Comment by barnabee
2 months ago
I’m over 40 and I think banning advertising is perfectly reasonable and should be done. I have been certain of this since at least my 20s, and since before the emergence of the current fully formed hellscape.
I have long thought advertising is the new smoking. One day we will look back and be amazed that we allowed public mental health and the wellbeing of our civilisation to be so attacked for profit.
I also manage to fairly easily live a life in which I see remarkably little advertising.
* I use a suite of ad/tracking blockers
* I don’t use apps that force ads on me
* I watch very little TV, and never watch broadcast TV
* I live in the UK which has relatively little outside advertising, and I mostly get around by walking/cycling (thus avoiding ads on public transport)
* etc…
It astounds me when I speak to friends and travel just how pervasive advertising is for some people, and particularly in some places.
The US, for example, is insane. I can see how some people used to living in such an environment may think it’s not possible or reasonable to get rid of advertising, and for sure there will be edge cases and evasion, but my experience is that it really wouldn’t be so hard to dramatically reduce the amount people are exposed to.
Fair enough. One of the things that has influenced my thinking on this topic was living through the laws on smoking being enforced. But perhaps a better analogy is noise laws. For me, it's preferable to use the power of the state to _prevent_ someone from pushing something on you that you object to. Not to outlaw the objectionable thing, but rather to insure that people have a straight forward way to avoid the thing and can be assured that if they take those steps they won't have that thing imposed upon them. When we use state power to deny people agency, that's when it gets dicey for me and that was what I 'heard' when I read the original article. I dislike drug laws for that reason, I think it is reasonable to ban the use of drugs by people who are doing things where the effects of drug use can cause harm to innocent bystanders, but I think it unreasonable to ban their use by individuals in their own home where all the consequences are landing on their own head.
I too use ad blockers and privacy protectors, and people are constantly trying to get around them. THAT behavior should be outlawed I think. If I'm choosing to use blockers and you don't like that, then deny me your website. That's your choice. Deploying exploits so that my adblocker doesn't work? Or convincing the people who wrote browsers that adblockers are theft? THAT is bad behavior (again in my opinion of course).