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Web advertisement itself is a great thing. It solves a big, important problem - connecting businesses and customers, at low cost and awesome efficiency. Besides, the narrative about all-powerful, mind-controlling demonic ads really needs to go away, Dall-E or no Dall-E. I suggest anyone who takes this seriously to switch off the ad blocker for a few minutes and go watch some actual ads, "touch the grass" so to speak. What you'll most likely find is a picture of the product with a price sticker superimposed on it, and maybe some kind of a product description. If you're lucky you may stumble upon an ad that's a bit more creative. Either way, it's not a hypnotic pattern devised by a malicious AI superintelligence with the purpose of injecting irresistible desire to buy into your head.
The real value here is about matching the product ad with the people who actually want it to buy it. The ad networks collect all kinds of data from the user, then use it to decide what ads to show him. That kind of thing allows you to find a paying customer for a few dollars. It's a nice, valuable service that solves an important problem. Try it sometime. Build something useful and sell it on the internet - you'll grow to appreciate the ads. Improving ad network capabilities, that are by the way vastly overestimated by many people including yourself, would be awesome. It would mean that instead of garbage ads peddling things of no interest to you, you'd see ads for things you really need right now (also no, a facebook ad cannot make you buy something you don't want to buy). It would also mean that it'd be easier and cheaper to start or scale a business.
The sad thing about the advertisement industry, however, is that in all likelihood the ads aren't leading us into a capitalist paradise. The side effect of collecting user data for the purpose of serving better ads (the good), is that a whole lot of user data ends up centralised in an ad network's data centers (the bad), and then one way or another ends up in the hands of the state surveillance system (the ugly). The amount and nature of that data is such that it can be used to trace it back to you as a person. There isn't anything remotely "anarcho" about that.
Perhaps we can re-engineer the ad industry so that it doesn't have to collect that much data about the user. I don't think the ad companies would be against that, provided that the quality doesn't drop. That's not a problem that's going to be solved by regulation, though, for obvious reasons.
Is this true though? I can only speak anecdotally, but in my 20 years of using the Internet, I have never once been enticed by an ad. No ad has ever made me aware of any goods or services to fulfill my needs that I wasn't aware of already.
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That's not why I have an adblocker. That's not why I was forced, after years without using one, to get an adblocker.
It's the sheer, unrelenting volume and placement of ads. I couldn't read an online news story without banner ads, sidebar ads, popup ads, autoplay music/speech (which is very disconcerting when you open a page, a voice starts yapping, and you have no idea where it's coming from or how to shut it up), and ads shoved in between every paragraph on the page.
It made any service, be it a website or commercial site or media site, unusable. I literally could not read the news story I had searched for, because the ads crowded it out.
So therefore adblocker. And now I have a much, much better experience because if I really want to find out "six different ways to cut a tomato with our amazing super-sharp knife!", I can go look it up, if I need a super-sharp knife. If I don't want one right now, no annoying ads about it.
I wasn't getting sophisticated, subliminal, slip past your mental guard and persuade you, slick ads with great copywriting and cool visuals. I was getting the equivalent of having my rubbish bin dumped over my head every time I ventured online. That's why I use an adblocker.
I had to start using them because everything is just simply too slow without it. Sites now feel like they have trackers in every pixel of every, otherwise static, page.
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That’s a different concern.
Fair enough, however you should also see that using adblockers in that capacity is not sustainable - essentially you are using something that was supposed to be paid for by ads for free. Eventually as the ad blockers gain adoption, content creators are going switch to some other revenue model, like directly charging you for content e.g. what the news websites started to do. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but YMMV
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