Arg! Advertisements!

I’m researching for my music appreciation classes, mainly the high school class. Most of the information I have so far is on Youtube. My Youtube access is carefully curbed: I pay to get rid of advertisements, all advertisements, and any that Youtube Premium doesn’t get rid of, the adblocker in my browser rejects. One of the educational Youtubers has a podcast episode about vaudeville. I want to include information on vaudeville in my class, but when I started the podcast, the first whole minute was straight advertisements. Halfway through the podcast, another group of ads played. The volume of the ads was louder than the volume of the podcasters’ voices. It made me want to grind my teeth. These ads talked about things I might consider buying, not inappropriate, not obnoxiously long for advertisements. I could hardly wait for the ads to end.

In this society I need to produce something people will pay for. Making my own clothes and growing my own food is only partly doable; I can’t be totally self-sufficient even if I wanted to do everything myself. Which I don’t.

I’m writing a blog, and plan to gather my writing into a book. I will write anyway, whether someone pays me for it or not. In fact, I write more, knowing that I’m not beholden to anyone for what I’m writing about, when, or how. Having said that, I’m paying Squarespace to host my blog online. I’m paying for the domain name. The associated email comes from Google, who theoretically provides it free, but in practice tracks literally everything that goes through the email account. They slice and dice my information and then sell it to advertisers. I’m also posting on Facebook; again, free account but tracking literally all the traffic they can get to, and selling the information. There are advertisements on Facebook that I can’t get rid of. Additionally there’s an add-on in my browser to “contain” Facebook so it doesn’t follow me everywhere I go online.

I’m not accessing spicy websites, nor am I leaving bank information about, but neither am I going incognito. Somehow these “free” services are making the companies wealthy. That’s not mentioning Amazon, who tracks all my purchases through their website, the regional grocery store that tracks my purchases using their membership sales card, and the restaurant that rewards me on my birthday. They know my birthday from their customer card.

I hate advertisements! I don’t want to earn money by advertising anything I haven’t used myself. But then, I don’t want free stuff in exchange for my writing about products, because it will influence what I say about the products and my feelings. You, my reader, would then be subject to not entirely honest statements. I want to write genuine thoughts. I understand the epithet, Sell Out. But I can’t eat a computer keyboard. It won’t keep me warm in winter. It won’t protect me from rain.