Adverts. You can't do anything these days without having to watch an advert. YouTube has adverts before during and after their content; at the Cinema, you have to sit through about half an hour of adverts for cars you can't afford and then adverts for other films that you haven't paid to watch before being told there's popcorn in the foyer (like you didn't know cinemas did popcorn). Then there's your podcasts (interrupted mid-word sometimes to tell you about a completely unrelated podcast), radio (since forever), television (since always) - even BBC1 has adverts for all it's own content between it's other content. Unless you pay more money than anything in the world is worth, you have to sit through an advert before you can see, use or eat it. Even Disney+ are launching a scheme where you pay £4.99 for all their content but it's all interrupted and preceded by adverts. Eh? You have to pay £7.99 if you don't want adverts. Who and I mean WHO would pay £4.99 and put up with adverts? It's just weird.
There are paywalls for online newspapers now too - you used to Google something like the time Brian Harvey fell out of his car and ran himself over. You could read about it in full - now, you get the first five lines and then it tells you to subscribe for the rest! There's adverts on buses, on beer mats, on the back of car park tickets, on lamp posts - all to get you to part with money you haven't got for something you don't need. Facebook has turned into a fascist organisation because of advertising too. I saw an advert the other day using Elon Musk's face and a completely untrue claim that you invest £200 and get a return of MORE THEN 10000£ (see below). The grammar is the giveaway, along with the pound sign being in the wrong place. If people 'made money so easily' why did they share this online and not keep it to themselves like you totally would!
The sad thing is, there are gullible people in the world who will click on this, blithely hand over their money and then sit back for six years wondering where their payout is. I'm not having a go at these people because celebrity endorsements will get people to buy anything. Even Samuel L. Jackson is doing a Warburton's bread advert like it'll turn people onto bread who weren't that interested in it before. "Well, if Sam Jackson eats Warburtons then to hell with my gluten intolerance", they'll say, probably.
I reported this Musk-faced ad and wrote a comment underneath warning others not to click on it. I got a warning from Facebook for 'Spamming for comments'. Apparently it's fine to scam people out of money with illegal and immoral claims using fake celebrity endorsements but if you warn people about it, you could be banned from the platform. How does that work? Also, you can't actually contact Facebook - as I found out when I lost control of one of my pages to a scammer. Nobody can access that page now even though I'm an admin of it - Facebook have ignored every single method in which I've tried to contact them on. This proves they're not interested in whether we're getting something out of the platform only that we're reading all the adverts they surreptitiously slide between the stuff we follow on purpose.
People on Twitter (or X or whatever it's called now) go a different route. They post things like 'Nobody can name a word that starts with T and ends in T'. Then thousands of people comment underneath with the 352 words that do. Who do these people think they're talking to though? The 'poster' of the comment isn't reading it and going 'OH! Toast! I forgot about that word. Thanks guys!' and then turns the comments off. They're harvesting your details, building mailing lists of gullible susceptible people who click and comment on anything shiny. Your comment is number 7662 in the list as well - who do you think is scrolling down that far to see that you've written 'Tint' to give you a thumbs up and a comment on your comment saying 'You clever little thing - I forgot that was a word. I'm now going to use it at the bus stop tomorrow morning to show everyone how clever I am.'
My biggest worry is that soon, we'll be watching an unskippable advert and an advert for something else will interrupt it - so we've got to watch that advert first before going back to the original advert. And worse still, the advertisers will demand a method to ensure we're engaging with their marketing. What they'll do is make sure we can't move past the advert without answering a small quiz at the end to make sure we were paying attention. You'll have to score 80% before you can watch the video you clicked on about cats falling off tables. It's going to ruin cats for me altogether. And quizzes.
The biggest problem I have with it all is that companies now are monetising human emotion. Whether through fake stories which pull at our heartstrings and get us to share clearly made-up things about fictional people - or, make us angry about something we didn't care about six seconds ago but now must write to our MPs about. Like, just today, I saw a picture taken from a Wrexham FC propaganda thing where they'd put football club crests on a map of the British Isles, but they'd put some of them in slightly the wrong places.
Oh, the outrage. The comments of indignation - Brentford isn't in the North! What are you doing? Well, they knew what they were doing - all tweets of this nature are designed to get you to engage in your fragile emotional state - they were trying to see how many of you would comment, share, click on, like etc. The engagement went through the roof and knocked their algorithm up a few notches and made people go watch the documentary. Don't, by the way. Ryan Reynolds is a deeply fake, narcissistic, unlikeable smug man with one facial expression.
Anyway, it feels to me that the longer this goes on, the human race is going to end up getting outraged by nothing at all. Wars, abusive behaviours, extortionate interest rates - whatever it is, is all going to garner a reaction similar to the one we give right now when we find out our last yoghurt went off two days ago. There'll be nothing left to monetise. Anything could happen to us and we won't care. And it will all be the Evening Chronicle Website's fault for putting more adverts per page than words of the story you clicked on to read.
Having thought about it - there won't be a quiz to find out if you were paying attention, they'll ask you at the end to type in what the thirty seventh word of the advert was because that'll make you have to go back and watch it again, counting the words till you get to the right one. Only when you type it in correctly can you move on to the second of twelve adverts.
Having said all that - please by my books - I owe people money.
