Personally, I just "ignore" those big problems, as I have no authority to fix them. I focus on what I can do: help my family when they need it, teach my kid(s) to be good and intelligent people (for my and my wife's definition of good and intelligent), and work in industries or on technology that will have a positive effect on the world (like distributed energy resource/load controls, currently). I can only affect my little part of the world, so why worry about those big issues that are above my paygrade? I just vote for whom I think will help most (hard to find these days), raise my voice when I see something I don't like (like when someone is being rude to a clerk at a store), and the rest is up to fate/the universe/god(s)/whatever.

This is a good point and it is something we can all do. Don't go work for companies in industries you're opposed to, no matter how much money they want to throw at you. For this discussion, that would be adtech, marketing/pr, etc.

Most of the time people think about how to stop corporate behavior they don't like, and it comes down to shutting off their cash flow by not buying their stuff, or by regulation. But workers are also required, and just based on numbers I'd say withholding talent is a lot more impactful than withholding cash.

My life is as close to advertising free as possible. The only thing that I can't really do much about is advertising signs by the roadside, but other than that it isn't a problem.

Me too, ad blockers and all my media on Plex, etc. For me it's only when I watch live sport that I see adverts now, which I quite like, it's like a little window into what most other British people are seeing when they watch TV all week.

PLEX really makes me feel like I’m living in an awesome future, the one I imagined as a kid on the early internet where I can watch whatever I want whenever I want. Then I go to YouTube and am grossed out by all the ads and the sponsored portions in every video.

How do you navigate around sites that insist on you removing the ad blocker?

A. F12 and remove the div that says so or one of it's parent.

B. find another website that offer the same thing.

C. give up and temporarily disable adblock for that website until you do what you need to do and enable it again

what I find really annoying is website that tangle login to their ads, so when you have adblock software enabled it just silently fails.

the most recent example I encountered is https://www.edf.fr/ a government owned company, I couldn't get electricity for my new house unless I disabled ublock.

How many of those are there? I've never encountered more than maybe one or two. Even illegal premier league streaming sites don't mind adblockers.

I don't know if this is unrealistic, but a couple of months ago I had a thought

As soon as AR Glasses start being usable and affordable, I want to buy an open-source model and try to develop a RL-Adblocker. I guess it would need AI, because I still have to see traffic signs and other actually useful things.

If AR Glasses allow me to replace every billboard with a picture of a family member or someting else, I will be happy. Hopefully we will get to use open-source ones to play around with.

I'm sure I remember reading about a city (somewhere in south america I think) that banned all billboards, and it was like the city was reborn.

They're banned on some stretches of interstate (maybe where they cross federal land? Not sure) and damn, it's nice. Even relatively dull and shitty landscapes are so much better without that blight.

I learned today that in California at least, they have to be designated as a Scenic Highway [1]; then advertising is not allowed.

[1] https://dot.ca.gov/programs/design/lap-landscape-architectur...

Sounds like the São Paolo Clean City Law: https://newdream.org/blog/sao-paolo-ad-ban

That's the one! Such a good idea.

Curious to know, how did you manage to get to an advertising free life?

No TV, big sticker saying 'no print advertising' on my mailbox, adblocked and jsblocked to the hilt on all computers in the house (I see that as a sanity and a security bonus as well), no physical newspaper. It's as good as clean now, every now and then something slips through and then my first response usually is 'surely people can't be that stupid'.

It sounds like the steps are pretty simple. I live in the suburbs of a US city, and billboards are banned, so unless I go into the city proper (a few times a year) I hardly ever see advertisements.

1) move to the countryside or at least outside a major city, or a place where billboards are banned

2) Don’t own a TV

3) use uBlock Origin/Adblock on all your devices