Whitling our lives away

Back in the days of TV you would use commercial breaks to go to the toilet, get a drink that would make you go to the toilet, or turn the sound off, or change the channel so that you didn’t have to be screamed at by The Ad Man.

This new incarnation of incarceration seeks to prevent and punish if you DARE to block ads during their streaming.

Lettuce say that the less invasive ads - the ones that ALLOW you to SKIP them - give a 5 second interruption to what you are trying to view and a 3 second response time to hit the SKIP like you have parkinsonian tourettes.

Lettuce be bold enough to round that up to 10 seconds to get rid of invasive insistent marketing.

10 seconds X 21,610 ads per month = 210,610 seconds.
210,610 / 60 seconds in a minute = 3510.1666 minutes.
3510.1666 minutes / 60 minutes in an hour = 58.5 hours.
58.5 hours / 24 hours in a day = 2.44 DAYS PER MONTH SWATTING BLOOD SUCKING INSECTS NON-STOP.

Dante needs a re-write to update some of his Circles in Hell.

2.44 day X 12 months = 29.25 days in a year.

A MONTH OF YOUR LIFE IN A YEAR SPENT SWATTING ADS.

Where does it stop?
How much is too much?
I know what the answer is:

• grow a beard

• shave your moustache

• marry your cousin

• get hit with a $400,000 lein for not having the ArriveCAN app on your amish cellphone…

Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. This is the world that you know. The world as it was at the end of the twentieth century. It exists now only as part of a neural-interactive simulation that we call the Matrix. You’ve been living in a dream world, Neo. This is the world as it exists today… Welcome.. to the desert.. of the real. We have only bits and pieces of information but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early twenty-first century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.

Neo: AI? You mean artificial intelligence?

Morpheus: A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them.

But we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun.

Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion, the machines have found all the energy they would ever need. There are fields, endless fields, where human beings are no longer born. We are grown. For the longest time I wouldn’t believe it, and then I saw the fields with my own eyes. Watch them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living. And standing there, facing the pure horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth. What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this.

Neo: No. I don’t believe it. It’s not possible.

I’m feelin’ a Graphic Novel: The Electric Amish about fighting battle bots with pitchforks and drones with slingshots.