You could generalize that to "exploiters vs. humanity", ads are just a part of that.
this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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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%.
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.
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Modern marketing, post WW2 was the privatization of propaganda.
Calvin and Hobbes warned us
Advertisers are basically just arms manufacturers, supplying the wealthy with the tools needed to manipulate and use the population. Cut the head of the dragon
Ads literally make me disabled. There presence challenges my freedom to interact both online and the real world.
More and more people are talking about how intrusive and annoying ads are, even those who make their living from them.
And majority of them won't do shit about it and keep complaining.
I know, there are user-friendly tools to deal with it, but the problem is that those people are lazy enough to not even bother spending few minutes looking for and implementing them.
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Chris Hayes spends a good deal of time on this subject in his book The Siren's Call which I can't recommend enough.
Is this a self affirmation or are there other people in your shower?
There could be thousands of people in that shower if they were pondering in the rain!
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Have you seen they live? Seems relevant.