Ads are here to stay. At best they may do less tracking in the future, but they remain.
Another unpopular thought...in a fully online, digitized society, how are companies supposed to advertise their existence or their products if there's no ads?
Not my problem, many would say. Well, it is your problem. Because you probably work at a company and they sell things.
Ads artificially increase the price of a product or service, because the cost of advertising is embedded in the price of what's sold; you're paying more money to be manipulated to buy something.
There are other externalized costs that aren't calculated, e.g. what's the cost to society on top of the "$10"/day?
What if ads also make us sicker, make poorer decisions, wasteful decisions - perhaps as simple as buying lower quality products because they have a higher profit margin and so it's the product you're exposed to, and then because we're sicker we spend more money on health?
There's not much conversation about all of this. I think the natural mechanisms of how information propagated via word of mouth before communications became what they are, how we are able to bypass those natural mechanisms, has some very negative impacts on society, e.g. buying products/services from people that didn't earn or deserve the attention, instead able to buy and manipulate you with cheap-shallow ads; what would the world look like today if this wasn't the case, what would your buying patterns be, what type of person would be amassing profits from the different buying patterns that would exist if there weren't ads, and what would the cascading consequences of that be?
Ads are here to stay. At best they may do less tracking in the future, but they remain.
Another unpopular thought...in a fully online, digitized society, how are companies supposed to advertise their existence or their products if there's no ads?
Not my problem, many would say. Well, it is your problem. Because you probably work at a company and they sell things.