Yes, we should replace "free" ad supported business models, which are in fact anything but, with ones where the customer pays and are therefore the beneficiaries of the work being carried out.
There are technical challenges to doing this as it requires sufficiently frictionless micropayments, but the biggest challenge is cultural. People are pretty addicted to "free" crap, so it's far from a given that most people will ever be willing to pay whatever arguments there are in favour of it. I think there's something of a pushback brewing though.
If nobody was ever in a position where they had to compromise their principles in order to not die, it would be easier to look down on people who do compromise their principles for money.
That's what I thought you meant. So in the analogy that means we should ensure people have a source of income that means they don't have to compromise their (anti-ad) principles as the author did. Which I agree with.
If you didn't mean to further the analogy but instead were expressing a general desire to live in a Star Trek like post scarcity world then I'm with you on that too, but I don't see the relevance.
I suspect the disagreement stems from the idea that to remove advertising we have to find another way for people to pay for services which are currently ad-financed. It neglects other options such as those services getting banned and ceasing to exist because they're not economical.
Or perhaps, if ads have any positive value at all, capturing that value in a less adversarial way and financing things we want through that. E.g. if we had an objective recommender service that made the economy more efficient we could tax it somehow and distribute those taxes to economically marginal but desirable services.
