Businesses get on board and start the horrible ad infestation
There were a couple years where businesses were “entering cyberspace” and still trying to figure it out. Mostly this involved static webpages, since they saw the web as a kind of yellow pages. i.e. a business’ web page was their ad.
people are apparently fine with ads
It amazes me how accepting most people are of ads. I suspect Google’s going to win, and their ultimate contribution to humanity will be forcing ads into everything.
That’s an excellent point. Hundreds of years ago, if you wanted to recomment the product of a particularly skilled soapmaker or farmer, you’d say “Jo made that”, and maybe you could point to Jo’s logo on the product so your friends knew how to recognize it. So the signifier of quality (the brand) pointed to the signified of a quality product. But now the signifier has become disentangled from the signified: the advertisements and marketing campaigns promote brand loyalty even if the product becomes worse through inferior ingredients or shrinkflation. Because of this, the signifier is presented to us when we do not want to see it.