What have we got to lose? (1998)
<p><pre><code>    Furthermore, the [online] advertiser gets astonishingly 
    precise feedback. They will know exactly how many people 
    have chosen to look at their ad and for how long, with 
    the result that an unwelcome ad for something no one's 
    interested in will quickly wither away, whereas one which 
    catches people's attention will thrive.
</code></pre>
He talks about this as a <i>good</i> thing - a meritocracy of "unwelcome" ads and ideas vs. "interesting" ones, with selection favoring the interesting ones, cutting out all of the "dead wood", and so on.<p>In a literal sense, that is indeed how it turned out. "Interesting" won.<p>Unfortunately the version of "interesting" that many people chose was simply toxic dreck: conspiracy theories, social media feeds literally designed to make us feel negative emotions, scammy ads that have been engineered to trick the maximum number of people, and so on.<p>So yeah, "interesting" won, but I'm not sure this is the future Adams was excited about.