How to sink Twitter, Facebook/Meta and Google in weeks. (posted in GD, Computer Help and Support)

[usonian]

16. Advertising is a poison.

In my post, I exhort users to contribute to DU.
NOTHING IS FREE
Your internet costs plenty. What do you get? A wire.
None of the (exorbitant, monopoly or duopoly) money goes to creators. IMO, it should.

When services are free, You are the product.

I used the internet before it was an internet, or a "dot com" world.
It was research and general discussion (netnews)

George Monbiot says it better than I could.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advertising-poison-hooked

Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it

A MUST-READ

As a techie with an altruistic bent, I really dislike the use of technology to coerce people.
I was strongly influenced by the writings of Lewis Mumford: "The Myth of the Machine", "The Pentagon of Power", "Technics and Human Development" and so on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Machine

Also by Bucky Fuller, trying to create more efficient and usable things.

And not by Henry Ford, https://allthatsinteresting.com/henry-ford-nazi

The dark truth of Henry Ford's Nazi sympathy and anti-Semitism looms over his legacy as an influential American industrialist.

By "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" by Ted Nelson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines

And lately, by Jeff Hammerbacher's essay in Businessweek, April 2011.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-04-14/this-tech-bubble-is-different

After a couple years at Facebook, Hammerbacher grew restless. He figured that much of the groundbreaking computer science had been done. Something else gnawed at him. Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google (GOOG), and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks."

NOT TO MENTION, that as a physics major, physics was used to create the deadliest weapon to date. Regardless of where you stand on that matter, it was used on two civilian targets, NOT on the emperor's palace, not on an isolated spot as a display of force, nor any military target, making it a war crime in my own conscience.

It's not the technology, it's the application by either kind people, nutballs, or people WHO CAN'T SELL A DAMN THING (Yes, things have a price, and I pay for good things) and resort to the lowest form of income generation, a sandwich board.

Untargeted ads are useless time and bandwidth wasters
Target ads are surveillance capitalism

Lose-lose proposition.