Kill the Ads, Save the Planet

You went down the internet privacy rabbit hole. You've got uBlock, you installed uMatrix, you have Privacy Badger, which, though redundant, pushes you further into the safe side. You follow Rob Braxman and you moved from YouTube to Odysee.

You're blocking canvas fingerprinting, you're switching your useragent every 5 minutes, you block all third-party cookies and auto-delete all the other ones every hour, and you've spent 3 days configuring Firefox to disable all the HTML APIs that can be used to track you. You're sending the Do Not Track header; though you know it's useless for 99% of the cases; that 1% gives you hope for privacy.

No matter how loud and how often you proclaim your disdain for the lidless eye of the advertising Dark Lord, the one ring of Google analytics won't leave you alone. They know more about you, more than your parents, and possibly more than you yourself. Like Frodo Baggins you set out on a quest to put “don't be evil” back to whence it came, but to no avail. The road is long arduous, and your fellowship is made up of two web browsers, one of which is on the Dark Lord's payroll, has been for over a decade.

Is all hope lost? Are you permanently naked, all your data available for the highest bidder to do with as they please till the end of time?

Cryptocurrencies are getting a lot of bad reputation lately. The press talks about it as if it were the single worst thing for the environment. It doesn't even come close.

Think back to what the supposed unsustainable crypto mining claims were: that most crypto was mined in China, using dirty energy. "They're using inefficient sillicon based computers for doing what amounts to useless number crunching that heats up the Earth and consumes often irreplaceable resources to move people's money around". On top of that, it was one of the contributing factors to computer equipment shortages. And then come the air conditioning costs, the difficult maintenance! It would seem that crypto is obviously bad.

Of course, one would think that visa uses a lot less energy, based on the flat amount of energy. This is far from the truth. In fact, the conservative estimates for how much energy it takes to operate the Visa system, Bitcoin, the least efficient of all the coins out there is three times more efficient. The reason being that you have a network of air-conditioned buildings operated by humans, with lots of advertising overhead, and a bunch of machines running all the time. It turns out that that, is enough to make Bitcoin and other Proof of Work coins, that are essentially the worst case scenario for energy-efficient crypto, are still better than banks. Elon Musk should stop accepting Visa payments! Oh and don't get me started on cash. If you're paying with pennies, their metal is worth more than their denomination.

Certainly when it comes to saving energy, one must mandate that computers meet a certain level of idle power draw… as opposed to mandating that computers be turned properly off, which would actually solve the issue. You see, when you put your computer into standby it uses power. A lot of power, in fact. Computers aren't the only things that do; almost everything that isn't turned on via a physical switch is constantly drawing what's called “vampire currents”. Yes even your USB charger, and yes, even when it isn't charging anything. And if most of what it's actually doing is waiting to be woken up, shouldn't we make sure that it uses as little as possible?

California thinks that way. Oh yeah, and forget about actually mandating optimised games and software, because… you know…

a) it's ridiculous,

b) it's as ridiculous as demanding optimised hardware,

c) it would actually solve the problem.

Ignore the fact that there's no way to resolder a perfectly working GPU, that has some bad memory. All the energy used to produce the mask, cut the wafer, test the chips and ship the new card to you all the way from across the world has to be re-done, because the consumer has no right to buy a small memory chip and fix it themselves. This is a problem, because it takes a lot of energy to produce every chip.

This hypocrisy isn't all-permeating. The right to repair is happening. OpenHardware standards are present to ensure that you have the option to repair a device instead of throwing it away. Yet somehow nobody talks about how advertising is eating almost double the energy of everything we've talked about so far.

Let's consider a thought experiment. How much real estate on a page is dedicated to the content, versus the adverts? How much, percentage wise, do YouTube ads occupy in terms of playback duration? How much time and effort goes into perfectly cracking the code of your brain and forcefully exposing it to brands? How much time and money is used to pay professionals to advertise on Facebook and Reddit? I'd wager that 5% (at least) of total computational processing power is wasted at making you buy stuff that you didn't need.

