Has the Golden Era of Adblockers Passed?

Recently I tried to watch some online video on a television channel's website. The video applet failed to load completely and it didn't take long for me to develop the correct suspicion. I disabled my adblocker and reloaded the page. No fucking video. So I open the page in a vanilla browser and it loads, a wild contrast from what I had, up till that point, been used to. On the vanilla browser there is a banner and large square add. Then the video starts and I am subjected to extra-loud advertising, TV style, with a vengeance. In addition to the other adds. Another advertisement plays, and a third, before my content is loaded.

Adblockers, with the advent of hijacked banner ads and unscrupulous marketing, to say nothing of the paranoid or political users of the internet, are not simply a tool entitled users employ to rid themselves of annoyances. Ad-blockers are legitimately a way of keeping your computer clean, of preventing your oft-used technological distractions from compromise. The fact you don't have to watch commercials (which are basically always: manipulative, insulting, indoctrinating or some shameful combination of all three) is an added bonus to not having your internet-accessing-device fucked with.

I am not a poweruser but I've been adblocking for years - since I discovered it was possible. I understand that advertising revenue drives some smaller sites, and, yes, I'd agree they deserve their due - assuming they police their advertisements for some level of quality. Fine, whatever, have your .005 cents per impression. You deserve it, plucky little website. However, the worst offenders are often large media sites – sometimes even those which already use paywalls. Let me present a brief overview of the galloping trend of online advertising.

In the early 90's during the second wave of the internet, when things became graphical enough that advertisement in the classic sense became possible, it was largely internet entities that advertised for themselves, and certain forward looking companies often related to the tech-sector. It was a simpler time. By late 1999 basically everyone who wasn't under a rock or a dinosaur was getting into online advertisement. 'Hey, check out our website at http://www.geocities.SonnysPizza/index.htm for some coupons' and other types of hilarity abounded. Whatever, wherever you got advertised to, it took a slice of your pitiful bandwidth and generally wasted time and resources, but you had to face it. Eventually MSN Messenger (R.I.P) becomes huge, and eventually it begins to advertise to you.

Side banner; top banner; .gif flames - all of these things were familiar. Between then and now the internet has grown up and come of age to the point where a huge section of people use it. All the troglodytes, termites, attractive well-adjusted people, and infants came out of the woodwork and the internet is full of everyone now. Whatever, other people will tell you about it, and some gigantic nerd could probably make a convincingly venomous deal about it... all I'll say is it drove a wave of advertising intensity that eventually rivaled the notorious realm of television adverts.

Fucking pop-ups were one thing, but there came layers of advertising that would jump into existence around key-words. Video sidebars that glitched out your browser and had to fling their audio payloads into your ears. 'Interactive' commercials made by committees of dullards and shills. YouTube videos became clogged with side, top, and skippable pre-video advertisements for every user account considered important enough to waste your time for their profit. What was once dumb, became even dumber, amen. So it goes, right? Absolutely. Yet there were additions to your browsers that would kill all advertising.

True to form, adblockers were free. They worked, and nobody who adopted them ever looked back. Surfing without them was like going back in time. It sucked, you were exposed to all the reprehensible shit that barely existed in your ideal internet experience. Going back to ads is like hitting yourself in the face with a shoe. Beautiful adblocking programs, released by benevolent and right-minded developers, worked on classic print ads, video ads, and even ads played in video content. It is like a magic balm that drives mosquitoes far, far away. For those who use adblockers, the internet just is that much less shitty. It's less claustrophobic and it can seem like the terminal cash-in state of the world has been opposed.

So of course, it comes to an end, by hosted content ('hosting ain't free, yo') which a profitable broadcaster puts online. Until very recently I had never been blocked for anything but geographical reasons (though nationalization of the internet is another ugly recent phenomenon) but a week or two ago I was denied a show I had been following online. I imagine in a year it will be impossible to skip video-advertisements everywhere, and only the smug power users will know what to do about it. Hopefully the same people who did the good work of blocking online advertising will keep up and their programs will not lapse into irrelevance due to some frightening and monstrous online advertising epidemic.

