My (admittedly limited) juggling experience would indicate something closer to "Anyone can juggle", or that your average person, particularly young people, can learn to juggle one, two, or even three balls with an afternoon of practice, but I suppose that makes for a worse title.

As to whether every company buying ads is making a good investment, mileage may vary - but the blunt answer to your question is that yes, people do purchase things because they saw ads for it, the advertising economy is well understood. Companies like Google whose fortunes rest almost entirely on the known efficacy of advertising are not full of idiots who have never thought about whether or not ads actually work.

"Is an economy based on selling attention ultimately the most beneficial and productive one for all participants" is a separate question, but it's not the question you're asking.

Materials: concrete, petroleum, steel, aluminum, cotton, plastic Music: 12 tone equal temperament Food: Cereal crops, food preservation (canning, pasteurization), fermentation Technology: batteries (lead-acid, lithium-ion, alkaline), circuitry, GPS Transportation: internal combustion engine, asphalt road engineering, flight, rocketry

Lists like this, or “tech trees” as you might find in Civilization-type games, are hard in part because language is insufficient to map technological progress. There’s also no version of modernity that could exist without some form of philosophy, pedagogy, and cultural development, but naming “most significant” ones in a modern context involves going back to very ancient and deeply opinionated texts that include the Bible, Koran, Torah and so on.

It’s almost as if software authors are afraid that if their project names are too descriptive, they won’t be able to pivot to some other purpose, which ends up making every project name sound at once banal and vague.

The point may end up being moot, however, since the dark patterns feeding the social media-data harvesting pipeline are driven by keeping most people hooked on algorithmic infinitely scrolling feeds, and that attention-selling system will fight any attempt to rein it in, whether cultural or governmental.

It’s like measuring national power by population, or saying that ants have “more power” than humans because ants are more numerous, have more legs and can lift more per unit of size. It’s fun to think about for about five seconds before recognizing that “power” is about capability, not abstract numbers.

All it costs is your citizens’ privacy, which if we’re being honest was never a priority in the first place.

If the United States had lost a world war with Russia & China coalition, this is exactly what the victorious powers would do to concentrate power into the hands of a few figureheads and oligarchs. This administration has saved them the trouble. This is what losing an economic & cultural conflict in the modern era looks like.

This was never going to be able to last forever as long as the population keeps increasing. This is why settlers left Europe etc in the first place to seek fortune overseas. And since there is no un-owned land remaining, the market price for land will match or exceed regional population growth worldwide forever, unless a whole lot of people start dying.

Working hard is necessary in its own right for many reasons, but promising everyone that if they "work" hard enough, they too can set up their heirs, is pure marketing. So is shaming anyone who fails to achieve it as "lazy", when it was never going to be possible for more than a fraction.

This sentiment is also hard to take seriously. Who are “most people”? How would you know who is “writing on the web” and if it somehow represents a majority of humans, or even a majority of humans with home Internet access, which I highly doubt?

I would argue that a very loud, very small minority of people write on the web, which may be the cause of our dysfunction. Encouraging a more diverse crowd to think deeply and overcome presentation anxiety via public long-form writing seems like a good thing.

Vicious, vindictive, petty, nonsensical, random, and trolling tactics are all strategically useful in this media landscape.