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To understand how unhinged our society is one only needs to understand how we constantly improve our technology, but don’t use it to improve us as a society.
Is it any wonder why we pirate and adblock. Im not going to embrace hostility, im going to fight fire with fire. Every time.
Even the article itself is hostile as i cant read it because it’s paywalled
Reminds me of those gas stations that play commercials at the pumps. More and more of them are disabling the mute buttons. I only stop at stations with the TV-free pumps now.
There are fuel pumps that show ads? Where do you live? That’s crazy to me
I think it’s an US thing. Have yet to encounter something like that in Europe.
Ohio. It’s all of them now
I have yet to encounter one that lets me mute it…
They used to let you mute them. But everyone started doing it, so of course they disabled it. Sometimes you can get into the admin menu with the right combo of button presses. I don’t recommend trying this, as most stations have multiple security cameras and your locale might have draconian laws about tampering.
wait, take a breath, do you think someone’s going to get arrested for trying to turn off advertising?
I know America is ever-sliding into Dystopia but that just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
The law doesn’t have to make sense to be enforceable.
If you harm a poor person, you’re generally OK. If you harm a wealthy person or corporation, you’re fucked.
Pretty sure you’d run afoul of some kind of federal cyber crime law if you did that.
"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."
– Banksy
I’m glad that The Atlantic is covering this issue. Nothing groundbreaking here for anyone who follows these issues, but the Atlantic’s audience overlaps a lot with actual policymakers and their staffs. The tech companies don’t want to be regulated by the government, so coverage by these types of publications may be a good starting point for reform (whether voluntary or regulated).
