You're trying to get people to do something without their consent. It's fundamentally coercive. Different in degree, but not in kind, to closing a road and rou

You're trying to get people to do something without their consent. It's fundamentally coercive. Different in degree, but not in kind, to closing a road and routing traffic through your restaurant's drive through lane. Additionally, we have institutions that (allegedly) function based on rational decision making by agents with access to accurate information (markets, democracy, etc). Investment in advertising beyond simply making information available to those who seek it erodes the efficacy of those institutions. It's like putting stickers on your windshield... Even if their content is not objectionable, you're going to end up less safe because you can't see past them. For a concrete example of the latter: education outcomes are trending poorly, many teachers blame phone addiction. But if you look at what those students are doing on their phones, it's engaging with some advertising platform or another. We've created an environment where good dopamine hygiene requires skillful evasion of one of our most well funded industries. We're surely shooting ourselves, and each other, in the foot here. If polluting the physical world with hazards waste is unethical, than surely there is something equivalently unethical regarding information.