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Looks like the war against advertising is continuing to fail, predictably. Google Chrome is now
banningrestricting ad blockers starting as early as next year. (1) I am not convinced this model of: create a free, ad-free service to get users --> slowly pull in ads for $$$ --> eventually become an ad-riddled hell is the best model. I often balk at paying for services up front, but if a service as essential as google is now bowing to the pressure, when will it end?Advertising definitely has some uses in connecting buyers to sellers, and informing consumers about the market, but I'm convinced it's a bit of a 'tamed demon.' If we don't want to devolve into a horrid anarcho-capitalist future, we need to get serious about restricting what advertisers can do, and where they can advertise. I predict advertising will become far more ubiquitous with the rise of Dall-E and similar image producing AIs. The cost of creating extremely compelling, beautiful ads will plummet, and more and more of our daily visual space will become filled with non stop advertising.
On top of this, we have Meta and other tech oligarchs attempting to push us all into the Metaverse. I am no detractor of AR/VR, in fact I think utilized correctly it could solve many of our current problems. However if the Powers That Be take over the metaverse, we will soon have ads that engage all of our sense - not just vision and hearing.
Given how powerful advertising already is, can we really afford to let it run rampant in an age where we have such powerful technologies?
1 - https://developer.chrome.com/blog/mv2-transition/
Web advertisement itself is a great thing. It solves a big, important problem - connecting businesses and customers, at low cost and awesome efficiency. Besides, the narrative about all-powerful, mind-controlling demonic ads really needs to go away, Dall-E or no Dall-E. I suggest anyone who takes this seriously to switch off the ad blocker for a few minutes and go watch some actual ads, "touch the grass" so to speak. What you'll most likely find is a picture of the product with a price sticker superimposed on it, and maybe some kind of a product description. If you're lucky you may stumble upon an ad that's a bit more creative. Either way, it's not a hypnotic pattern devised by a malicious AI superintelligence with the purpose of injecting irresistible desire to buy into your head.
The real value here is about matching the product ad with the people who actually want it to buy it. The ad networks collect all kinds of data from the user, then use it to decide what ads to show him. That kind of thing allows you to find a paying customer for a few dollars. It's a nice, valuable service that solves an important problem. Try it sometime. Build something useful and sell it on the internet - you'll grow to appreciate the ads. Improving ad network capabilities, that are by the way vastly overestimated by many people including yourself, would be awesome. It would mean that instead of garbage ads peddling things of no interest to you, you'd see ads for things you really need right now (also no, a facebook ad cannot make you buy something you don't want to buy). It would also mean that it'd be easier and cheaper to start or scale a business.
The sad thing about the advertisement industry, however, is that in all likelihood the ads aren't leading us into a capitalist paradise. The side effect of collecting user data for the purpose of serving better ads (the good), is that a whole lot of user data ends up centralised in an ad network's data centers (the bad), and then one way or another ends up in the hands of the state surveillance system (the ugly). The amount and nature of that data is such that it can be used to trace it back to you as a person. There isn't anything remotely "anarcho" about that.
Perhaps we can re-engineer the ad industry so that it doesn't have to collect that much data about the user. I don't think the ad companies would be against that, provided that the quality doesn't drop. That's not a problem that's going to be solved by regulation, though, for obvious reasons.
Is this true though? I can only speak anecdotally, but in my 20 years of using the Internet, I have never once been enticed by an ad. No ad has ever made me aware of any goods or services to fulfill my needs that I wasn't aware of already.
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