"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."
- Banksy
I agree that they’re evil and there are legitimate reasons to use ad blockers. But ("But" is such an unwelcomed word here) we need a better business model than ads to support free content creators, if we want to push back against The Advertisers.
It's called paying for shit. Like we used to before everything went ad driven. You'd go and buy a magazine or a book or a newspaper. (Ironically, you often still got ads though, ugh).
The advertising business model destroyed any possible alternative, like Google Maps destroyed virtually all commercial maps, by providing products "for free" with costs well hidden from the public. Yet those costs exist and burden the society even more by removing the competition and enabling monopolies.
Who knows which products and business models would exist without it? The (actually free, non-monopolized) market would show us. I wish it could and am curious, too.
The real solution is to ban advertising and let the free market do its job, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269