> Well, advertisers don't really want to spy on you and control your mind. What they want are stable, well-defined target audiences with well-known statistical properties and control groups.

What we're evolving is predators of human state of mind. For every well-understood target audience there is an optimal revenue extraction method. With more data new sub-audiences appear, allowing experiments to find even more effective advertising for maximizing revenue extraction in those subgroups.

A huge fraction of advertising is nothing more than gaslighting us into believing we have a need or desire for a product or service. The other fraction is exploiting biases in our brains to influence our purchasing decisions toward particular brands or markets.