I have always disliked ads. Not as a considered position, more a reflex, the way you flinch from a loud noise. None of that is new: the ads have run this way for decades, and the objection has been there the whole time. What's new is only that I'm finally writing it down, and putting a long-standing reflex into words forces it into an argument you can actually check. It holds up, and it doesn't stop at ads. Followed to the end it becomes a theory of rent (who charges it for sitting between you and what you want) and a sketch of the software that would refuse to.
You can watch the rent tighten
E-commerce operators have been describing their last few months on Google Ads as a quiet robbery. Conversion costs have exploded, and the standard explanation ("competition increased") is doing a lot of work.
What actually changed is the platform. Google has pushed Performance Max, broad match, and Smart Bidding hard while transparency and advertiser control fell away: you see less of your own account, search terms are increasingly hidden, and the algorithm decides almost everything. The model is now "add more budget, trust the automation," and that automation optimises for Google's revenue rather than the advertiser's profit.
The agencies best placed to call it out are the ones whose livelihood runs almost entirely through the platform, a textbook principal-agent problem, so they stay quiet and keep "optimising" while results slide. One veteran put the time-depth bluntly: advertiser returns have collapsed to a quarter of their pre-2008 level, and it has been one long squeeze since.
The way ads are sold leans on the same asymmetry. Every platform markets itself with best-case studies: the brand that multiplied its return, the store that scaled to seven figures on Smart Bidding. Nobody publishes one about the long tail underneath, the majority of accounts that spend steadily and get back roughly what they put in, or less.
The headline value is real but unrepresentative, and it keeps the long tail paying in the belief that it is one optimisation away from the success story. The platform's revenue is the winners' spend plus the losers' wishful thinking, and the losers are the larger pool.
I have always disliked ads, as a reflex more than a considered position, and the objection is as old as the ads. Put into words, the reflex becomes an argument you can check, and it does not stop at ads. Followed to the end, it is a theory of rent (the charge someone levies for sitting between you and what you want) and a sketch of the software that would refuse to pay it.
The two kinds of advertising
The useful distinction is not ads-good versus ads-bad. It is informative versus combative. Informative ads tell you a product exists, what it does, and where to buy it. They lower search costs, they are genuinely net-positive, and they are a small minority of spending.
Combative ads are the bulk: Coke vs Pepsi, McDonald's vs Burger King, every SaaS retargeting campaign that trails you across the web. They are a prisoner's dilemma. If both sides stopped, market shares would barely move and both would save billions. Neither can stop unilaterally, so the spending escalates.
The cost lands in product prices, and the platforms capture the rent (Google and Meta alone take roughly half of global digital ad spend). The winning advertiser's gain is temporary, erased the moment a competitor matches. The platform's gain is structural, and now automated, so it tightens on its own.
The deeper critique, from Scitovsky, Galbraith, and Tim Wu in The Attention Merchants, is worse than waste. Advertising manufactures dissatisfaction to drive consumption, so you pay to be made unhappy with what you own. Serious estimates put the majority of ad spend in the socially wasteful column even when it is privately rational for each spender, and consumers pay in money, attention, and a degraded information environment.
The real question is what funds the thing
Disliking ads is easy. The hard part is that ads answer a real question: what pays for the product? Attention turned out to be monetisable at near-zero marginal cost, so it scaled. Objecting honestly means saying what replaces it, and the alternatives stack in three layers.
Personal moves, on the consumption side:
- Direct payment. Pay for what you use heavily (search, email, news: Kagi, Fastmail/Proton, paid feeds), and stop being the product.
- Network blocking. Pi-hole, NextDNS, uBlock Origin remove you from the system without changing it.
- Commons stacks. Wikipedia, Signal, OSM, Linux, funded by donations and labour rather than a surveillance arms race.
Funding-model alternatives, on the production side:
- Subscriptions align incentives but fragment the commons behind paywalls.
- Patronage (Patreon, GitHub Sponsors) works for individuals, not infrastructure.
- Public and grant funding (NLnet NGI, NSF, the BBC licence fee) suits commons-shaped goods and produces durable infrastructure, though it's politically capturable.
- Foundations and endowments (Mozilla, Wikimedia, Signal) work given an initial capital injection.
- Open-core and platform co-ops round it out.
Structural shifts, on the policy layer:
- Surveillance-ad bans or contextual-only ads remove the worst externality without killing all advertising (the EU is partway there).
- Antitrust on the ad duopoly redistributes the rent.
- Public digital infrastructure is conceptually clean and politically distant.
- Data unions are compelling in theory, weak in practice.
No single alternative replaces ads at the same scale and accessibility. Their one genuine virtue is that a poor user and a rich user get the same product, with advertisers paying the bill. Subscriptions reintroduce access inequality, public funding needs political will, and patronage does not scale.
So the realistic stance is a portfolio: pay directly where you can, use commons where they exist, fund grant-backed projects, and back surveillance-ad regulation politically. You do not exit the system; you starve the parts that extract the most and feed the parts that do not.
