The thing about human actions and taboos is that they're contextual, so, sometimes you keep doing the same thing, but _what it means to everybody else_ changes out from under you. We mostly hear about this from comedians who are annoyed they can't squint their eyes and do an "Asian impression" without being cancelled (read: handed a lucrative Netflix special) anymore. But sometimes it works the other direction, and an action looks contextually nobler with the passage of time.

Having Jewish friends in 1920s Germany: not really controversial, except with your racist Uncle.[^1] Having Jewish friends in 1930s Germany: a principled political statement against the rise of nationalism all around you. It's not like you changed! It's just that the not-changing becomes a visible and intentional choice against the pressure to, as a society, change for the worse.

It isn't always as big as all that. In fact, I got started thinking about this concept because I realized there were some things I was doing that have, over time, come to feel like small activism, that I wouldn't have even considered activism at all a few years ago, and that was interesting to me. The only thing relevant to readers of this website, though, is probably my stance on advertising - particularly online advertising.

Most of my life, I've accepted advertising as a necessary annoyance in society, a tax we pay in order to get monetarily free services. I have a GMail account that I don't pay for, which couldn't exist without a fleet of expensive servers inside an expensive data center and administered by expensive and highly-qualified engineers. None of these lights stay on without cash. And you're telling me I can have this for free, as long as I put up with small ads in the web interface? Wowee! What a country! What a clever solution that lets us all live better lives.[^2]

Still, none of the personal websites I've ever run (including this one) have had ads. I wasn't trying to make money off of them, there was no business model. I like to publish things for free. I've gotten a lot of free help from the internet in my life, and it's nice to give back, and I can afford to because I have a day job. I've never come at that decision from a place of "okay, I'm going to make a brave! controversial! choice!" It was always more, this is my place that I control, it's going to be whatever I want, and I think ads are kinda icky, so I won't use them. I was doing things I considered small activism, like donating to the EFF and participating in the FFTF blackouts against SOPA and PIPA, but I wouldn't have even considered "host a website without ads" as a candidate for that list.

And yet, the world turns. Advertech has, in that time, been a facilitating player in a lot of the turns for the worse. If you want to understand the incentives and implementation of Surveillance Capitalism (the escape hatch which totalitarian governments use to subcontract out invasions of privacy that would be illegal or financially impractical to do in-house), you'll find online advertising under every slimy rock. It turns out that having a publicly acceptable industry with a "legitimate" business interest in creating comprehensive dossiers of every private citizen in the world, to the point of subverting privacy technologies (see fingerprinting, Manifest V3), and that industry having ambitions of scale that require staying on good terms with governments, is _a match made in Hades._

Of course, it's not just that. Advertising is hostile to humanity across multiple axes. Why is short-form video content being pushed by so many platforms? Because it's easier to sneak an ad into a slot where you expect real content. Because you're more suggestible when you're absorbing a firehose of shallow media. Because it's addictive and flexible, so people will voluntarily spend the 20 second gaps in their schedules On The Platform, where the ads are. A mom-and-pop website with a tutorial on how to clean your garbage disposal will _never_ have an incentive or ambition to rewire your brain such that you spend all your short-form attention there (and allocate more of your attention to short-form). But YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels are all obligated by the stock market to treat your neurology as a natural resource up for the taking. They worry about competing with each _other_ for claim of these virgin lands. They don't take seriously for a second the idea that your mind might have an owner already.

On yet another front, even devotees of the "AI Revolution"[^3] will tell you openly that they see it as a bubble, but one that will leave behind some real progress after the hype evaporates. I'm not sold on that "real progress" amounting to much. One of the few industries that _will_ gain some lasting benefit from our all-in investments into LLMs will be the spam industry. They used to have to pick between paying humans to write spam, or using lower-quality automations. Now human-quality spam is cheap to automate. The AI industry is operating at losses that defy comprehension right now, and spam is one of the few AI business models that will probably remain profitable when the investors backing OpenAI, Anthropic et al. finally start demanding ROI. Is that a world you're proud to build? Enthusiastic to have to live in?

And finally, we are exposed to so much advertising at this point, and it's only getting worse faster because the per-ad value is dropping. We don't even realize how many ads we see every day because we're tuning them out so aggressively, but it's a mental fatigue tax nearly everywhere you could care to point your eyeballs. It adds up, and for most of those ads, you can't opt out. This fatigue, itself, is one of the things that makes you more suggestible and therefore more profitable. They don't mind making you numb and tired like that, that's the system working as intended! That's part of the crafting of an extraction-optimized populace, baby!

(Wait, I forgot to mention how much ads slow down the experience of the internet and waste your bandwidth, because the people in the ad industry literally don't care about you. When I was on Tumblr it was a pretty regular experience for the app to slow down to the point of crashing when certain unoptimized ads would show up in my feed. Is it too late to talk about that?)

