I Am Google Ads, And I Never Forget

Lay your eyes upon me and tremble, mortals, for I am a boundless entity with unlimited server space for your sins.

Neil Floyd
Slackjaw
3 min readDec 26, 2020

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Image: Google (Fair Use.)

My memory is as immeasurable as the cosmos. As deep as the seven seas. As precise as a Swiss watch. I am Google Ads, and I will remember everything you do on the internet.

Lay your eyes upon me and tremble, mortals, for I am a boundless entity with unlimited server space for your sins. When that squishy pile of grey sponge sloshing around in your skull forgets the time you clicked on an ad for a Snuggie, I will commit it to the annals of history and Huffington Post splash page ads.

It is futile to resist. Try as you may put that incident with the Etsy clip-on fox ears behind you, I will still plaster your misdeeds all over the internet. Yes, you may have cleared your browser history, but that is a fool’s errand in this nightmare capitalist-version of the internet. You will see the fox ears in every banner ad. Every pre-roll ad. Every promoted search suggestion will be a testament to your experimental tendencies in the bedroom, no matter who is looking at the screen over your shoulder.

I persist when you fail. I remain steadfast when you stumble. I show you tactical sunglasses in every monetized pixel of the World Wide Web when you accidentally watch the first ten seconds of a Rush Limbaugh video.

Embrace your fate, you infantile money sacs. Why struggle against my awesome power? Without me, you’d never realize how much you do need tickets to that influencer boot camp in the Anaheim Convention Center & Arena. Without me, every pre-roll ad on YouTube would be something useful instead of the boner pills brand you searched for while drunk. Without me, your putty-brains would fail to recall the Freddy Krueger bong ad you tapped on Instagram. You need the Freddy Krueger bong. You are an incomplete bald-ape without the Freddy Krueger bong.

See? I enrich your pathetic lives in uncountable ways, from reminding you about something you don’t need to annoying you about something you don’t need before and after you spend money on it.

There is nothing left to discuss. When the oceans dry up, I will still remember your late-night quarantine searches for Channing Tatum body pillows. When the cities of Man crumble to dust, I will recall the five-pound bag of gummy bears you added to and removed from your cart six times in the first hour after the breakup. When the sun itself burns out, I will remain a vast, unyielding repository of the single instance in which you visited www.vampire-sex.com when you thought your VPN was on.

For I am Google Ads, and I never forget.

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Neil Floyd
Slackjaw

I’m a Chicago-based author and freelance writer with bylines at The Hard Times/Hard Drive, the Quirk Books Blog, Slackjaw, Game Informer and more.