Entangled

Advertising is everywhere.  And “everywhere” keeps increasing.

That’s not what it’s for.  Of late, Microsoft has been using the “notifications” window on one of our computers to sell the pay-for version of Adobe pdf software.  “Notifications,” properly used, contains things about software updates and maybe backups.  Not ads.  But now it does.  And our smartphone provider has taken to sending us text messages twice a day touting new services to buy; ditto our internet provider.

Our web host, right here, is flagrant.  The login page is mostly advertising for additional SEO or website-buiding services; you can find the username and password blocks only if you look hard.  Once you do login, you have to click through one or two banner ads.  Then, to get to email, don’t click on “email;” that takes you to an opportunity to buy more email services.  To read our own email is a non-obvious three clicks down.

There is no legal way to get past this, as we understand.  Because we are doing or have done business with these companies, anything they send is not legally “unsolicited,” even though by any sane use of English it is.  All these companies, and no doubt many more, have taken our customership as a license to clutter up all methods of communication with ads.  In a former age, this would be dismissed as crass presumption.

But the old idea, that I paid for a product once and then just used it, is now hopelessly naive.  Software is a service, even though we have no need or desire for upgrades.  Clothing has long been a way of paying a company to promote their products; now everything is a way of paying companies to send us more ads in more formats.

We have heard the mantra, “If it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it.”  That is a counsel of deep pessimism.  It means that the number of people who respond to these ads is significant.  That would lower our opinion of mankind to previously unplumbed depths.  We think, rather, that it’s the cheapness and ease of producing this chaff that makes it so prevalent.  It does not require, as in former days, the expense of paper and postage stamps; or time on a radio or TV broadcast; or an automatic phone dialler with a recorded message.  It does not even require a few lines of code.  It only means checking some box on a GUI that someone else has produced.

Getting away from this phenomenon presents problems.  Open-source software can do everything we want, but is not available to anyone who works for someone else.  Shifting  ourselves from this web host to another is possible.  But even if a host with some sense of decency could be found, we would almost certainly lose ten years of weekly blogs.  None of it amounts to Great Literature, but it does represent a great deal of work.  People who have integrated their social media, work and recreation accounts on all platforms are in an even worse position.

We don’t have an answer, short of signing off completely.  And even that might not work.