Funny enough, you can link Atari games to AI job losses. Less funny is the stark omission of the probable decimation of “AdTech”.

Al (spelling: A-L) Gore — inductee to the Internet Hall of Fame and of Veep and nearly prez fame — was part of the 1980s “Atari Democrats”. He’s a prominent part of the long arc of advertising riches, which traces a path From: Atari’s Pong as exemplar of America’s technological dominance. To: setting the rules of the road for the modern internet.

Clinton/Gore saw private companies gain unfettered latitude to surveil users, in service of providing better services and products.

No righteousness here.

But the agreed monetization was / is advertising. Membership models have always been on the table. That’s why subscription models exist as the immediate alternate. Binge watch with no ads!

This has created the new ouroboros – an advertising serpent eating its own tail to rebirth. You could go back to the Bible/print press dynamic, but … we are in 2025. More recently, you can take the classifieds and newspapers dynamic. The serpent ate!

Cookies have been the center of monetizing the internet. They are like a button on a shirt, assuming being attached to the fabric that makes the shirt makes them part of the fabric. Not. They get lost. Replaced. And no one really says – “nice buttons”. That’s how you buy a fridge and get more fridges in your ads

Browser wars are always brutal. And the oncoming proliferation — Strawberry, OpenAI Atlas, The Browser Company’s Dia, Perplexity Comet is no different. What is really happening is that no one wants cookies anymore. They want the whole jar. They want to the be the fabric. Not the buttons.

It is the most tangible reality of AI we are seeing playing out. The “surveillance” needs to all happen in one place for the returns to be acceptable. And frankly, the ads better.

It is beyond cookie cutting now.