It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: The internet was always supposed to be a different thing from what we have now. Advertising came along and killed the internet’s potential, helped along by the companies that hold most folks’ experience in the palms of their hands. Not because it was better, in any way. Instead, it was done because it was more convenient for the people making money out of your web searches, doomscrolls, and other online activity.
Apps — you know what apps are — were sold to the world as a more convenient way to get the thing you want from a given source. In reality, apps have one major purpose. They keep you away from the real internet, which barely exists anymore. Okay, two major purposes — the rise of the app also allows for advertising that you cannot escape.
Advertising prison
Take a moment and think about it — Facebook has, over its history, hunted for ways to make more and more money from you. One of those ways was aggregating the interactions and data that users volunteered and selling them to advertisers. But that information isn’t very useful unless advertisers’ products and services are seen by people. There’s long been a running battle between users on web browsers and online advertisers, with everyone from Google to Meta to… actually, pick your monolithic company, struggling against add-ons that remove advertising from sight.
Move everything over to an app, though, and you remove that battleground from the field. Why do you think Reddit badgers you to view whichever post answered your obscure question in the app? It’s not because it’s better. It’s because you’re locked into the advertising services the platform offers. You become a locked-down pair of eyes that can be marketed to.
Now, not every app will do that to its users, but any company looking to increase its income will eventually look in that direction. WhatsApp is the latest to consider advertising on its platform, an action that Meta a) said it would never take and b) backed away from in 2020 when everyone reminded them of this inconvenient fact. Apparently, several years’ distance is enough to make the world collectively forget that this happened. The result? WhatsApp’s ad ambitions are back and, it seems, locked in for rollout.
Meta’s formula for WhatsApp has been refined to cause as little offence as possible, but when the door’s open, who’s to say what will come through later?
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This switch to more centralised control over information has been going on for years. Decades, even. The endgame for all of it is more control over the user. Their habits, their spending, their loyalty to a specific platform — all of it is designed to siphon as much money into one particular place. Cloud-based services? Those are certainly easier to deploy, but they’re also far, far harder to customise. If you need something like that, you can pay for it. And, if the company really sucks, they can use said service to advertise its other offerings to you.
It’s why Microsoft’s Xbox division is pushing particularly hard towards its cloud-based gaming offering. If your games stream over an internet connection to hardware that won’t run them natively, then you rely on Microsoft entirely for your gaming hobby. That turns you into a monthly revenue stream. And there’s almost no way for you to ‘steal’ this access from somewhere else. It’s possible to hack a console. Doing the same for a game-streaming service is far harder to pull off.
And when you’re in this ecosystem, you’re also a captive audience for… You guessed it, advertising. Higher tiers that you don’t pay for yet, upcoming games, unskippable promos, all of it is on the table. Or screen, as it happens. Sign up for a Microsoft 365 subscription, and you’re constantly badgered to pay for more things. Heck, install Windows 11, and you’ll still be hammered with nag screens all over the place.
What can you do?
Weirdly, the solution to a future that consists of incessant advertising bombardment was figured out by a fictional supercomputer in 1983. 80s film WarGames features a computer called WOPR that almost ends the world until it’s asked to determine the odds of success for something else — a game of Noughts and Crosses. It concludes that “the only winning move is not to play.”
If you’d like to avoid a future that involves advertising stuffed into every aspect of your life, you’ll have to start doing things the hard way. Avoid the algorithms. Cancel convenience when it becomes inconvenient. Do things the hard way. That’s going to be harder than ever now that companies have figured out a way to kill off internet searches — it’s called AI, and most of it lives inside an app.
Since OpenAI and its competitors are speedrunning the tech cycle, before the product even works the way it’s supposed to, they’re all already considering (or implementing) ads. And, unlike a Google search in a web browser with an ad blocker, there’s no escaping these. Not if you intend to use the lowest-effort approach to the information you want, at any rate.
