reinventing Gosplan

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Big Tech is squeezing advertising jobs and companies. While AI job loss fears are still hypothetical for most occupations, the Big Tech companies are already pretty far along on squeezing jobs—and smaller companies—out of advertising….Myles Younger suggests that Zuckerberg’s vision of AI advertising could even grow to capture the money that now goes to media, sales, and customer service. The advertising agency business is already hollowing out. WPP, owner of famous agency brands including Ogilvy, is down from 200,000 employees to fewer than 90,000. The top six agency holding companies have gone from almost half of U.S. ad spend in 2019 to 28% in 2024.

Antitrust Policy for the Conservative by FTC Commissioner Mark R. Meador. (This is basically a good memo but is not going to have much impact in a political environment where a powerful monopoly can avoid government action by showing up at Mar-A-Lago to invest in a memecoin or settle a lawsuit. If we get to the point where there is a reasonably powerful honest conservative movement in the USA, then Meador’s work will be useful, probably with not too many updates.)

Project Cybersyn was a Chilean project from 1971 to 1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy.

Ad Aged: Priests. by George Tannenbaum. The whole point of our modern-technological era is the promise of If-Then-ness…. Nevertheless, the if-then-technocrats sold to clients causality. If you put a click now button here, if you re-target, if you inundate you’ll be wildly successful. Now, they’re selling (with about 2% margin) if you game the AI-algorithm you’ll rise to the top of search and targeting. Then you’ll be successful. For as long as there have been humans the priestly-caste (today, technologists and private equity nabobs and consultants) have been selling their ability to predict the future and therefore guarantee success.

Bonus links

Even a Broken Clock Can Lower Drug Prices by Joan Westenberg. The CBO has repeatedly found that negotiated drug pricing—including international benchmarking—can save significant amounts of public money.

Crypto Is Still for Criming by Paul Krugman. (Will cryptocurrencies go mainstream, or will they be stuck as just a crime thing? Turns out the answer is both because crime is going mainstream.)

The AI Slop Presidency by Matthew Gault. (This kind of thing is a good reason to avoid generative AI header images in blog posts. The AI look has become the signature style of the pro-oligarch, pro-surveillance side. This is particularly obvious on LinkedIn. An AI-look image tends to mean a growth hacking or pro-Big Tech post, while pro-human-rights or pro-decentralization posters tend to use original graphics or stock photos.)

Monopoly Round-Up: China Is Not Why America Is Sputtering by Matt Stoller. Simply put, modern American law is oriented towards ensuring very high returns on capital to benefit Wall Street and hinder the ability to make things. (fwiw, surveillance capitalism is probably part of the problem too. Creepy negative-sum games to move more units of existing products have higher and more predictable ROI than product innovation does.)

Industry groups are not happy about the imminent demise of Energy Star by Marianne Lavelle The nonprofit Alliance to Save Energy has estimated that the Energy Star program costs the government about $32 million per year, while saving families more than $40 billion in annual energy costs.

The Mozilla Firefox New Terms of Use Disaster: What Actually Happened? by Youssuff Quips. It is clear is that Mozilla wants to be able to unambiguously claim to regulators that people agreed to have their data sold – they want that permission to be persistent, and they want it to be modifiable in perpetuity. That changes what Firefox has been, and the Firefox I loved is gone. (For what it’s worth I don’t think it’s as bad as all that. In a seemingly never-ending quest to get extra income that’s not tied to the Google search deal, Mozilla management has done a variety of stupid shit but they always learn from it and move on. They’ll drop their risky adfraud in the browser thing too at some point. More: why privacy-enhancing advertising technologies failed)