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The tyranny of advertising

February 25, 2026

Musings

Screen grab of 1980s Yellow Pages ad featuring JR Hartley

Not quite 18 months ago, Sam Altman said that OpenAI putting ads in ChatGPT was definitely certainly probably not a good idea.

“Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me,” he said at a Harvard event in October 2024. “I kind of think of ads as, like, a last resort for us for a business model. I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody on the world—in the world—like, access to great services.”

Just a few weeks ago, Sam Altman said that OpenAI was putting ads into ChatGPT.

The last resort has thrown open its doors. And it still seems like it’s still probably not a good idea.

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Now, I am not an expert in OpenAI’s business, or on the potential revenue that ChatGPT might be able to generate by sliding advertising into a machine that uses stolen words and inscrutable technology to generate false information. (If you want to know more about that stuff, perhaps read Ben Thompson or Ed Zitron or somebody else who is either more informed or funnier.)

But I am a human being who spends time on the internet, and therefore I do know that advertising is not just the last resort: it’s very much a problem rather than a solution.

I am also, as it goes, a human who can do basic mathematics. Therefore I know that if you’re hoping for ads to prop up your business’ projected $1.4 trillion in spending— which means we’re ultimately relying on ads to prop up the $3 trillion+ AI bubble which is in turn helping keep the stock market going, then advertising isn’t just a problem: it’s the domino that’s going to knock all the others over.

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A quick note, though: I don’t hate advertising. As somebody who has worked in media for 25 years, I appreciate how important ads are to helping all kinds of businesses run. Big ads, small ads, personal ads, job ads. They all have a place. And let’s face it, they’re not going away any time soon. Plus, ads can be relevant, funny, entertaining and even poignant. The best ones stick with us, they become part of the culture. I quote lines from 1980s TV commercials as often as I quote The Princess Bride. Nor do I believe, unlike many newsies, that Craigslist killed newspapers by stealing their ads. I think newspapers were too greedy and inward-looking to realize the opportunity they were missing until it was too late.

But I also know that ads are everywhere. Really, everywhere.

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We’re flooded with them. In the 32 years since the first banner ad hit the web and a full 23 years after Google bought AdSense and super-charged its business, ads have simply gotten more intrusive, more obnoxious and less valuable every single day.

By way of example, I looked at the first 10 posts in my feeds across a variety of websites.

My Instagram feed was 40% advertising (and this was after I suppressed some suggested posts.) Same with Facebook. Reddit was lower at 20% ads, but 30% were suggested posts—so fully half of the content wasn’t actually stuff I wanted to see. My LinkedIn feed, meanwhile, was a whopping 60% ads. Not only is it full of maniacs posting AI-generated hustle screeds; it’s full of maniacs paying to show me their AI-generated hustle screeds.

These are services that are meant to help us connect with other people, but in fact they are merely tubes that help pollute the information ecosystem.

Alternatively, go to almost any large scale news website and you’re bombarded with a thousand tiny ads trying—literally—to get in the way of your reading experience. I’m not even talking about the skeevy clickbait-only slop sites, I’m talking about the “respectable” mid-market news sites, your local channels, your upscale outlets with paywalls and lots of subscribers. Finding the information you are looking for requires dodging your way through a hail of shitty bullets.

During one of Medium‘s many pivots, we were searching for ways to make money from the business, and started building out advertising. (The first project there had actually been a paywall, since we had built our own version for the initial version of Matter.) But even a high-value ad network is still an ad network, which on the internet inevitably means being presented, eventually, with choices that put the best interests of readers and writers in conflict with the best interests of the bank. So we stopped doing it. I disagreed with Ev Williams on many things, but he was right on this.

I suppose what I’m saying is that ads are important, and we aren’t going to get rid of them any time soon, but that doesn’t mean they own us. They are always, always a slippery slope.

And the idea that in 2026 our entire economy is essentially reliant on a Potemkin city of AI companies, each one balanced on the precarious promise of ad revenue? I would have to agree with Sam Altman: that feels uniquely unsettling… and probably, definitely, certainly not a good idea.

Jennie Erin Smith: “I didn’t want researchers to spoon-feed me the story”

February 7, 2026

by Bobbie Johnson

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books

What fun to talk with Jennie Erin Smith, the author of Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer’s Families And The Search For A Cure, which was Curious Reading Club’s book of the month for January. It’s a really fascinating book about a major research trial in Colombia which focused on a huge group of people who carry a particular gene linked to early-onset Alzheimer’s.

