Comment by windsurfer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by windsurfer | Hacker News Reader

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I'm imagining a remix of the featured video to look something like this:

* Guy wakes up, puts on glasses. They immediately tell him what brand of breakfast he should be eating today.

* When he looks at the window to see the weather, buildings and places are censored, and advertisements are replaced with google ads, yet he doesn't care

* During the text message with his friend, after he says "Strand books", Google suggests Chapters or Noble or another "featured" store, and he has to opt out of the text replacement.

* When the Subway is out, advertisements for cab companies come up on his "screen". He must opt out of them to get the walking route. Google begins caching the advertisements he will be seeing during the rout superimposed on the scenery.

* The board of posters he steps up to is blurred out and is instead a different, large "pop" label, not some indie band.

* In the book store, Google quotes lower prices for each book at "Google Books" and offers free shipping.

* The picture he takes at the end has a superimposed image of "Sponsored by Google!"

* It ends with the sunset having a superimposed text advertisement for vacations.

This is a very interesting interpretation of that video. It has such a dystopian flavor. Yes, it solves problems for you, but at the expense of a full thought process.

You already live that life on the Internet. Why is it so hard to imagine it following you into the real world?

Maybe something like this:

https://vimeo.com/8569187

A less cynical version:

https://vimeo.com/14294054

This is why government regulation can be healthy. Ideally, ad replacement like what you described would be illegal. In a purely capitalist world it would be encouraged.

Apologies for getting political. But you paint an all-too-possible picture that's worryingly dystopic.

>"Ideally, ad replacement like what you described would be illegal"

Why is that? No one's forcing anyone to wear these glasses.

Do you think Adblock plugins should be illegal? If not, should they be illegal if they display a different ad instead? What if they remove all ads, but put a banner at the bottom of each page?

I personally didn't think that any of the situations I described should be illegal, but I suppose it really says something about our society when I can picture people being okay with corporations knowing everything about them.

I personally wish that outdoor ads visible from public places were illegal like they are in São Paulo. Outdoor advertising is visual pollution that has been placed over the World so slowly that most people don't realize the problem because they don't have a point of reference to compare to and be outraged.

Wrong. In a purely capitalist world, you can choose to avoid the product or use a competing product, or pay more for a premium service without ads.

Thinking that government regulation can be healthy is a horribly naive and extremely dangerous idea.

> Thinking that government regulation can be healthy is a horribly naive and extremely dangerous idea.

I assume you don't mean for this to apply to others areas, like food and drug inspection, vehicle safety standards, etc.

I would definitely prefer if the government had nothing to do with any kind of safety standards, including regulation of food, drugs, and vehicles.

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