There's a passage of Carl Sagan's "Contact" that's on point and interesting to read 34 years later. The billionaire who helps to decode the Message (from outer

There's a passage of Carl Sagan's "Contact" that's on point and interesting to read 34 years later. The billionaire who helps to decode the Message (from outer space) and ends up building the working copy of the Machine made his fortune by selling tools to detect and block ads from television. There is some discussion of the technical cat-and-mouse game he has to play as advertisers try to make their content avoid detection and blend in with the regular programming. In this version of the future, the ad blockers eventually win and network television is destroyed. (The book also features networked computers and email ("telefax"), but the concept of ads appearing on them was still too futuristic for 1985.) https://books.google.com/books?id=Q6o51-W_z8MC&lpg=PP1&dq=google%20books%20contact&pg=PA223#v=onepage&q=adnix&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=Q6o51-W_z8MC&lpg=PP1&dq=go... Adnix and Preachnix were the essence of capitalist entrepreneurship, he argued repeatedly. The point of capitalism was supposed to be providing people with alternatives. "Well, the _absense_ of advertising is an alternative, I told them. There are huge advertising budgets only when there's no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaching people to be stupid. A strong country needs smart people. So Adnix is patriotic. The manufacturers can use some of their advertising budgets to improve their products. The consumer will benefit. Magazines and newspapers and direct mail business will boom, and that'll ease the pain in the ad agencies. I don't see what the problem is." Adnix, much more than the innumerable libel suits against the original commercial networks, led directly to their demise. For a while there was a small army of unemployed advertising executives...