We chatted about all manner of things, including the complexity (or not!) of her reporting, the hubris and honesty of the people in her story, writing stories about “great men” … and how her view of the subject changed along the way.

One of the most interesting areas of our conversation, and the book, is wrestling with the ethics of trials by Western drug companies in less wealthy populations. If the drug works, what guarantees are there that the people on the trial can still get access to the medicine they’ve been given? And who can fight for those people?

The only reason they were allowed to do this trial in Colombia is because they’ve done enough research to say that this drug could reasonably be distributed in Colombia: Colombia has the capacity to market and distribute this drug. Well, yeah, but to whom, right?

I’m in Medellin right now and there’s awesome clinics and awesome hospitals here that serve the middle classes and up. But for the type of people who are participating in this study, most of them are on public insurance…

So the idea was that this was ethical, that we could go forward with this because this drug could be distributed in Colombia and therefore we’re not experimenting on people who could not reasonably benefit from this therapy. I challenged that, and the pharma companies want to do more and more of that. They do a lot of work in Brazil. They do a lot of work overseas. And I think it’s really imperative on people in these countries, and the regulators, to say “Hey, what’s your plan for this? Are you going to market this here? What price do you want to put on it? Is this really feasible?” I think more people need to ask that question.

I think the interview is worth your time.

(And if you’re interested in signing up for Curious Reading Club, it’s easy to join.)

Preserving the past

January 17, 2026

by Bobbie Johnson

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Work

For Dweb Digest I wrote a short profile of the archivist Rick Prelinger, and his work to create decentralized copies of vast tranches of archival data alongside his friends and partners at the Internet Archive.

It was a lot of fun driving over to their East Bay warehouse and sitting down to talk to him and his team about how they find, clean, capture and share vast amounts of video taken from almost anywhere you can imagine. And particularly important given the Trump regime’s attempts to erase the past and rewrite the history books.

One of the issues both teams face is scale. The Prelinger Archives collection stands at maybe 40,000 videos (on top of 60,000 that were already donated to the Library of Congress), and it’s producing around 18 terabytes of video each week — too much for their current unoptimized decentralizing process. So right now, the team is producing smaller, more usable files for decentralization and keeping the higher-resolution originals elsewhere.
—Preserving the Past on a Decentralized Future

Fun fact: the same location was home to the Democracy’s Library attempt to scan in huge amounts of government information before it was disappeared, which you may have seen via a live video feed. It was interesting to see them in the flesh!

David Baron: The Martians used to be the good guys

December 30, 2025

by Bobbie Johnson

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books

December’s Curious Reading Club book is The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America by former NPR science editor David Baron—a rollicking read about the gilded age’s obsession with aliens, and the space-obsessed Boston brahmin Percival Lowell who made it happen.

David’s book looks at how the craze took hold, what it meant, and how it fell apart… and why we’re still obsessed anyway.

I was particularly taken by the concept of Mars as a planet full of benevolent, evolved beings—something we discussed during our chat.

One of my great finds when I was studying newspapers is this article from 1909 that I quote in my book that was headlined “Questions Mars Might Answer”. There was all this discussion about different ways you might communicate with the Martians. And what were the questions people had for Mars? Well, you would think it would be “how do you dig canals efficiently?” or “what's the best way to build a flying machine?”

No. The questions for Mars were the deepest, most existential questions: Where does the soul go when you die? What is the meaning of life? How can we prevent human suffering? These were the questions for the Martians. So, you know, it didn't surprise me that you know that people really wanted the Martians to exist because they might come save us.

... That totally surprised me, because the most famous piece of fiction to come out of that whole craze was H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, which was published in magazines in 1897, and came out as a book in 1898—although most a lot of people are more familiar with the Orson Welles radio adaptation from 1938.

He [H.G. Wells] imagined the Martians coming here to take over our planet and to prey on us. And so I imagined that people must have been really scared of the Martians, and that this reflected some widespread view—but absolutely not. I found very, very few comments in the papers of people being afraid of the Martians. 99.9% were looking at the Martians as at least benign, if not actively a force for good here on Earth.
–David Baron

It was a really interesting conversation!

