So be it. If those services can't survive without ads and surveillance capitalism, they don't deserve to exist.
If for example youtube with all of its information or even Google search required a subscription, suddenly a lot of people who make significantly less than the average for the developed world would no longer be able to access those resources.
I still hate the ad surveillance everywhere, but it was a point I hadn't considered before.
You know who has seeded that argument into the public domain? PR agencies working for the advertising industry. It doesn't have any merit whatsoever. People in developing countries don't like ads any more than anyone else.
This argument definitely gets pushed now and then, but seeing you write it out actually made me realize it seems like a red herring.
Ads are priced, bid, bought, and sold based on their expected return on investment.
If lower-income countries would be unable to sustain a public website because of being unable to pay for subscriptions, wouldn't they also be unable to sustain that website because ads sold there should have lower prices?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
There are plenty of online resources which don't require ads. Sibling comment mentions Wikipedia, Open Street Map also comes to mind. We need more of these in this world. Not this ad-supported nonsense.
I wonder how many millions of people have missed their train/bus connection because they couldn't find a departure board among the billboards.
>There are plenty of online resources which don't require ads
So you claim, but one of the two links you provided contains an ad. Which did not bother me at all, of course -- I'm happy to provide a couple of seconds of my attention in return for the interesting and useful information someone spent time preparing.
If everyone blocks that ad, though, the site will make less money, unless they start charging a fee to view some or all of it. I'm interested enough to read for "free" (paying with a couple of seconds of my attention), but not interested enough to pay cash -- and the world is full of people like me. What do you think will happen to sites like this if everyone blocks ads? Is that what you want?
Yes, there is Wikipedia, which is excellent and free. I think Wikipedia is an outlier, though. It's high-profile enough that people actually donate money to it, which is exceedingly rare. In some countries, the government donates only a small amount to well-known charities like the Blind Foundation or the Red Cross because they are known to be high-profile and trusted enough that large numbers of the public will give to them directly -- but there is a long, long tail of deserving charities that almost no one has ever even heard of, which the government has to subsidise fully. What do you propose to do about the long tail of websites that no one cares enough to donate to, once you shut off their main (and possibly only) source of income?
(OTOH if that intention is conveyed in p. 37 of an EULA in dense legalese, it seems clearly designed to swamp the user. I'd like to see a lot more attention paid to this in legal circles.)
We aren't talking about a Clockwork Orange type of scneario. You're trivialising real rape when you refer to easily avoidable online-advertising.
Your mind "rape" is in no way or form analogous to rape.
But we are.
I'll bite. Is hearing or seeing any idea that you have not previously consented to likewise mind rape?
If not, where do you personally draw the line? And, just as importantly, who do you feel should get to decide in the general case?
Advertising is by definition noise. Superfluous. Information I did not ask for. Irrelevant stuff that someone paid money to put in front of me. Information I explicitly ask for is not advertising, it's simply information.
My cognitive functions are inalienable, they are not theirs to sell to the highest bidder, nor are they currency to pay for services with. I have attention deficit disorder. It's hard enough for me to focus without these corporations trying to grab my attention. I consider their attempts to do so a violation of my personal integrity. I consider ad blocking to be justified self-defense. I will literally do everything in my power to avoid looking at ads.
I'll bite: yes. If you show me images of goatse or mutilated bodies in a war zone without my consent that’s mind rape. Same with bring politics forcibly into the workplace, showing Fox News (or MSNBC or whatever) at the bbq joint while I’m trying to eat or at the gym while I’m trying to exercise, or screaming at me in protest while I’m trying to access family planning services.
Just like women have the right to walk down the street in whatever clothing they want without getting raped, I have the right to experience the world without constantly being bombarded by commercial and political mind rape.
> If not, where do you personally draw the line?
Consent is implicit via set and setting. If you want to challenge peoples viewpoints go to college or start a poker night with a bunch of philosophically diverse neighbors who like to argue politics. If you want to shove ads down everyone's throat, go join an influencer support group.
Everyone else deserves to live free from constant mental assault.
> And, just as importantly, who do you feel should get to decide in the general case?
Judges, the people who interpret laws.
Billboards on a highway: mind rape.
Interestingly, I agree that it doesn't have to be evil, but in practice it is, so close to 100% of the time that the exceptions are actually not worth discussing.
> advertising at its core does _NOT_ have to be evil
Advertising has inherent and irreconciliable conflicts of interest that make it worthless to any rational person. They're trying to sell you stuff, it's literally guaranteed that they will be overstating the pros and downplaying the cons. When you want to make an informed decision, the last person you want to listen to is the advertiser. You want to listen to people you personally trust or independent third parties, not the seller who has every incentive in the world to lie to you.
Therefore the existence of advertising is incompatible with a rational society. There is no such thing as "non-evil" advertising. It doesn't inform anyone. On the contrary: it is disinformation, inherently untrustworthy.
