The other day I mentioned how some files on my computer had been judiciously modified in such a way that now a certain percentage of online advertising banners became invisible. At first glance, this seems to be a good thing. But it’s also disconcerting, because in place of the advertisements is now a blank space. And it just feels like something’s missing. The balance of the pages gets thrown off in a very subtle way. Maybe it’s just the graphic designer in me speaking. In one way, it’s almost like I would prefer to see the ads as part of the visual landscape, than to have them filtered out. To see them and ignore them is almost easier than to not see them, and to try and overlook their conspicuous absence. But maybe I just need to get more accustomed to it…

Similarly, I also find it disturbing when people switch off the sound on tv during commercials. It’s like I instantly get thrown out into the cold silence. I’m much more comfortable if the sound is just lowered a little bit, but still blaring warmly in the background. Same thing with the increasingly aggresive spam filters in my email, also. I haven’t received a single piece of spam at my gmail addres (yet), because only humans possess it, and so far no evil harvesting programs. But at my Hotmail addresses, I regularly receive all kinds of spam. Most of it gets automatically shunted off to a “Junk Email Folder” somewhere. Of course, the problem is that Hotmail is just operating off an algorithm, a formula, to determine what is and isn’t spam. And sometimes things which I truly want end up in this little piece of electronic wasteland.

I wonder what it’s like to have Tivo, or one of those digital tv things that filters out commercials. It must be great on one level, but weird on another. Since, subconsciously about a third of any television program’s message inadvertently ends up being melded together with the advertising message. One provides a context with which to understand the other. By separating them, it’s almost like you’re crippling an essential element to its full and complete contextual understanding. I recognize that some people won’t agree with that analysis, but I think that advertising is an important source of cultural discourse for us right now, like it or not. Like all the other ideas and stories which we are awash in, it helps us understand and communicate with one another and with ourselves.

I wonder how long it will be before somebody invents a contraption which you can hook your mind up to which will automatically filter out spam/advertising in any and all formats. Like you could set it up so that you never receive any messages from the Coca-Cola corporation. Anytime anyone says “Coke,” all you’ll hear is “Carbonated Beverage.” Anytime you see a coke bottle or logo, all you’ll see is a black and white lable bearing the words, “[Content Edited]” (or one of those blurry patches, like they put over logos on MTV videos). Or, if you were to drink a Coke, all you would taste is water, or maybe urine or something.

I think a bidding war of sorts would also take place, which co-opted the technology away from personal use. Say, if you were a subscriber to a system that Coke freely put out, then you would never again hear any advertising relating to PepsiCo or any of it’s subsidiaries. You would drive by a Taco Bell (owned by Pepsi, I believe) with friends, and all you’d see was a kind of blurry burned out parking lot with weeds growing over it. Actually, it would necessitate eventually that you only associated with people who shared your brand loyalties, because otherwise your consensus reality would be much more difficult to maintain. I wonder too if, in effect, people who subscribed to a competing system would be wholly erased from your sensory world, in order to maintain your illusion.

Of course, once you developed that kind of contraption to filter out advertising, then you could presumably filter out any content subset which you wanted to. Like you could filter out any particular ideology which you didn’t subscribe to. Then you would never again be bothered by Christians, or Satanists, or Feminists, or Buttfuckers, or Republicans, because none of their “advertising content” would ever even reach your sensory inputs. It would all be neutralized and your perceptions of reality would be completely whitewashed so that nothing ever challenged or upset you again.

It’s actually sort of a tantalizing idea, and I think it would be the single-most popular invention in the history of humankind, and the biggest moneymaker of all time. Plus it would almost certainly destroy civilization and culture as we know it, as we all individually walled ourselves in and tweaked our settings to tune out every single thing that might upset us. Or maybe we would just become really really fucking happy. But I doubt that severely, of course.

Honestly, I think the next closest thing that we have to this hypothetical contraption is religion (& ideology in general). Which, in and of itself has all the effects described above:

1. huge moneymaker
2. most popular invention ever
3. helps people maintain their illusions
4. helps people block out things they don’t like
5. has the potential to destroy and isolate
6. has the potential to make people really really happy

Is religion/ideology the ultimate spam-filter? By subscribing to one “company’s system” and agreeing to their “terms of service,” are we basically saying “I agree to let you decide what messages reach me and what messages do not?” This relates very much to the other post I wrote about the role of evil in a religious story-system.

To rephrase that in the language of this essay, I’d have to say that “Evil” occupies the same position as the “Junk Email Box” in my Hotmail accounts. Any messages which meet the criteria of a specific formula are automatically filtered into a section which I agree is not worthy of my full consideration, and which will be automatically deleted if not claimed (according to the terms of service). Either they do not come from a “trusted source” or they contain “inappropriate language” or something like that.