Because what the hell? You're running a profitable business already, and why not add some more revenue? Why not even more? Why not three advertisements every five-and-a-half minutes on video content? Why not have it be 30% louder than actual content, like on TV? Who cares is the commercial is ideologically loaded or bankrupt of all value? Who cares if it's annoying? 'I like money, gentlemen, and nobody gets a free lunch!'

A browser without an adblocker is a sign of a pitiable person trapped in the commercial arena, a hopeless square, a submissive lackadaisical fuck, a worthless shit hyperbole rapist. This is one fight the internet should not lose.

Fast Food versus Sexuality, Orientation

Only in America would a divisive, manufactured 'political issue' come to a head at a fast food chain. I don't use the quotes to say that gay rights aren't an issue, or that marriage equality is jokes bro, but the issue is blown out of all proportion by one or both sides and it's annoying to see what was once a great country turned into a hobbled caricature of itself. Political issues should deal with good governance, any country mouthing anything or pointing fingers about poverty, hate, and human rights should have solved its own problems before sallying forth into other countries. But that's a lost battle, and the USA is far from alone in offending those of us who prefer politics to revolve less around identity, distraction/division, brand; and more around effective, efficient, consistently improving policy. And, oh, I don't know: honesty, transparency, good governance, and other foolish little things that have been largely forgotten and are outsourced to the drudges of bureaucracy.

That digressive aside aside, the whole fried chicken fiasco is about as insane as you'd expect. Dan Cathy openly admitted to having a specific belief in marriage, supposedly Christian, which determines that it can only involve one man and one woman. This has been the de facto form of marriage for something around two thousand years. It has been strictly enforced for maybe one thousand, and it has been a hysterical point of order for the last 40. It's more or less a distraction meant to separate and confuse people. It works really well, as it turns out, at doing that. Dan Cathy isn't the enemy; he's just the enemy's unwitting pawn. He's already purchased a certain existence that he feels is fair to him and those he loves, and how others feel about his overblown comments will not bother him. Was the entire event even heartening to see? Photos and videos suggest there's some kind of super-important event that's worth swarming a franchise restaurant about, like voters in the third world traveling hundreds of miles only to wait in the dust to vote... except:

This mindless wasteful dumb herd is all the satire this divisive issue needs. They have been crafted into satires of themselves. Clearly America is in trouble, and for the smug rest of the world: you're no better and believe in the same fundamental lies. It's in so much trouble that many people can't even walk to a fast food restaurant (priding itself on exceptional quality and service), to make clear how they feel about what other people do, in the privacy of their own lives. This kind of shit causes traffic problems. It will get to the point where the difference between fries, a burger and a shake will mean life or death for thousands. Except, well, it already means financial destitution, factory farming, environmental destruction, and pure unadulterated wastefulness. But those, of course, are small issues compared to the love a homosexual individual may feel towards another homosexual individual.

So burn your gas waiting in line with the AC cranked and your favourite Kid Rock album on the stereo, or sweat in the heat singing hymns with your friends, or stand a few feet from all of that and kiss your sweetheart in protest, or just protest. Wave your flags. Just... don't for a second question your existence and what it's come to, your material or social privilege, and all the myriad things you take for granted in the equation. Never change, America. Never change until it's too late, and the chilling reflection occurs to you that all of that bullshit you thought was so important and worth suffering and fighting and hating for isn't going to mean anything when the cannibals come knocking in the middle of the dark night of hunger. Your leaders will be done pulling you around like puppets, and some of them will even be safe, and don't go asking to join my inclusive non-hate survivalist gang. We were recruiting even when you bought into the fried chicken hysteria of 2012 – you just didn't care. You had bigger chickens to fry.

Fast food politics. Let's not get too afraid of what this means, but let's not forget about this anytime soon. I'll give 5 dollars to the first person willing and able to make a satire about this and I'll pay 50 to the network who broadcasts it.