Living Advertisement Free - Don't Ask Me To Disable My Ad-Blocker So I Can Read Content You Didn't Create

For the most part, I manage to avoid advertising.

I haven't watched any network television on a television since around 1992, and I don't think I've turned on a radio since I bought my first CD.

Thank God ad-blockers arrived to wage their war of attrition with advertisers around the time that Web 2.0 arrived. YouTube is unwatchable without an ad-blocker in place.

I don't mind print ads, billboards, even static links and suggested products in the margins of web-pages. I mean, I could do without them. But if you, as a newspaper, or magazine, or internet publisher, need the revenue from some poor sucker to keep doing valuable work, go ahead and stick a few words around the margins of your message. I don't have to look at it. I can turn the page in under a second. And in the case of newspaper, I need that crap to light my fireplace anyway.

But as soon as that your ad is font-and-center, slowing me down, or locking me out of what I'm trying to accomplish, I'm finished. I'm finished watching your show or reading your story. And I'm definitely not going to buy the product you're shoving in my face.

And if your ad is actually catchy enough for me to remember it, I'll be damn sure never to buy from you.

What really bothers me about the TV and radio model of advertising is two-fold.

First, we're all mortal human beings with limited time on this planet. At 41, my life is half over. If I'm lucky. If I'm healthy and productive until I'm 80, I've got less than 350,000 hours left. As a narcoleptic/heavy sleeper, I'll be awake for 200,000 of those. Take out three hours a day for food, exercise, self-maintenance, &ct., and that leaves me with 156,585 hours of alert attention.

If you want some of that time, and you're not adding value to my life, you can goddamned well pay me for it.

An hour of television today contains nearly 15 minutes of advertising. If the average American watches 5 hours of TV a day, they're consuming nearly nine hours of advertising per week. If we were working those hours at minimum wage in my state, we'd be making over $400/month with that time. (And if my lawyer was billing me for those hours, I'd owe him over $14 grand!)

Let's have some respect for ourselves and stop giving away our time to people who don't have our interests at heart!

Back in the early days of broadcast TV, hearing a few "words from our sponsors" seemed like a fair exchange. I mean, we got our programming for free, through the air, as if by magic. So sure, if Fred and Barney want to tell me that "Winstons taste good, like a cigarette should," it seems a small price to pay. After all, in those early years, advertising only took up eight minutes an hour - half the time we waste on ads today.

Today, we have twice the advertising, and we have to pay a cable company to cram these unwanted messages into our eyeballs. How's that for a kick in the balls?

My quote from the Flintstones brings me to my second concern about advertising.

Ads colonize the mind. They are designed, by psychologists who have every incentive to get better and better at it, to stick with you on a subconscious level and influence you - without your even being aware of the influence.

Seventy years after that Flintstones ad aired, I can still call up the jingle at will, and hear it running through the back of my head like an earworm any time I see a pack of Winstons sitting on the gas-station's shelves.

I see a tube of Pepsodent toothpaste and hear You'll wonder where the yellow went... I pull into the Burger King drive-through and think, Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce...

That, for me, is the biggest violation of all. Maybe I'm being a little over-dramatic if I compare it to the mind-rape experienced by Counselor Troi on Star Trek The Next Generation, but any catchy meme or message does colonize our minds and stick with us for the rest of our lives.

You college kids want to whine about safe spaces and intellectual security and micro-aggressions? Turn off your bloody TVs and stop thumbing sponsored messages on your cellphones.

This is why, whenever I hear an advertising jingle in the back of my mind, or recall seeing a product in an ad, I always choose the competitor's. Or do without.

Maybe if more of us did this, invasive advertising would disappear as a business model.

Why am I carrying on about this tonight?

Well, that arms race between ad blockers and online ad providers seems to be heating up. Content providers seem to realize that advertising is dead in the water.

Unwilling or unable to innovate, though, they've started begging us to disable our ad blockers when we arrive on their sites. "It's not you. It's your ad-blocker," one site told me. And a helpful animation played on the side of the screen showing how I could disable it, just for their site - so that my computer could tell their computer to tell their sponsor's computer they'd made an impression.

What's especially pathetic about this is that they realize no one pays attention to their sponsors, but they go on selling their advertising anyway. Then they turn to the reader and say, "Hey look, see, I've just got to show you some of this stuff. I know you don't really want it, but if you let me just flash it on your screen for a second, we can all go home happy, right?"

And you know what? Fine. Sometimes I will disable my ad-blocker, if there's an article I need to read. If I wind up on a site I don't normally visit because a search brought me there, and I need to do some research, or, what the hell, an article just looks genuinely interesting... It doesn't cost me anything to turn off my ad blocker for a minute. So long as you don't play any videos or run ads with sound, we're back to the newspaper and magazine scenario. I get to read your stuff and you can pretend I give a shit about your sponsors. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

But here's the thing - and I'm looking at you, Forbes.com - when the article you deliver is something you've copied from Quora, an article that's available for free two entries down on a search, an article which is word-for-word identical with the same answer provided on a site that pays its authors nothing even though it makes its own money by mining user data and selling contextual advertising, well, you can bet I won't be picking up a copy of your magazine or venturing back to your website anytime soon.

How do you feel about online advertising? And advertising in general? Do you make an effort to filter it out? Do you think it's worth making an effort to stop corporations from selling us things we don't need, and to protect the precious limited time we have on this planet?