Advertising is a natural resource extraction industry,
like a fishery. Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention.
We are the fish and we are not consulted.
Two problems result from this. The solution to both requires legal
recognition of the property rights of human beings over our attention.
First, advertising imposes costs on individuals without permission or
compensation. It extracts our precious attention and emits toxic
by-products, such as the sale of our personal information to dodgy third
parties.
Second, you may have noticed that the world's fisheries are not in
great shape. They are a standard example for explaining the theoretical
concept of a tragedy of the commons, where rational maximising behaviour...