You can even imagine an alternate reality where the central ad serving entity emerged as pull-based instead of push-based.

Ads can, in theory, serve a useful purpose, informing individuals of products and services which would legitimately make their lives better (e.g., I bought a low-end immersion blender a year or two ago, didn't know they existed too far beforehand, and am quite happy with the ease/safety improvements over any other blending strategy I used to have, especially for bulk and/or hot liquids, especially compared to what I paid and how much space it takes, but without _some_ kind of ad I might never have known about the product (not a perfect example, since I learned about them from a friend, but hypothetically)).

The push-based ad ecosystem has a tacit assumption that people don't want the products and services being sold. That's a mostly true assumption, but instead of the solution being filtering to better products, well-vetted products, avoiding added-cost-without-added-benefit lookalike products, not advertising outright frauds, ..., the industry has opted for more invasive ways of forcing us to watch things we won't ever care about and siphoning invasive tax/healthcare/... information to slightly reduce the miss-rate in ad serving.

That's probably inevitable without regulation (it's cheaper to bully people into watching ads than to improve your ad inventory, with the side benefit that as an ad network you profit when suckers fall for the frauds too, plus it's easier to charge the company making money instead of the end consumer, so a profit-focused company will naturally swim that direction). As an alternative business model though, imagine great search tools on top of a pool of better ad inventory, where you could choose the demographic info and interests you wanted to be considered for a particular search session instead of having that inferred from your browsing history and the raw copies of your paystubs your employer is likely selling.

I guarantee you would have learnt about that immersion blender without Adtech.

I'm not saying the industry can't be useful, I'm saying that it's broken.

The root cause? You've missed the giant elephant that's standing right there in the room. It's strange how the elephant managed to make itself invisible. I agree the elephant shit is really bad and really stinks, we should do something about the shit, but we should also do something about the elephant.

What's the elephant? I feel like we agree, but we're talking past each other.

Either a “veiled” political jab, or someone implying that money is the elephant, and as soon as we cure that pesky human nature thing all the problems are solved.

liberalism isn't human nature, thinking it's an unavoidable immutable natural law instead of just another ideology we decided upon and can change, is exactly why it's invisible to people.

(neo)liberalism

Sure. But it's also an Internet without a lot of the web sites people enjoy.

If it ends the "brainwashing" it would be because people would not be on the Internet at all. And maybe that's a net good for the world. But here are you and me, on a web site that is itself basically an advertisement for a VC firm.

There's an even deeper foundation to this problem: copyright.

Artists must get paid, or they will either starve or stop making art.

This is the fundamental threat we have structured our entire civilization around. Art must be labor. Labor must have monetary value. Without income, people must starve and die.

To support this system, we have the most untenable law of the digital age: copyright. The most trivial act, to copy data, shall be monopolized.

But copyright didn't stop there. It grew. We use it to censor. We use it to moderate. We use it to end fraud. We use it to prevent libel. We use it to guarantee collaboration of work. Copyright has become the swiss army knife of law.

When a dull knife slips, it cuts deep.

How would removing ads help with any of that stuff? Desire for power and influence are not byproducts of ads.

Ads are an assault on the mind

Ads literally dictate what you see online. They don't create the desire for power and influence, but they do create the structure for achieving power and influence.

You think ads are the only way for power and influence to be achieved?

Of course not, they're just the easiest.

But ads are an inevitable effect, no matter if they are online or "offline", except if you think that ads should be prohibited which would turn to a different discussion.

Oh, we're in that discussion. I have yet to see a valid argument for advertising of any sort that outweighs the negatives that the industry currently displays.

We're well beyond the arguments for the recommendation graphs and the open market. Adtech, as it's currently practiced, is basically rage farming in disguise.

Gotta maximise that emotional quotient.

My comment was neither against or in favor of ads, I have a bad feeling with ads like everyone else but that doesn't mean that I think I should prohibit them.

> We're well beyond the arguments for the recommendation graphs and the open market.

Why? If people prefer these options, I don't see how forcing them into an alternative is any better. People on X could enjoy a free experience with no ads if they used Mastodon instead, but they actively seek out X. They want an ads-included package because they feel that the value is stronger than the alternatives.

I despise ads, but I don't think it's fair to characterize ads as market abuse any more than paid services are abusive. People consider the deal fair, they don't care about surveillance capitalism and they want to watch their YouTube video.

We passively seek out community, and X is one such. The advertising ROI on X is probably dropping rapidly as we speak. I regard this as a good thing.

I don't have to imagine it, every device I browse the web on has uBlock Origin and I've refused to use anything else for the past 5 years.