So how did I get that estimate? The average duration of a mid-roll ad on Youtube is around five seconds. Not everyone closes the ad immediately, and some use an AdBlocker, so let's assume that the two demographics average out. An average video on Youtube has around 1 mid-roll ad per 8 minutes of content, plus a pre-roll. Some creators, however, prefer to record the ad themselves, and insert it as part of the content. While you're free to skip it, and there are extensions that allow you to do just that, not many people use those extensions. So suppose a 5 minute video has an additional 20 seconds of sponsor ads. By that estimation at least 5% of the content is advertiser related, which ignores the fact that you may also be presented with an advert on the page.

Google is already consuming over 12 terawatts of energy, and it doubles every couple years. Maybe instead of enforcing low power computers, let's look for energy savings there? Studies suggest that content blockers could save billions of dollars a year, and that's just counting the energy spent on displaying the ads. Advertisements also generate millions of tons of CO2. A neat side effect is that by reducing the attention wasted on creating, managing, and watching ads, we also reduce the amount of pointless plastic crap being manufactured and purchased, which has the potential to have the biggest impact on overall eco-friendliness.

Finding data on global advertising expenditure is hard; my suspicion is, because the number I've presented is a gross underestimate, and the change in the economy of advertising will negatively impact several wealthy people. They're not good or bad because of it, everyone has things they're willing to give up for the greater good, and things that they're not. As a reader you shouldn't antagonie big tech, it's counter-productive. Instead, we should look for a compromise, one that puts the resources available to big tech, to good use.

The issue isn't as clear cut as "we need to remove advertising completely". Digital advertising and marketing is something that we engage with. Yes, even I, who has a dedicated raspberry pi as an adblocker. Think to when you need to find a good GPU. If you knew what GPUs were available at this time, at what price, the source of that information is advertising. The issue here isn't that we need to stop advertising altogether, but that the current scale and magnitude of forced online ads is unsustainable. Ad-Blockers are so pervasive that websites invest into anti-ad-blockers, which are countered by even more sophisticated ad-blocking strategies. Gone are the days when you could use a dumb solution of putting all known advertisers in /etc/hosts, and enjoy peace and quiet. The resources invested into blocked ads are lost twice. We need to stop that!

Unfortunately, things like Brave attention tokens, have one crucial flaw. Advertising creates next to no value when it is unsolicited, biased and only there to make you buy stuff that you don't need, rather than aid in the discovery of what you might need. It, however, creates immense value for the people whose products are advertised. A cryptographic attention token cannot be exchanged for actual attention directed at the actual product, and so Samsung will never invest into one. It produces a set amount of smartphones every year. Some people will upgrade regardless of whether or not the new model is better (IMHO all Samsung phone models after 2015 were objectively worse every year), or whether or not they actually need one (because of breakage), but because of the ingrained, pervasive desire to have the newest shiniest thing.

Advertising, no matter what other greybeards tell you, works. But it's not the kind that wastes your energy, but the implicit one. The "someone has a new iPhone so I should also get one" kind of advertising. And best of all, it costs you absolutely nothing as a company. If you're a consumer, do the right thing. If something interests you, look it up, do some research, pick the best product. Annoyed at ads? Want for them to stop? Well, whenever someone offers you a service, like e.g. Squarespace, look up comparisons and look at their competitors. Often you'll find that the least advertised option is the best. If you're a company… you won't listen to what I'd have to say. But if you did, then please focus on making your product better. The current economic model of favouring shallow shininess is unsustainable. At some point, the threat of global warming will necessitate sweeping changes, and no amount of money you earn now is worth the suffering of subsequent generations.

The amount of money spent on advertising is so immense, that it would have been enough to end world hunger twice over. Perhaps, if we're being hard on an emerging technology that promises safe and easy exchange of value, we should be equally hard on what burns time, money and energy and serves to annoy you.

Photo by Chris Abney on Unsplash)