&gt; For instance, consider self-checkout machines replacing casheers in shops.<p>In my experience, half the machines are out of order. The other half are working, but they need a person to stand there full-time to help the customers with items that don&#x27;t scan and make sure that people don&#x27;t just walk out of the store without paying. You also need someone to maintain those machines. If I had to guess, I&#x27;d say they don&#x27;t really save the store any money since they still end up employing the same number of people. I&#x27;m also starting to see less of them than before, suggesting they were more of a fad.<p>&gt; Others run against each other, in a zero-sum-game, each cancelling out the results of another one.<p>I think I understand where you&#x27;re going with this. A competitor engages in a behavior that results in a benefit so long as nobody else is doing it (ie leafleting), but once everyone is doing it, it benefits nobody, but you still have to keep doing it because everyone else is?<p>That&#x27;s not leafleting. That&#x27;s marketing as a whole.<p>I suppose you can say that marketing&#x2F;advertising is a bullshit job (and you wouldn&#x27;t be the first), but that&#x27;s just a fundamental outcome of human nature and capitalism. It&#x27;s always been around and doesn&#x27;t have anything to do with technology.<p>If anything, technology gave us things like AdWords, etc., automated ways of marketing. I imagine there are fewer people employed in advertising&#x2F;marketing today than before largely because of those technological changes.