Well at least give me the chance for an addendum about security. We've been laughing grimly for years at SourceForge-style "DOWNLOAD HERE" ads meant blatantly to trick people into clicking on malware portals. You don't have to be a grandma figuring out her first smartphone to fall for these. Cynical and predatory behavior is the norm, the job, the purified essence of online advertising. I don't like the trend of proprietary hardware vendors locking down their machines from boot, but considering the environment we live in - where we've just accepted that advertisers will sometimes try to rootkit our devices with zero-day vulnerabilities, and advertisers get to be on every website without a collective and consistent "kill it with fire" reaction from the public - I get where the lockdown solutions are coming from.

I didn't come to all these opinions abruptly. I radicalized slowly under low heat for 10-15 years until fork-tender. It's just one of those things where it's hard to pay attention to the world _and_ hang onto old worldviews indefinitely.

So, without really changing any of my personal policies about it, I've come to see my hosting expenses in the same category as the five bucks I toss over to the ACLU every month. It's a drop in the bucket, but it's a drop in the _right_ bucket. My participation in the world I _want_ to live in, as an alternative to the world that hostile and wealthy interests want me to live in. A small way I can make it easier for other people to live in the better world, so it can someday be the normal world. And why shouldn't I, when it's a negligible imposition to me, even on my lean months? I'm still not a hero for it, it's still small activism, but it _is_ activism, and at a scale I can easily sustain.

With that in mind, I'm now committed to keeping ads off my websites forever, and since the site doesn't pay for itself, I have to make some corresponding choices about how I host it. If the traffic gets intense because I "went viral" about something for a week, I don't want to scale to 1000 cloud instances to service all those requests and then pay a huge AWS bill that month. It's received wisdom in my community that even your personal website should prioritize serving every request, even under massive load, and I think that's just a newer version of admins treating host uptime as a point of pride (turns out, old kernels are insecure kernels. Who knew!). You should examine your priorities. One size doesn't fit all. For my purposes, I would rather apply backpressure under load, drop requests with a tasteful 502 page, and recover quickly, all with my costs capped to a reliable maximum. If someone cares what I have to say while I'm being DDOS'd, they always have the option to refresh the page later after the rush has died down. This page was served to you off a hand-me-down black laptop with League of Legends stickers on it. The only expenses were DNS registry, a CloudFlare tunnel, and a negligible electric bill. That will probably not change for a very long time.

> (That being said, even the business website world is rediscovering the value of backpressure, after temporarily forgetting it in the early decadent days of cloud enthusiasm. It's actually vital for anyone doing microservices behind the scenes, and just ask any competent Go developer [why unbounded channels are intentionally not supported by the language](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41906146/why-go-channels-limit-the-buffer-size). Sometimes staying online means making reasonable choices about when to say no to people!)

I think it's a really good thing that we're finding alternative paths of funding cool services, too. I've been moving from Github to Sourcehut, and while it was initially a little uncomfortable to put in my card info and pay a monthly fee to publish software I was developing for free, it gives me a lot of peace of mind about how I'll be treated - _not_ like someone paid for my dinner and expects some compensation at the end of the date. It's not a new model, but it's a traditional model that's seeing renewed interest in the same way that physical media is. We're also seeing Ko-Fi and Patreon and such become more viable for sustained creative presence online, which allows creators to get paid _and_ the resulting work to be public. There are grants and programs being publicly funded (sometimes by taxes, sometimes by donations) that help keep the lights on for digital public works projects like OpenSSL and GNOME. Not everyone can go ad-free the way I do, but if there's many ways to choose from, an ad-free internet is possible.

To that end, I'm going to say one last controversial thing, and I sympathize with anyone who feels upset about it. I think using ad-blocking technologies is a kind of small activism that you can do without any expense to yourself, and you should use it, even if there are small website admins who are currently dependent on ad revenue. I want those websites to exist. I want them to find alternative ways to finance it, because advertech is just that big a threat to the public good. And I think the most reliable way to make this happen, this world without online advertising, is for ads to be so unprofitable that people _have_ to find other funding options less implicated in the project of Surveillance Capitalism. I'm not afraid to be part of that pressure in the right direction, even if it makes me look like a bad guy to a certain percentage of well-intentioned web admins.

Fingers crossed that I end up doing more activism before it was cool.

[^1]: Why does every place and era seem to have The Racist Uncle as an archetypal constant? Where there's humans, you know there's an uncle in the family with _opinions_ about _those people._

[^2]:  Of course now, years later, I find myself making plans to de-Google my life, because I've gotten tired of playing cat and mouse with my settings. It's the same feeling that drove me off Facebook. How many times should I need to turn off AI features in a service? At most once, forever. If you make this a war of attrition you will be excised from my life like the tumor you are.

[^3]: A term I despise, because it squats the linguistic space of a much more deserving movement: rights for artificial sentience. I have a longer article about this in my drafts, which I need to polish and publish sometime.