In my day to day life, I often forget how much advertising most of the people face every day: ads are delivered to home via mail unless forbidden; linear TV has so many ads constantly interrupting the shows; web is near unusable without an ad blocker; newspapers and magazines are full of ads too.

I don’t see any of them. I don’t have a TV so I watch pretty much all my entertainment from streaming services, free or premium. I don’t go to web without an active and aggressive ad blocker. I don’t subscribe to any ad funded magazines or papers and I’ve blocked all paper ads to be delivered to me.

I also use services and tools like Mastodon and RSS readers to gain access to interesting stuff people share without being constantly bombarded with advertisements.

Every now and then, I journey outside my regular environment like when I visit someone who watches TV or stay in a hotel and open the telly to check what’s there. And it boggles my mind how much interruptions and visual disruptions there are with ads everywhere unless actively avoiding them.

I was shocked when I talked about ads with a friend and they considered them a nice thing as you can find what’s on sale and make shopping decisions based on them. I can see the logic in that but knowing how much advertisement world has “innovated” on ways to manipulate people to purchase shit they don’t need, I’m happy to skip a few good sales and instead buy stuff when I need something and then researching where to find them with a good enough deal.

What if ads didn’t exist?

In What If We Made Advertising Illegal?, Kōdō Simone writes about an idea of making advertising illegal. It’s a thought-provoking idea in current world where we are being constantly bombarded with ads but Simone makes a great point that this current ad-heavy society is a very recent phenomenon.

But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.

The problems with modern advertisement isn’t just the attention it takes from us but that it’s supported by an entire industry that threatens our privacy and democracy through tracking our every action and building profiles of us, even when we don’t actively interact with the platforms.