Everything that makes advertisers happy is to the detriment of humanity as a whole. Everything that makes advertisers’ jobs easier also makes it easier for authoritarian governments. “Innovation” is no longer about creating new things, it’s about taking what already works, breaking it, shoving ads on it and charging a ransom in the form of a premium subscription.
On the other hand, there are endless ad-skipping tools, pages and sites where the main attraction is the lack of ads without a subscription. More and more people are talking about how intrusive and annoying ads are, even those who make their living from them. As the efforts of big tech to please advertisers grow, so do the efforts of ordinary people to screw them.
Very Cyberpunk.
we have ads because services paid for with attention are more accessible and get more traffic than services paid for with a monthly subscription … we could probably subsidize a lot of websites or make them community efforts (like Wikipedia), but because there is a desire to profit from websites, we have this aggressive push for ads and monetization in every corner of the web.
Commercialization, though, is the problem more than advertising itself is. Monetization through “native ads” or affiliate link marketing is just as insidious and toxic, and pervasive. Just like people hate loot boxes and games that have mechanics where skill is less important than paying cash for in-game content to gain an advantage, the root problem is commercialization.
This is just capitalism, and cyberpunk as a genre is meant to be critical of capitalism and its rotten fruits.
I think it misses the mark to interpret the war as a war between humanity and advertisers when it’s a war between the powerful and wealthy and the 99%.
I know that the advertising problem is just the tip of the iceberg. My observation is in how it seems to me that this antagonism between the Human experience vs. advertisers seems to be the first active front in a more generalized class war.
Exactly, also stop vilifying “advertising” when the cause of advertising is corporations. There would be no advertising without corporations paying for it. It’s like complaining about ashes instead of the fire.