The user has no app
The same asymmetry runs through software. It is far easier, and far more fundable, to build the business side than the user side. Providers have budgets, a clear return, and someone whose job is to buy software. Users are unorganised, do not pool demand, and cannot commission anything, so they adapt to whichever provider app wins.
Business software firms outnumber consumer ones, and B2B software dwarfs the consumer market in both size and growth. Software gets built for whoever holds the budget, which is rarely the person at the end of it. Apps that would work for you against every provider at once are mostly missing.
You can see it in energy, water, and waste: each provider ships its own app, and each insists you make an account inside it. Multiply that across every utility, bank, shop, and service and you reach the state most people are already in, somewhere around a hundred online accounts, every one of them its own:
- interface to learn,
- login and security surface to defend,
- payment and invoice system to reconcile,
- private copy of your data to leak.
Apps that never make you an account are not exempt. A game with no provider login still authenticates to Apple's Game Center, to Google Play Games and its billing, or through a "sign in with Apple" or "sign in with Google" button. Identity and payment move up a level to the platform, which owns the sign-in graph and takes fifteen to thirty percent of anything sold through it. It is the same rent, one layer down.
One app that belongs to the user
The fix is an inversion: one app that belongs to the user. You log into your own app, and every provider shows up inside it over a shared API or protocol, so there are no provider apps to install. Your identity, payment details, and history stay with you and are shared per interaction, not deposited into a hundred separate databases.
Identity then lives in client infrastructure rather than provider or platform infrastructure, which answers the per-provider account and the platform sign-in in one move. It removes the duplicated accounts, the per-app security surface, and the ads wedged into each provider's screen to monetise the attention it captured by making you install it.
The shape that resists rent
Nobody with a budget is asking for this app, and it is harder to build than another provider app, which is why it does not exist yet. The parts are not exotic, though. Assembled, they form four layers, each closing off a way the rent gets in.
- Identity and reputation, portable and signed. You own your identity; reviews, history, and credentials are signed objects attached to it, not rows in a provider's database or a sign-in the platform owns. You carry them from one app to the next, and that portability is what kills the moat.
- Discovery, federated and open. Providers and listings live on a federated network (ActivityPub, Nostr, Matrix, take your pick), readable by many clients, so no single vendor controls access. You set the ranking, not paid placement: there is no slot to sell, so the ad model has nowhere to attach.
- Coordination, out of band. Once you and a provider connect, communication and payment go direct, with no intermediary taking a commission. Escrow, when it's needed, is an opt-in flat-fee service, never a percentage.
- Sustainability without advertiser money. Member fees, grants for the protocol and reference client, and partners who benefit from the arrangement without governing it (insurers, for one, like vetted counterparties). No advertiser money, ever.
One caveat decides whether this works or just relocates the problem. The client infrastructure cannot be a single app on a single host, or whoever runs it becomes the next Google. It has to be distributed and federated: you run your own identity, or pick a host you trust, or several, and move whenever you want, as you already can with email, a Mastodon account, or a Solid pod.
Providers integrate once, against the protocol rather than your particular host, so integration keeps working wherever your identity lives and however often it moves. Portability of your data is necessary but not sufficient; you also need portability of where that data is hosted.
None of this is invented from scratch. Mastodon and email show federation working at scale. Signal shows sovereign, foundation-funded infrastructure outside any one company's reach. Solid and the personal-data-store movement have spent years trying to give people a pod of their own. What is missing is someone assembling them into the app the user actually logs into.
Who pays for the refusal
The rent is not only an advertising problem. Ad platforms extract it from attention, gig platforms from labour, and provider apps from lock-in, an account at a time. The same four layers answer each of them, and the same problems stand in the way. I won't pretend otherwise:
- Cold start. A user-centric app launches with fewer providers wired in than the incumbents have, and there's no shortcut but doing the integration work one provider at a time.
- Provider resistance. Owning the customer is valuable, and some providers will fight a protocol that frees the relationship. The early adopters are the ones who gain from being found, not from locking you in.
- Trust without a gatekeeper. No central moderator means vetting moves to signed credentials and reputation you can verify yourself.
- UX. Open and federated interfaces are reliably worse, which means the reference client matters more than the elegance of the protocol.
This is the same shape as the sovereign infrastructure I keep gravitating toward: self-hosted, paid or grant-funded, no telemetry. It is also the kind of thing that is hardest to fund. The design refuses the rent that normally pays for software, so there is no easy revenue stream and no investor upside to chase.
It lives or dies on grants, member fees, and donated labour, which are scarcer and far more competitive than ad money will ever be. Who pays for software whose whole point is that nobody gets to charge rent on it?
Disagree, or have a case of your own? Find me on X.
Sources
- Tibor Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy (1976): consumption driven by manufactured dissatisfaction rather than met preference.
- John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958): the dependence effect, advertising creating the wants it then satisfies.
- Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants (2016): the long history of monetising attention and the rent the platforms collect on it.
- The companion piece: Seeing Like a Dashboard.