This metaphor doesn’t work, unfortunately. You have huge ability to avoid advertising. Don’t go on the internet or watch TV. Turn your eyes away from billboards.
Advertising is an annoyance, closer to noise than theft. It is extremely annoying. Like noise, it may have very bad effects on us. Perhaps that’s an argument for regulating it somewhat more tightly: laws against advertising in public places seem reasonable to me, which is what most of your pictures focus on.
I like the idea of it being closer to noise, but there are also reasons to consider the act of advertising theft, or worse:
It feels like the integrity of my will is attacked, when ads work and I know somewhere that I don’t want it to; a divide and conquer attack on my brain, Moloch in my head.
If they get the most out of marketing it to parts of my brain rather than to me as a whole, there is optimization pressure to keep my brain divided, to lower the sanity waterline.
Whenever I’m told to “turn off adblocker”, for that to work for them, it’s premised on me being unable to have an adblocker inside my brain, preying on what’s uncontrollably automatic for me. As if to say: “we both know how this works”. It makes me think of an abuser saying to their victim: “go fetch my belt”.
Life is full of pressures, it’s true. Not just from deliberate advertising, but from social comparisons.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that it’s ultimately our responsibility to engage or not. If a website demands you turn off adblocker to read, you can always click away.
If you literally feel like ads are driving you insane, equivalent to being beaten with a belt every time you glance at a billboard, or compromising your very ability to make meaningful choices...
Well, that is probably a stronger visceral reaction than most people have to ads.
I for one often choose to get free content in exchange for trying to ignore ads. I feel this deal is worthwhile to me sometimes, other times not. I pay for a subscription to Spotify so that my music listening can go uninterrupted by ads. I don’t pay for a subscription to news sites that I can read if I turn off my ad blocker.
This metaphor doesn’t work, unfortunately. You have huge ability to avoid advertising. Don’t go on the internet or watch TV. Turn your eyes away from billboards.
Advertising is an annoyance, closer to noise than theft. It is extremely annoying. Like noise, it may have very bad effects on us. Perhaps that’s an argument for regulating it somewhat more tightly: laws against advertising in public places seem reasonable to me, which is what most of your pictures focus on.
I like the idea of it being closer to noise, but there are also reasons to consider the act of advertising theft, or worse:
It feels like the integrity of my will is attacked, when ads work and I know somewhere that I don’t want it to; a divide and conquer attack on my brain, Moloch in my head.
If they get the most out of marketing it to parts of my brain rather than to me as a whole, there is optimization pressure to keep my brain divided, to lower the sanity waterline.
Whenever I’m told to “turn off adblocker”, for that to work for them, it’s premised on me being unable to have an adblocker inside my brain, preying on what’s uncontrollably automatic for me. As if to say: “we both know how this works”. It makes me think of an abuser saying to their victim: “go fetch my belt”.
Life is full of pressures, it’s true. Not just from deliberate advertising, but from social comparisons.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that it’s ultimately our responsibility to engage or not. If a website demands you turn off adblocker to read, you can always click away.
If you literally feel like ads are driving you insane, equivalent to being beaten with a belt every time you glance at a billboard, or compromising your very ability to make meaningful choices...
Well, that is probably a stronger visceral reaction than most people have to ads.
I for one often choose to get free content in exchange for trying to ignore ads. I feel this deal is worthwhile to me sometimes, other times not. I pay for a subscription to Spotify so that my music listening can go uninterrupted by ads. I don’t pay for a subscription to news sites that I can read if I turn off my ad blocker.