Advertising is foul to me. I cannot stand being advertised to. I abhor it. I never want to see an advertisement again.
I do not consent to seeing ads.
Yet no matter how hard I protest (mostly cursing under my breath or running an adblocker or disabling advertising cookies), the companies which fund advertising activities have the statistical edge on me (and you too). I may be able to escape the attentional clutches of ads for one site, for one show or one moment. But they never tire of shoving things into my face. They only have to show me something in a moment of weakness or hunger or boredom. They can bombard me. Sure, I can raise my shield, but eventually my arm will wear out and they will strike me.
I believe the shift to advertisement-centred monetization is a symptom of the overabundance-culture of the West. I will touch on the superabundance in a different gemlog post, but in short the vast majority of the West knows effectively no need compared to those 100 years ago in the same place. We have no conceptualization nor experience of famine. Sure, crops may fail in Kansas, but a farmer in Nebraska or Iowa still produces enough for the nation to get by on comfortably.
Yet we still have poverty! Why do some suffer while the overwhelming majority gluts themselves on abundance!
Let me not be taken for one who advocates for starving when famine comes. Certainly not; but having real needs for something rebalances our consumerist attitudes. I see this in my life, too. I could get by workingat McDonalds for three days a week and bumming it the rest of the time. But I would have much more to fight for if I had a wife and kids.
With regards to advertisement, the overabundance of commodities has devalued the individual price of goods. This has also taken place in the entertainment industry. When home video was at its height, you could skip the advertisements that came with the films you watched. One could come to the theatre fifteen minutes after the show actually started to skip the previews (which are Trojan horse advertisements disguised as gifts). You, the consumer, were the filmmaker's market. You were the one buying from the filmmaker the film, the box set, the video game.
Hyperabundance makes it harder and harder to market a commercial-creative work (e.g. films, video games) commercially successful. Not only are the games released today competing with other recent games, but also with the creme-de-la-creme of the past twenty to thirty years (depending on whom you ask). As for myself, I have minimal desire to spend $60 dollars on a new game when I can play an old game that scratches the same kind of itch. Same thing with films and TV: why would I buy a disk or digital download or go to the theatre and hazard not liking it when I could watch something I know I like? This problem leads to entertainment producers to turn from selling their work to consumers to selling their consumer's attention to advertisers. Their works, then, become methods of attacting eyes. I could go so far as to say that this compromises their creative integrity --the dogmatist inside me says so. But is it not so that artistic works can come from any reason? I am conflicted and cannot make a judgment to one side or the other.
This has impacted for-profit creative-commercial enterprises but also social media. I do not need to harangue social media for its ills; many have touched on this and I will most likely do so eventually. If you are interested in lambasting social media, I quite enjoyed Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism. It is a more thoughtful approach to life that is in control of media as opposed to it being in control of life. You could say that this whole gemlog and my ongoing experiment with the flip phone are incarnations of that philosophy therein presented. Every consumer of a creative medium (which is all of us) needs to weigh the opportunity cost, either explicitly or implicitly, of consuming their medium of choice. Therefore, when you are going to the movies, you are giving up two or three hours of scrolling on youtube or playing video games or whatever else you may do with your time. Advertisers have realised this, and they have supported free things to detract from any paid experiences.
Free experiences appeal to the primitive instinct of our brains. We may realize that there is no such thing as a free lunch intellectually, but our will fails us sometimes. And when the average Joe entertains himself with whatever is easily at hand, the advertisers have pushed their products to be accessible anywhere. Thus, it makes the opportunity cost of doing anything else higher --why would you do what's hard when you could do what's easy and pleasurable? Why would you sit and pray and meditate when you could be amused for hours on end? Why would you write when you could binge TV?
The hardest part of all this is the dissonance between the will and the intellect. I may know it's overall worse for me to spend four hours watching TV when I could be working out and praying and writing and reading in that same period of time, but sometimes I do it anyways. The spirit is willing, the flesh is truly weak.
Advertisers, in doing this, may have lined their pockets well; however, they erode the will of the people. I have more to say about that from a political stance, but I will also save that for later. When we consider the marginal benefit of advertising, they are only really marginally beneficial for the advertisers. For consumers and viewers of ads, many times they are ignored, often other times they are interruptions, or they are sources of frustration or irritation. They are overall a net negative for us who view them. And there are a great number more of people who are the subjects of ads versus the number of people who run advertisements.
Another source of my frustration is my inability to opt-out of advertisements. They are everywhere that I go. They are on the TV menu (not even in the programs themselves; thank you Roku), they are on my church bulletin, they are on the side of the road, they are on the radio and in the break room at work. I cannot escape them, and I cannot contemplate the influence they may or may not have had on me.
Last night I rewrote a chunk of my .gmi to .html conversion script. That's how I mirror my capsule/gemlog to the web.
Gemtext is my first-class citizen for this project, so things have been kind of funky with the conversion script.
I was able to reformat the logic so links in the HTML should be working. If there is a broken link, then it's most likely due to me referring to another Gemini capsule [gemini://foo.com/bar.gmi] that isn't mirrored [https://foo.com/bar.html].
I lament that I have not had the opportunity to sit down and browse the Geminispace. I am sure there are equally brilliant writers with equally brilliant content as my capusle. I am glad that those writers are real people (for the most part; I wouldn't put it past someone to throw up a capsule filled with GPT-garbage). I haven't really had time for anything lately. Beyond work and cooking for myself, I have had only a spare two hours to work on the capsule. Even that has come at the expense of two hours of sleep. Frankly, tonight's the first evening where I've been able to do something lesiurely. I watched a bit more of Seinfeld. That's one of my comfort shows. I've seen it a million times, but I just don't really get sick of it. M*A*S*H is also one. That's my favorite show ever. I love how it can touch on transcendental topics like war, emotions, death, trauma and the like while also maintaining a comedic edge.
This weekend, I'd like to devote a bit of time to browsing Geminispace.
Browsing. That's funny. No one ever browses anymore. They just scroll.