It's not colonialism if you can opt-out of it. Which, for most of the nations of the world, you can. Don't get me wrong. We've been manipulated by advertising

It's not colonialism if you can opt-out of it. Which, for most of the nations of the world, you can. Don't get me wrong. We've been manipulated by advertising since the 1850s. The Hidden Persuaders, written in 1957, detailed the ways advertising can manipulate our subconscious to make us do things beyond our control. 'Big Ad' has been a core component of American radio and television since its introduction to the US. When the internet arrived in the '90s, so did a raft of businesses floated solely by ad dollars. Google improved the game with more personalized ads, but this was really just a form of direct marketing, which had existed for a half century. But most of the things we consume, we do because we are consumers, in a consumer society. We have not been captured by a foreign power and forced to work for nearly nothing, with our lands pilfered for goods to power a foreign nation. We are not 'unsalaried slaves'. We are willfully accepting the trade of services for our attention and our dollars - the same way we did with newspapers, and radio and television programs. We have been selling our attention for cheap for a century and a half, buying whatever crap someone feels like printing. In most nations today, we have the complete freedom to pay for and use the internet without advertising or restriction. You can pay for an internet connection, pay for e-mail, send and receive files, communicate, etc, all without ever being sold a diet pill, told to vote for a candidate, or having your data changed out to something more profitable. And you can do all of this with the security of a first-world military power. The global internet is still the most powerful, affordable, un-controlled communications tool in the world. You can talk about empire all you want, but really the only oppressive forces are governments against their own people. Yes, many governments have chilling effects on the rights of their people to have free speech - but those are limits imposed within their borders, and not to the internet as a whole. We still have an internet of creation, and we can still use it to change the world (evidenced by how many nations are rightly afraid of its power to allow people to freely communicate!) The only thing that has left is our imagination, but luckily, no one can take that away from us.