Tania Branigan: “Everybody thinks they would have been in the Resistance in wartime.”

November 24, 2025

by Bobbie Johnson

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interviews

This month’s Curious Reading Club pick is Tania Branigan’s Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution (WW Norton, 2023). It’s an absolutely fascinating look at people’s memories of this turbulent, horrific period of recent Chinese history, and how people wrestle with what they have done and what they didn’t do.

Tania is an old colleague of mine from the Guardian: I once visited her in Beijing while I was on assignment for this Wired story about Chinese hardware pirates. I’d spent the last couple of weeks in Shenzhen and Shanghai, which were strange in their own ways, but Beijing felt like another level of strange: an overwhelmingly large, smoggy, oddly circular city, full of construction sites and hidden alleyways, and far more alien to me than I expected.

My language was non-existent, so I’d gotten lots of things written down as a way of navigating the city—but when I showed the taxi driver the address of Tania’s place, he shrugged. It was clear that he didn’t know where to go.

I eventually ended up drawing a picture of the distinctive building, which the driver recognized after I attempted some cajoling and wild hand movements: his thick eyebrows leapt suddenly up and his crooked smile emerged as he realized exactly where this dumb Englishman was trying to go.

Anyway, I had a really great conversation with Tania about her book, about individual and collective memory, about how people censor their own memories as a way of coping with what’s happened.

When I began the book, I thought it was going to be much more about official suppression. And sometimes it was. But as I wrote, I realized more than more that, actually, a lot of it was about people wanting to not address it for very personal reasons, not just because they were scared of what the authorities might do. Often it was simply too painful to talk about, or they felt guilt in talking about it, or their version of what had happened was very different to the memories of other people around at that time.
—Tania Branigan

We also discussed what lessons there are for today, and how people imagine they’d act differently in times of strife. The evidence I see around me is that while everybody thinks they’d resist an authoritarian purge, or would refuse to take part in struggle sessions, many more people would become willing collaborators than they realize.

In the NYT: AI crosses the deepfake rubicon

October 19, 2025

by Bobbie Johnson

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Work

Soup cans in the style of Andy Warhol labelled "AI Slop" illustration by Allie Sullberg

I have an opinion piece in the New York Times today about my extreme distaste for Sora, the new social video app from OpenAI that was built to create and share fake videos.

“At a time when we are surrounded by fakes and fabrications, Sora seems precisely designed to further erode the idea of objective truth. It is a jackhammer that demolishes the barrier between the real and the unreal. No new product has ever left me feeling so pessimistic.”

This article started because a friend showed me Sora 2 and it immediately generated an extreme and visceral reaction in me that I hadn’t experienced before.

I’ve seen many terrible technologies and dumb products over the course of my career, and met many objectionable people too. But watching Sora in action created a very specific sense of sadness and disgust that genuinely surprised me, and I wanted to understand more about it. And I know many other folks have struggled to pin down the disquieting, upsetting feeling that AI tools can generate, and so wanted to attempt to capture what it was that left me so hollow.

(If you want a more fun exploration of the same topic, may I recommend The Oatmeal’s view on AI art?)

As is always the case when you’re under editorial constraints like time and space, there’s so much more I wanted to say in the Times essay. But the essential point is there: Whether intentional or not, it is a malicious act to build a system that is designed to inject deepfakes into the body politic.

(This is especially unpleasant when you combine it with a worryingly minimalist approach to safety. The irony of OpenAI calling its post about guardrails “launching Sora responsibly” at the same time it’s letting people generate deepfakes of everyone from Hitler to MLK was not lost on me.)

@thinkingsmarterwiser
These are the top 5 sora 2 mlk jr clips #fyp #top5 #sora2 #mlk #ranking
♬ original sound – SmarterWiserThinking

In the essay, I mention Stafford Beer’s dictum of “the purpose of a system is what it does.”

Mentioning Beer, a somewhat peculiar British management professor from the 1950s, is the kind of thing that creates a certain response from some corners. It’s possible to nitpick or disagree with his approach or outlook, and I think his framework is extremely imperfect. But at its core, the lens is helpful: if a system keeps generating a particular outcome, it is essentially a system made to do that thing.

