If you flew during the 90s and 00s, you probably remember SkyMall. It was a catalogue of completely loony products — often high-tech gadgets of dubious promise, such as “a vacuum cleaner to catch flies, an alien butler drink tray, a helmet that promises to regrow your hair using lasers.” Here’s that head laser …

Very often the products existed to solve a problem that wasn’t remotely a problem, like “hey, do you ever find it a huge hassle to pour cereal from a box?”

The thing is, SkyMall was a blast. It was so consistently unhinged — night-glow toilet seat! seabreacher customized boat! wine-glass-holder necklace! — that I began to look forward to thumbing through the catalogue while nursing a plastic tumbler of scotch. It was the high point of my flight.

Back then, I was somewhat baffled that anyone bought this crap. In retrospect, I can see that air travel — where people are sealed in a tube, hurtling through the sky, and trying to ignore the near-intimate contact of strangers — has a faintly Freudian quality that’s probably psychologically well-torqued for surrealist impulse-buying. (SkyMall’s top-selling item ever? A “hand-painted designer resin Yeti statue.”)

Alas, SkyMall filed for bankruptcy in 2015, and while it lives on as a crepuscular online store, the paper catalogue has long vanished. (You can listen to a wonderful Jonathan Coulton song about SkyMall, though.) For years, I’ve wistfully hoped for someone to proffer an equally unhinged landscape of useless products. But no retailer possessed the same alchemical combo of P.T. Barnum shamelessness and bizarro technological provenance.

Until, of course, Instagram ads.

I can’t say precisely when my Instagram ads began to tip over into SkyMall territory. I’d been noticing the devolution for months, maybe years. But these days when I open up the app, every ad customized for me is some decidedly loopy gewgaw.

Today I got the “SkyFloat”, an iphone/tablet-holding pole that magnetically attaches to metal plates that you affix to ceilings in your house, so you can wander around from room to room, reattaching it wherever you want, y’know, a pole sticking down from your ceiling …

As with all good SkyMall products, it’s got the gist of an interesting idea here — which is promptly taken, with exhilirating fervor, about fourteen miles past the point of reasonableness.

Another ad that arrived yesterday was for the Cushion Lab chair seat: When your existing chair stops being comfy, why buy a new one when you can shove in an insert that re-comfifies it?

Then I got this ad for … the Dandy Labs intra-oral dental-scanning system …

And here’s the “Oyo Fitness” portable personal gym — a “FULL GYM IN YOUR HANDS” with “SpiraFlex resistance technology used by astronauts on the Space Station for 10 years”. It’s demonstrated by this dude, the inventor, as his dog looks on in a field …

… or a Glow Zoey LED face-mask that displays patterns and emotes:

I haven’t actually ordered any of this stuff — though I’m morbidly tempted to buy that tooth-scanning thing. This guy did order some: For his YouTube channel, Drew Gooden bought a bunch of equally weird gadgets and tried them out …

… and he discovered they ranged from terrible (a beanbag chair that “as far as comfort goes, this is like bare minimum”) to surprisingly okay (a cube-shaped pillow that was nicely soft).

Now, your Instagram ads probably don’t look like mine. The ads are customized, so clearly Instagram/Facebook’s algorithms have figured out that I’m a huge nerd, which is why they pelt me with SkyMall-like stuff. Your mileage may vary. Maybe your ads look like … I dunno, an old Sears catalogue?

At any rate, for me, the ads became so interestingly weird that I startedleaning into it. Other friends I knew were getting irritated by the flood of ads on Instagram, so they were complaining and trying to figure out ways to block them.

Not me. I started hitting “Like” on every. Single. Ad. Cheapo swarm drones? LIKE. Ear-wax-control system? LIKE. Ipad-pen tip-covers to reduce the annoying click of pen on glass? LIKE LIKE LIKE LIKE LIKE.

I could practically feel the algorithm break into an excited sweat. We got a live one here, folks!

I can’t actually figure out whether my likes increased the strangeness of the ads much, given they were already pretty batty. But over the next few days I got a flood of ads for modular edit-control systems and light-bending color cubes and faux-flame lightbulbs that will turn my home into “a cozy wonderland”, and so many — so very, very many — arms for holding my phone so I can become an influencer.

I also got this erectile-dysfunction device, thanks Facebook …

It’s pretty clear that Instagram ads are a breeding-ground for the legions of dropshippers who are trying to find some sort of tech thingmabob that they can sell four million of a week so they can “put their income on autopilot”, as per The Four Hour Workweek. It’s also clear that many of these merchants are itchily desperate for attention. Many of the products have “like” counts so risibly high they practically need scientific notation, almost certainly juked into the ionosphere by roboclicks.

Indeed, I started looking at comments for some of these products, and found that they, too, were infested with bots. Sometimes the comments appeared obviously paid-for by the product-maker itself — but other times the comments were infested by bots from rival dropship sites, shamelessly hawking their plasticky offerings. Behold the comments for the Satywig Buckle-free Invisible Elastic Waist Belts …

Maybe this is a glimpse of the inevitable heat-death of ecommerce: Bots trying to convince other bots to buy stuff no humans would ever click on.

SkyMall is dead; long live SkyMall.

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a columnist for Wired and Smithsonian magazines, and a regular contributor to Mother Jones. He’s the author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, and Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better. He’s @pomeranian99 on Twitter and Instagram.