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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Can anyone offer me an argument in favor of ad-blockers that doesn't amount to some kind of misanthropic "The system, man, it's broken; so whatever I do against the system is a-ok"? I really can't even create a steelman for the ad-block position. I can understand the logic of not liking to be tracked, sure, and I find that a somewhat reasonable ask; but not viewing any ads that pay for the content you consume is just expecting the world to provide you with something free of charge.

When I browse to a webpage, what I get in return is essentially a text file that contains the webpage, including lots of things like "hey, please load this file as well", or "download and run this script". But you know, I am executing this text file on my computer, using my bandwidth, and my cpu. If I think your header is ugly and decide to not render it, or dislike your choice of font and change it then that is my (technical) right. l.

Ads usually have a very disproportionate load (want to load this 20kB of text? Ok, here have 3 MB of images), or are outright distracting (I am trying to read text, and the visual explosions on every side are not helping) so I will just elect to have my computer not expend resources on them, thank you very much.

There's other reasons too: ads have historically often been vectors of malware, resource hijacking for bitcoin mining, etc. It is actually asking quite a lot that when I got to webpage.com, webpage.com says "hey also download these 30 pages which I have no affiliation with or responsibility for, and which increase your expenditure by several 100%".

If you don't like that I can do this then you can feel free to move from http into some other protocol. You don't get to call me immoral for using the tech stack as it was intended.