Cigarettes were once seen as a tasty indulgence; we now see them as cancer sticks. Modern political campaigns were ways to help affect wider societal change; now they basically are voracious, self-propelling engines for raising money. If Sora makes you second-guess what’s real and what’s not, that is in the most important way, what it is

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It’s worth saying in all this that I would not call myself stridently anti-AI. I tend to agree with the position outlined in Karen Hao’s excellent book Empire of AI, and recently outlined by Anil Dash in a shorter form: there are useful purposes for machine learning and deep neural networks, but this ain’t it.

If you read Karen’s book, or Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever, a searing overview of the thinking that drives many of these companies, you will get a detailed understanding of the negative costs of the current, hyperscale approach to these technologies. We know about the environmental and energy drains that huge new AI data processing facilities put on society. We know about the endless appetite for more input, with AI models gobbling up vast tracts of information and content, often illegally or against people’s expressed wishes. And we know about the exploitation of labor and traumatic experiences of staff who train these neural networks, essentially nudging it to produce something that is “right” only by themselves constantly watching things that are very, very wrong.

And then, of course, there are the fundamental weaknesses of systems that don’t understand information but simply regurgitate it—machines that produce “hallucinations” and make factually incorrect statements with a glib and unearned confidence.

My issue with Sora is that hallucinations aren’t a bug; they are the point. And so that’s why I was left so unmoored by watching it in action.

You had all the power and the technology, and this is what you do with it?

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One last note: I’m donating my fee for the article to the International Rescue Committee’s Gaza relief efforts. I admire a lot of what the Times does and many of the folks who work for it, but I also think it has taken the wrong stance on a number of important issues—not least the genocide against the Palestinian people. I don’t think a donation is really a satisfactory way to go about things, but it’s what I decided to do.

Podcast: North Korean sleeper cells

October 19, 2025

by Bobbie Johnson

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Uncategorized

Change Agents is a podcast about terrorism, crime, intelligence, warfare and all manner of gnarly stuff, hosted by former Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf. Let’s just say it’s not my normal audience!

But I joined Andy recently for a conversation about the North Korean pretender scam.

(See my recent story in Wired or read the background post for more context.)

I haven’t watch the whole thing back, but I think I did a pretty good job of explaining the way this attack works and its dangers.

Talking books, talking ideas

October 19, 2025

by Bobbie Johnson

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Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI, during our talk about the book in June 2025

For those who aren’t following along, I run a small book subscription service called Curious Reading Club. It’s focused on sharing non-fiction books that I’ve enjoyed, often about science, technology, history and society—mostly new (but not always) and with a curveball memoir or handbook thrown in for fun now and then.

The books I choose are generally written from a journalistic point of view, and I particularly try to find titles and authors that deserve a little more time in the spotlight… after all, the reality is that it’s really hard to promote new works, and most authors don’t get a ton of publicity and support from their publishers.

We are closing in on 60 members who get a book each month, without any real promotion.

One of the added benefits for me is that the chance to interview the author of that month’s book. This happens often but not every time. We don’t actually have an interview this month—I was unable to make contact with Tim Clare, despite several attempts. But it did make me think about all the fun conversations I’ve had since starting this up. So I thought I’d share the interview archive here.

Here they all are: I’ve grouped them by broad subject to help you see some common threads, although subject matter inevitably goes much further than these one liners can capture, and there are many more overlaps between the various interviews once you start digging in.

Our planet, past, present and future

Ferris Jabr on a holistic approach to earth science; Laura Poppick on the benefits of thinking about deep time; Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on maintaining hope in the face of environmental crisis.

The art of writing about history

Bonnie Tsui on mixing reporting and memoir; Carvell Wallace on the joys and difficulties of writing memoir; Adam Higginbotham on bringing history to life (part I, part II); Rebecca Nagle on digging up complicated stories.

Technology and society

Alexis Madrigal on how the world has changed and what we can do about it; Karen Hao on what’s wrong with AI; Nicola Twilley on the way refrigeration has utterly changed our food and our lives; Henry Grabar on society’s terrible incentives around parking and cars.

Politics, policy and ethics

Annalee Newitz on propaganda and the culture wars; Nora Krug on illustrating a guide to resisting tyranny; Carl Elliott on whistleblowers; Lauren Markham on who benefits from the current migration system; Carly Anne York on the importance of engaging people about the value of scientific research.

Talking with these fantastic authors has been a real highlight of the last 18 months for me; I hope you get something out of these conversations too.

