Writing at Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple says he takes comfort in the fact that spam advertisers have thus far been completely unable to target his email account with ads for products he might actually buy. Thankfully, electronic surveillance has not yet advanced that far. I am loathe to quote the concluding lines of any of his pieces, but these are good ones:
Thank goodness there is a law of unintended consequences to protect us from the ennui of omniscience! How intolerably dull life would be if everything could be calculated precisely in advance, if no one had anything to hide, if life could be, or were, lived entirely in the open, if there were no hypocrisy or dissimulation. But such a life there will never be.
Dr Dalrymple is indeed lucky, or perhaps just independently smart to not fit the standard profiles of the advertizing crowd. I very recently removed nearly all my identifying characteristics from Google’s advertizing profile. I found the link to this from an actual advert. Thanks Google. The funny thing is that Google tries to convince you that to have adverts customized to you is somehow to your advantage. However, second best to having no adverts is to have those that are of completely no interest, so that they are that much easier to avoid. The only characteristic that I have not hidden from Google is my age, for fear of being inundated with ads aimed at the self centered, vulgar and unintelligent parts of the juvenile society.