taladar, 6 months ago

Ads have just absolutely fucked most web browsing and that’s sad.

It is actually much, much worse than that. Ads have pretty much fucked up

• our privacy since most tracking of your personal life is ad-related (pretty much all besides government surveillance)
• our health (smoking, alcohol, sugary foods,… are all heavily pushed by advertising)
• our climate (dito with fossil fuels, cars and other climate killer technologies)
• our politics (Cambridge Analytica and similar propaganda campaigns as well as closely ad-related propaganda in movies and other types of media)
• our attention spans and emotional stability (content optimized to keep us watching/clicking/… tends to be super-short and enraging)
• our freedom of speech (“advertiser friendly” (self-)censorship and demonitization)
• our news (what gets ad clicks gets reported and in the way to optimize clicks)

There are probably a few things I forgot but this should give you an idea of the scope of the problem.