The monetization of the web is reaching paperclip levels

As is now my editorial policy, comments I make in $ocial media that add up to more than a couple of sentences get reposted to the present decidedly noncommercial (anticommercial) venue. In that spirit, I offer a copy of this reply to youthdecay’s comment in Reddit’s /r/breadtube:

It’s true that everybody be monetizing, and it’s also true that much activity simply can’t be done on a non-monetized basis, and it’s also true that creators deserve to be paid. So whether I should have adblock anyway is a debatable ethical question. I don’t use ad blockers, but I do use a tracker blocker (Privacy Badger) and of course I get accused of using an ad blocker by those websites in the “ad blocking is stealing” camp. Apparently at least some parts of publishing (if not creatordom) feel entitled not just to advertising, but to highly targeted advertising, a goalpost move I refuse to go along with. As for indie creators monetizing, I’m really not economically successful enough to patreonize more than a very small number, but my attitude about it is pretty “more power to them,” in spite of my open source and anti-DRM stands, given that we still have to live under capitalism. In early 1990s Usenet, the words advertising and spam were used virtually interchangeably. In the late 1990s Web, it was right and proper to promote your online activities, but there was a level of aggressiveness at which such promotion was considered a “shameless plug.” It seems that starting with the 2008 recession, any hint of shame has gone out the window, the online economy resembles a carny show more than an economy in any other sense, and everything non-monetized (like blogging in the traditional sense) is utterly extinct, and everything else is monetized absolutely to the hilt. Call me old fashioned (as I am after all old) but when a YouTube channel has YT ads, sponsor ads, AND merch, about all I can say is “gotta love the hustle,” which I really do mean as a compliment, but I’d like to believe that breadtube, seeing hustle as at best a necessary evil, prefers a more lowkey approach to hustle.