Tailored Ads Are Killing the Informed Consumer

In many ways, the tailored advertising that supports much of the internet works pretty well. It helps people with money figure out where to spend it with minimal effort and waste. But I’m afraid it could lead to the extinction a certain kind of human: the informed consumer.

The early internet was pretty useless for finding stuff. I’m an avid knitter, which is another way of saying that I collect yarn. I remember prospecting on the Alta Vista search engine in the mid-1990s, before Google: Most yarn stores didn’t have websites, and even finding discussions was hard. The best resource for yarn stores back then was an actual book called the MilePost Guide1 — which, on my Alaskan honeymoon in 1997, took me and my shockingly patient new husband to every purveyor reachable by car.2