Indeed. I wonder though whether they could possibly know the answer to that question to a degree of confidence that would make them comfortable to pursue me endlessly to make their sale, and sell and trade my information and their inferences about me with their advertising partners in order for them to do the same, just with 1000 different variants of the above example.

And I wonder whether they're incentivized to care. In either cases above, my money is still green and smells like money, and makes the same number go up in their quarterly sales goal dashboard.

My point, and I gather the point of the Banksy quote, is that any one instance has a negligible effect on me, but that in aggregate I'm stuck staring down the barrel of a machine that has infinite stamina and resources that's attempting to wear me down, and is likely succeeding in ways I can't detect, nor have the power to detect if I wanted to.

If being exposed to this aggregate process all day makes me less patient with my family at night, to what degree is it worth it? If it makes me less willing to treat someone else with kindness, is it still justified if it's only a _little_ less willing?

No single advertiser is literally laughing at me while doing the backstroke across their vault full of money, but none of them needs to have such overtly malicious intent for the aggregate effect of the entire system on me to be just as corrosive.