YouTube has started giving me ads that remain as pop-ups that you need to manually dismiss even after you’ve skipped out of the ad, and I’m left to think two things:
- How do you get YouTube Vanced?
- Ernest Cline was right
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Ernest Cline is the author of Ready Player One (and its inferior sequel, Ready Player Two), and describes a world within the world, the Oasis, a virtual reality universe in itself. In the grim post-climate change world the story is set in, the only real escape from the grinding poverty of everyday life is a VR headset and a few minutes of time. The inventor was a generous soul, and he aimed to create a world that everyone could inhabit, but when he died, he decided that the best way to pick his successor was to ensure that only a total nerd could inherit the most valuable company on earth.1
Obviously, the other corporations realized that hiring a total nerd to find the way to the most valuable company on earth was a good idea.
But what do you do with the most valuable IP on the planet? Sell ads, obviously. While advertising already exists in the oasis, it’s unobtrusive, literal billboards, no pop-ups, nothing like that. The corpos have big plans if they can acquire the Oasis. Those big plans: pop-up ads that fill something like 45% of a user’s vision at all times.
They’re the bad guys.
Google, I noticed that you changed your slogan.
Footnotes
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He also decided to make sentient digital clones of everyone but not tell anyone. Ready Player Two was weird. Even aside from the gratuitous sex stuff, bro just blew up the story. The entire payoff of Ready Player One was that everyone was going to get closer to the real world, but the Ready Player Two decides that there isn’t actually any difference between them at all because we can feel the exact same thing using the power of manipulating the central nervous system. Ewwww ↩