Hear hear. Ban all advertising. We could do it slow.

Start by banning all gambling and drug commercials. That's like 20% of all commercials right there. This is already normal in other countries.

Then ban all billboards. People hate them already.

Then the big one, ban targeted advertising. With personalized ads gone, all of the incentives that make data collection profitable are gone.

Of course there will still be bad actors that want data mining to continue. But right now you can't even read 95% of websites because they have popups that make you agree to data mining just to get in. I'll be searching for like, a recipe and they want my name, device IP, browser fingerprint, and anything else they can pinch.

I'm searching for a nice spinach salad recipe. I go to google

First it fires up an LLM, which will run a GPU in an AI data center that they probably cleared a forest to build.

I just made nvdia stronger. I just helped pump their AI "adoption" numbers. And I helped train an AI that will help layoff me and my friends.

As always I run the search again with "-noai" at the end. Now I'm searching twice for no reason. The results were better, and faster 10 years ago.

It gives me results and I click the first link. A video that I can't pause starts auto playing. This recipe isn't that good so I go back and find another. I need to click the back button 4 times.

I try another link. And get another pop up. I opt into data mining this time because uBo is having trouble with the full page transparent overlays. Now they have my data to sell to 3rd party intermediaries that will sell them to companies like palantir and cambridge analytica. Every search builds a little more of my "shadow profile".

Maybe I should have just gone to the library and taken a picture. All I wanted was a salad recipe and I've now helped train the system that made brexit possible. I've helped nvdia. I've helped the very AI datacenters that I hate. I've helped the data miners.

The experience of using a computer in 2025 is exhausting. Particularly search engines. They used to work so good. They used to be so fast.