Ads, No Thank You
(It's been a long time since I posted. Moving apartments and the awful heat threw all my habits off the rails and it's taken me a while to get back into the swing of things.)
1
When I was a teenager, I read a book called The Gospel According to Larry by Janet Tashjian. It's a YA book published in 2001 about a very smart teenager who anonymously runs a website and blogs about anti-consumerism and his dealing with threats against (and then loss of) his anonymity1. It's one of the few books I read as a teenager that had a big impact on me. Some of Larry's thoughts on brands and advertisements have stuck with me, and I still avoid wearing clothes with brands on them. As Larry said, I'm not a billboard for advertisements.
2
Most of my childhood and youth my family was poor. Sometimes very poor. I'm still learning about and recognizing just how poor my family was at times, because my mom was so good a disguising our poverty to protect us. For example, I realized just this year (and I'm in my late thirties) that we never had TV not because my mom was against watching TV (although that might have been part of it) but because it cost money we didn't have. So I grew up on movies we had at home on VHS and then DVD or things we got from the library. Which means I grew up without ad breaks as a regular and normal part of watching something. The knock-on effect of this is that I cannot stand ad breaks.
3
Yesterday the ad-blocker on my laptop briefly stopped working2. It absolutely pissed me off because 1) I am not interested in the vast majority of the things being advertised, 2) the ad interrupts the video at the stupidest moment or blocks what I'm trying to view on the website, and 3) I plan my video-watching based on the length of the video, and adding ads (ha) throws everything off. For example, if I've got 4 hours of work left, I'll pick a video essay or two that's just shy of 4 hours so I can watch/listen to the whole thing and be finished when I'm done with work. But if ads pop up, that adds time and then I won't finish when I need to.
I'm sure some people will say, "well, you can have the ads tailored to you, then you'll see things you are interested in." To them I say, hell no. First off, that requires them to have access to my data, and I definitely don't want that. And secondly, I don't want to be influenced to buy things. I don't need your gadget/game/medicine/concert/app/car/attorney/clothes/bag/food/service/etc.
4
One of my favorite authors is Jeff VanderMeer, who wrote Annihilation, which got butchered into the movie of the same name staring Natalie Portman. VanderMeer's prose is some of the most beautiful and lyrical I've ever read, and I love the way he looks at the world and how he describes things. I would love to write something like he does in the future. He writes in the short-lived New Weird genre, which is a somewhat contested niche genre that basically pushes the boundaries of what science fiction and fantasy is, in a similar way to the original Weird Fiction genre from the turn of the 20th century, which included authors such as H.P. Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson.
In thinking of what kind of thing I would write in the genre, to emulate the way VanderMeer takes a thing or idea and makes it weird, I keep coming back to a world idea where advertisements are banned because when people look at ads their heads explode. It's simple and pretty weird, but I'm not sure I've found the right angle for it yet. I've had the idea for a few years now, and it just sits in the back of my mind, stewing on the back burner with the rest of my too-many project ideas.
5
Ads are not going away, unfortunately. Over time they have become the main way that companies get word out that their product exists, and until it stops working completely, companies are going to continue using it and continue injecting themselves into our on- and off-line spaces.
And I will continue to block them as much as I can.
Thoughts to share? I have a contact page now!