Well.. doesn't it pay for let's say Superbowl? Or makes NBA possible? Didn't it enable early internet to mature and become internet as we know now? If you're talking about just the first order affects, perhaps I see your point. But broadly speaking, advertising fuels a gigantic part of modern society. Remove it, and who knows what we will find ourselves in.
Look, I am also not convinced that modern society, or at least the economic aspects of it, are providing a net positive for the average consumer either. Saying advertising enabling these high-cost ventures being a good thing makes me immediately question why these ventures are high-cost to begin with. Yes, advertising enables the superbowl. But the superbowl exists in order to sell advertising
This is a deep kettle of fish to be opening, but I don't believe that the world we have constructed around us is necessarily good for us.
kind of a bad example, but take google, search, youtube, Android. It's an extreme position to argue that those products exist to serve advertising, they are clearly useful to end users.
I don't think it is. Google in particular is just an advertising company. Youtube would not exist if it did not serve ads.
And ultimately, while yes your examples are modern services that provide us convenience and entertainment, at a deeply human level I still argue that they are not providing net positives to us. Bread and circuses.
I agree with the sentiment that it might be net negative.
But on the other hand I'm almost certain I wouldn't have pushed through and gotten a degree without the internet (3b1b and Khan Academy in particular). I don't know what the world would look like without Google so almost impossible to argue, but I would definitely classify (ex. youtube) as "clearly useful".
Just gross positives is the claim.
Ad is the negative, and the services are the positive.
how is enabling ever bigger and more expensive to produce forms of entertainment making modern society better? remove all that and we won't lose anything. we'll always find a way to entertain ourselves. likely, with more culturally beneficial and social forms of entertainment.