>everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms ... when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need ... I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible.
I don't think this is a great way to frame the debate - we've been a consumerist society full of billboards and sales people for 100s of years before the internet was even invented. There has been relatively little pushback (perhaps mild annoyance) outside advertising on websites.
Let's be honest here: this debate for most people is a fully practical one about speed, security, aesthetics, etc. Most people I know are fine with unobtrusive advertising and enjoy the benefits it's provided them up to now. But the state of the digital advertising world has been getting worse and worse for everyone (including the advertisers, btw), and ad blockers have been making that glaringly obvious. What we're seeing is the side effect of a broken industry, not a pushback against consumerism.
But ad blockers are a recent innovation in controlling advertising. Billboards... you can lobby your local city or state to pass laws against obnoxious billboards, but at some point it is someone else's property, and they'll be able to put some kind of advertisement there.
Ad blockers let you edit your reality, immediately and easily. It's a big change and our historical acceptance doesn't carry over.
>you can lobby your local city or state to pass laws against obnoxious billboards, but at some point it is someone else's property
Such bans are completely possible and within the rights of a local jurisdiction - they're just extremely rare and not something society generally seems to care about. In actuality, branding and advertising is engrained in our culture. I hear friends talk about their favorite ads all the time - instead of the TV show the ads interrupted. I know a very large number of people who watch the Superbowl "just for the ads". I can't convince anyone who visits me in NYC to skip Times Square, because they really want to see that pit of blinking ads for themselves. Many moviegoers love how the theater wastes 15 minutes of their time playing previews (i.e. ads). I could go on and on with my biased examples :)
My point is that we are a consumerist society; anyone who has worked in advertising lives off of this fact and knows it's true. The real problem is internet advertisers took it way too far.
I guess that you're right, mostly. Initiatives to pass city laws against advertising do exist, though [1]. I don't live in Grenoble so i cannot comment on how this plays out in practice, but i wish all cities would do that.
The supreme court ruled that billboard bans based on location (for city and land planning purposes) would be appropriate, but billboard bans which determined which kinds of content were appropriate for public discourse were unconstitutional. A blanket ban across the state is constitutional, but a ban which targets certain kinds of content is not.
Five years ago, Sao Paulo, Brazil, banned all outdoor advertising. All. Not just billboards, large business signs had to go too. It worked out very well.[1]
I'm not sure where the balance is. Too many is certainly bad for a city as well. LA has seen a big increase in strip club billboards. Not sure why that popped in my head.
I actually enjoy the ads on trains in Tokyo and learn about all kinds of stuff from them from products to events at museums. I noticed the lack of ads in the Paris subway (in the cars themselves) left me kind of bored. It doesn't help there's no mobile signals in the subways.
In my city, we banned outdoors advertising that used animation, flashing lights, lights in any kind, and anything with a bounding box larger than 25 m²
You might be surprised by the computerization and tracking that competently-designed out of home ad setup will run. They are surprisingly good at figuring out who drove by their billboard.
> I don't think this is a great way to frame the debate - we've been a consumerist society full of billboards and sales people for 100s of years before the internet was even invented. There has been relatively little pushback (perhaps mild annoyance) outside advertising on websites.
There's been plenty of push-back against sales people: Do not call lists, blacklists on phones of late, swearing at the people down the telephone, 'no callers' signs and rather unpleasant greetings, 'No thank you' yelled at the people trying to accost you in the streets, the inability to get to a decision maker without an inside line in b2b sales.
And billboards? Well, they're more an American thing than something I see much of, there are three I can think of in a few miles of where I live, all fairly well hidden and definitely not things that you'd spend time looking at unless you were trying to.
Adverts on TV? Let's not pretend they weren't annoying, or that we didn't skip over them in recordings whenever we could. They were just an unfortunate cost of doing business that there wasn't a way around bar sighing and leaving the room to do something else for a few minutes. At least for myself, they were one of the big things that finally decreased the quality of programming to a point where it wasn't worth the bother of owning a TV. 15-20 minutes between 5 minute adverts? I think I'll just buy the DVD....
Web advertising is more like the salesmen than the other things, mind. Things that attempt to force your attention to them and try to interact with your computer in various undesirable ways.... If it was just a .JPEG at the top of every page I doubt anyone would give them five minutes thought one way or the other.
I don't think this is a great way to frame the debate - we've been a consumerist society full of billboards and sales people for 100s of years before the internet was even invented. There has been relatively little pushback (perhaps mild annoyance) outside advertising on websites.
Let's be honest here: this debate for most people is a fully practical one about speed, security, aesthetics, etc. Most people I know are fine with unobtrusive advertising and enjoy the benefits it's provided them up to now. But the state of the digital advertising world has been getting worse and worse for everyone (including the advertisers, btw), and ad blockers have been making that glaringly obvious. What we're seeing is the side effect of a broken industry, not a pushback against consumerism.