Advertisements;
Or, The Modern Crime and Punishment
I hate advertisements. Not a little bit, not just enough, I hate them with every fibre of my being. From the glossy billboards that line our once-beautiful tree-lines and meadows, to the inescapable purgatories that echo forcefully from our headphones, advertisements have become the plague that keeps on giving. But to the degree that their existence is a punishment against our mortal souls, so too do they represent our infernal recompense for the sins we have committed; namely – the sin of free content.
“The best things in life are free,” comes to a grinding halt as soon as we realize there are plenty of ‘un-best’ things we appreciate in life as well. Sure, my mother will always love me, and I wake to a big, beautiful star in the sky at no cost to myself (for now); but, in addition to stars and moms, I also like my reruns of old shows and my cheap Friday-night-thrillers. I, like many others, also have a desire to not pay for these cheap thrills. What can I say, I was spoiled on the freedom of days gone by.
And so, like the proverbial frog in the slowly boiling pot, we simmered in our own complacency. We downloaded our first episodes on some flickering knock-off site back in the early days, convinced we were sticking it to the man. We binge-watched our cheap Friday-night-thrillers on ad-riddled streaming platforms that looked like they’d been coded by a caffeinated raccoon. “Just this once,” we told ourselves, while the little banner ads for miracle cures and get-rich-quick schemes danced across the screen like judgmental fireflies. We told ourselves it was victimless. The studios were greedy anyway. The artists would survive on passion alone.
But the universe, that great cosmic bookkeeper, keeps immaculate ledgers. Free content was never free; it was merely a loan with compound interest measured in stolen minutes of our lives. And now the bailiffs have arrived – dressed in pixelated suits, armed with autoplay videos and mid-roll interruptions that strike at the precise moment a plot twist is about to land. They know exactly when our attention is most fragile: three minutes into a cooking video, right as the knife meets the onion; forty-five seconds before the detective reveals the killer; the instant we finally relax into the couch after a twelve-hour workday. The ad doesn’t merely interrupt; it serves as our sentence. It reminds us, with cheerful corporate sadism, that we chose this path. We voted for our own penalty with every five-second-skip we ever suffered through.
And yet, here we are – billions of us – collectively agreeing that this is a fair transaction. Our eyes for their entertainment. Our patience for their bandwidth. We have become the willing participants in our own sentencing, where the punishment is not some external crime but the consequence we cheerfully accepted. We have quietly executed our own attention spans in exchange for a few cheap thrills. The difference between grand literary crimes and ours is only scale. Theirs were committed with an axe. Ours are committed with a click – silent, algorithmic, and delivered straight into the ear canal via wireless headphones that cost more than the screen they’re poisoning.
So I hate advertisements not merely because they are loud, ugly, and omnipresent. I hate them because they are honest. They are the mirror we refused to look into when we first clicked “Watch for free.” They are the receipt we never wanted to read. They are the modern scarlet letter stitched across every screen, spelling out in ten-point Arial: *You wanted this. You still do.*
And the worst part? I’m already queuing up the next episode. The ad is loading. The countdown has begun.
Five… four… three…
Forgive me, Father, for I have streamed.