I think the anger is quite misplaced here by the author as it has never been the ad industry that has done "everything that was within their technical capabilities to spy on people and shovel ads on top of them" as the ad networks are simply a platform for which there are buyers of ads/eyeballs (advertisers) and sites/apps that display said advertising. It's the sites that you use that have chosen to include the code snippets needed to display ads or track you (not withstanding those terrible ad injector add-ons). Without your favorite sites providing it space to advertise on, there would be no advertising network.
In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today. Paywalls largely don't work for many types of content and advertising is much more lucrative for the sites you patronize. Who's paying for that "Which Harry Potter Character Are You?" quiz on Buzzfeed that you gleefully wasted 5 minutes of you life on? Certainly not you; it was the advertiser who paid in exchange for an opportunity to influence you in some way (either direct action or indirect branding).
When you think about the 'morality' of ad blockers, it's not about the ad networks that we're talking about, it's the publishing sites that produce the content you consume. When you block an ad, the network doesn't pay the site. