Madelyn Sanfilippo is an assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and book series editor for Cambridge Studies on Governing Knowledge Commons. She is a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project.
I often see online advertisements recruiting me to participate in research studies for Sanfilippo Syndrome. Fortunately, I don’t have this rare genetic condition, it’s simply my last name. Just as often, I see ads for college degree programs and toys.
As a professor who studies privacy and technology policy, these ads make sense; systems know things about me, even if imperfectly. I’m not looking to go back to school, but I am a parent who buys lots of toys.
While many of us shrug at personalized ads — maybe even buying one of the many products or services tailored to our wants and needs — the truth is that targeted advertising is unnerving and inappropriate.
It is, after all, the result of surveillance capitalism, or very simply: a system that has every financial incentive to capture, save, and use as much data about us as possible at all times. People are data and data are a commodity. If this is true, we’re not just the users of technology, we’re also the used. Our identities are bought and sold, while we pay for that privilege.
And it’s about to get worse.
As generative artificial intelligence enters this system, we can and should expect to see more —more manipulation, more prediction (which can be both more unnerving and less accurate), and more biased ads.
Imagine ads promoting sales that are targeted to us based on race, or a vague guess what our race or ethnicity is based on stereotypes. Would it be OK for someone to pay more or less for the same items or services based on their race?
Think of the most manipulative ads you’ve ever seen, creating a false sense of urgency or promising incentives, but really including hidden costs. What if every advertisement you ever saw did this? We cannot simply accept this.
Broadly, practices of targeting and prediction around advertising are not new, but the recent evolution of generative AI and its rapid incorporation into advertising — in the past weeks, Google and Meta have rolled out products toward this end — pose new and real challenges.
Generative AI advertisements have the potential to scale even further, target more directly, and to adapt in real-time to increase clicks or purchases based on our behavior, context, and attributes.
Of course, many will see this as an exciting opportunity or the natural extension of the modern digital economy. However, this speaks to profits at the expense of the average person and is a major issue for consumer protection, or, as perhaps we ought to see it, protection of people.
We cannot wait to see the harm unfold and act in a panicked response to the inevitable discriminatory ads or dark patterns that will emerge, as they have from less sophisticated attempts to capture our attention and wallets.
As individuals, we can monitor our ad preferences on many platforms. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok, all offer some user control or transparency — but this is not enough.
As a society, we need oversight to address these issues at scale. We need legislation like the bipartisan Digital Consumer Protection Commission Act, introduced by U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
Existing consumer protection infrastructure is overcommitted and scant on the necessary technical expertise to evaluate concerns and new uses of AI, like advertising. This proposal will create a new federal agency, bringing together experts who can address privacy concerns, deceptive pricing, and bias due to AI and data brokers in advertising — without putting the burden on us to protect ourselves.
People are not merely users. People are not merely consumers. We are citizens. We are parents and children and sisters and brothers. We are friends. By reducing us to users and consumers, we are less real. If we are data in this discussion, dehumanized and abstracted, it almost becomes a problem of math, which tends to both make people less interested and more accepting of the objectivity of the practices.
When privacy comes up in popular culture, it often focuses on social media alone or perhaps a tradeoff with security in discussion of government surveillance. It’s rarely about advertising, but it needs to be.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.