How a strange job interview turned into a journalistic investigation

May 6, 2025

by Bobbie Johnson

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Workbook

Last year I met a young CEO who was suspicious that some folks interviewing for coding jobs at his company were scammers. We chatted about the situation, and it was interesting—but I fully expected it to be some common-or-garden fraud, or the kind of “overwork” scam that has gotten popular since the pandemic.

On closer inspection, though, the reality was much stranger than I ever imagined.

It turned out they weren’t ordinary fraudsters, but in fact gangs of cybercriminals working for the North Korean government who steal people’s identities and score high-paying remote IT jobs in the West and then send the money they earn (and data they steal) back to Pyongyang.

Seriously.

Security industry insiders knew about this, but the story hadn’t really reached the general public. And, at the same time, the problem is increasing. These fraudsters rely on tech, and they’re getting upgraded all the time: AI to cheat on coding tests; LLMs to fake the answers to interview questions; deepfake tech to get past ID verification; VPNs to dial in to work from overseas. But they also use old-school techniques, too, with accomplices who run their ground game for them—connecting their computers, filling in forms, sometimes even doing stuff like taking drug tests.

I figured this was a story that was so interesting I’d want to read more about it. Then I realized that I had the chance to actually write the story myself. So I embarked on a full investigation, and dug deeper. I talked to victims, experts, defectors. I even sat in on job interviews with North Koreans who were posing as Americans, using stolen identities and pretending they were in Ohio or Florida rather than China or Russia.

It touches on a topic that I’m fascinated by, which is the history of fakery—from the ancient world to the digital age.

The result was just published in Wired. Thanks to the team there, especially editors Sandra Upson and Rachel Morris—it was fun (and hard) to be out reporting again, and odd to be on the writer’s side of the desk rather than the editor’s. And lots of appreciation to everyone who was part of the story along the way.

Why I love rain

November 26, 2024

by Bobbie Johnson

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Musings

If you grow up in England, you know about rain. You know about heavy rain, light rain, drizzle, mizzle, and mist. You know about the kind of rain that slaps you in the face, the kind of rain that comes at you sideways, and the kind of rain that is invisible and still makes you wet. You know about the rain that makes you hot, the rain that makes you cold. You know about the sinister rain that comes before a thunderstorm, and the crackling kind that comes during one. You know rain because it is there, almost every day.

There are plenty of types of rain you’re not familiar with, of course. There is no monsoon and no typhoon. You don’t often get those driving, painful rods that come down for days. There is none of the swampy humid wet, not really, and there’s no place to find that steamy tropical drip that feels like being in a sauna.

But if you grow up in England, rain is just the thing.

They make jokes about it of course, but it’s one of those things that is worth joking about; the kind of thing that makes uncles lean over and say to you quietly: “It’s funny because it’s true.”

These days, living in San Francisco, rain doesn’t come very often. Yes, people always laugh about the city’s indecisive weather, its umpteen microclimates and the thick, sarcastic fog. And, yes, those things are real, but they are also a sleight of hand. San Francisco often gets wet, but it doesn’t rain much.

Sometimes “not much” means “not at all.” A few years ago we went without it for a long time. There were entire years of drought punctuated by incredible, angry rainfall that had no proper place to go and simply broke the dams and ran away back to the ocean. Drought is not so frequent right now, but the dry has retrained me. It’s made me forget—or at least lose any affection for—the endless days of foreboding skies, those weeks when you live your life under a heavy blanket.

These days I love a good heavy downpour, but I have grown distasteful of the little rains, that everyday kind. During the rainy season I’ll frown at the prospect of a chance of rainfall; once a year I’ll wonder if it’s time to buy Wellington boots. Where I used to go out without a coat, today I’ll throw on a waterproof coat at the merest sign of damp in the air.

It rained this weekend, real rain: an inch and a half on Friday alone.

We sat inside, enjoying the feeling of being locked in by the conditions. I thought about the smell of the wet leaves, of walking to school and pulling up my hood, of getting off the Tube feeling sweaty and cold at the same time. I remembered my grandfather in his old estate carving his way through huge roadside lakes to create arcs of water that cascaded onto the grass.

I stood in the garden tying back a branch of wisteria that had blown loose in the wind, my fingers frigid.

A flower in the garden of succulents outside the front of our house was coaxed out into the world, red and proud.

My shoes were muddy, and I felt like a kid again.