Agreed - and I really dislike how anti-tracking technologies are commonly called ad-blocking. I’m ok with ads, but not ok with tracking.

Honestly I'm not really OK with either. Of the two I'm less OK with tracking, but I also don't want to live in a future like Minority Report (https://youtu.be/oBaiKsYUdvg) with giant ad-walls in your face wherever you (virtually or physically) go.

Or even a "future" like the '90s, if I'm being entirely honest.

Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?

Fry: Well, sure, but not in our dreams! Only on TV and radio. And in magazines. And movies. And at ballgames, on buses, and milk cartons, and t-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.

True, print newspapers look(ed) basically like news websites do now if you turn off your adblocker. 3/4 of a page of ads for a quarter page of content.

I don't like tracking but I don't really care; yet I'm strongly opposed to ads in any form. Forcefully showing me content I didn't ask for is an act of violence against my mind / against me.

I believe a majority of users of these extensions have the opposite feelings: complacency with tracking, and not ok with being exposed to ads.

Horse drawn carriages also worked just fine. And still do.

Yet, they can't compete with cars.

From what I've seen so far, tracking doesn't deliver superior results. Ad companies (Google, FB and Co) want to make us believe that. But using all targeting mechanisms that Google and Facebook offer still delivers worse Conversions than a direct deal with a website you know has approx. your target audience.

That might be true, I don't know. Dealing with Google and Facebook is more scalable though and standardised.

Bicycles on the other hand...

Yes, they are still around and in heavy use. Just as we still have outdoor advertising on billboards.

Advertisements, indeed marketing in general, has always been a zero-sum game. The more you spend on ads, the more I have to in order to keep up. The more you track, the more I have to track.

It's hard to see how we'll ever get that genie back in the bottle.

To a certain extent. But let's not be overly cynic: ads also inform people about products and services available. And eg Google's early money making was built on showing more relevant and less intrusive ads. So there's non-zero sum progress possible.

Don't hyper-correct though: the zero-sum nature of most ad spending is important.

So did blocking.

- for billboards, there’s the visor

- for TV ads, there’s the mute button, or time shifting/ad skipping

- newspaper ads don’t move around, so it’s easy to spot and tune them out.

And yet they're effective. Many people like looking at ads. I also don't mind ads, I just mind that on many pages they slow down my computer, let content jump all over the place and make it hard to use the website at all.