People cannot be relied upon to provide accurate birthdays but nobody would suffer the social faux pas of an incorrect birthday congrats note. Nor would they send it to a spam catching email, but rather are guaranteed to send it to a regularly checked address. They know the persons birthday after all.
You can then sell high quality birthday information correlated to contact information to ad agencies.
Fuck this current internet. So dystopian.
Like seriously, outside of some close friends and family, are you sitting there deliberating over a message for your coworker Steve in the Slack chat or a cousin you barely talk to outside of a birthday and Christmas card?
> or that people have almost completely lost the ability to consider making art
They haven't lost it, no, but there's a lot of financial incentive to stop paying people to do it.