You shouldn’t let consumers off the hook entirely. Every time some idiot buys new mop they saw on TikTok or a Dubai chocolate bar they are pumping money into the system and reinforcing the idea that spying on us and clogging our space with advertising is a viable business.
IMO ad blocking is not only a quality of life improvement, it’s a moral imperative.
In a way it’s fair to say that every moment changes every moment that happens after. The entire global economy is still reeling from Reaganomics ffs.
I lived through all these. 2001 and 2008 were horrible, but sort of felt like a normal kind of horrible. Recessions and terrorism were things I’d seen before. It was only the scale that made those anomalous.
From my (American) perspective 2016 was when shit started getting very weird. We were relatively stable, relatively prosperous, foreign wars were tapering off… And half the country decided that a game show host was her best bet going forward.
Then it started snowballing… Bill Cosby’s a rapist, there’s a global pandemic, Kanye put out a pro-Hitler song, Pete Davidson is a sex symbol that no starlet in Hollywood can resist, The secretary of health had his brain eaten by worms, everything you own or use became a subscription service, The fear Factor guy became a political king maker, The first lady has a crypto scam that everyone’s kind of okay with, we created AI but it’s only good for spam and rule 34 tweets, we decided political corruption isn’t a crime if you brag about it, America’s war machine is being turned on its cities… Oh and the US is building full on concentration camps.
It’s a very strange time even compared to occupy, The tea party, or Bush riding out 9/11 Reading a children’s book in an elementary school.
It’s part of what I find so frustrating with the American discourse on drugs. We talk about the drug trade in the United States as if innocent victims in America are being poisoned against their will by foreign bad actors.
In reality American consumers have pumped so much drug money into their neighboring countries that the cartels are a threat their governments.
The cartels and the dealers are very bad guys, but the consumer’s hands are not clean.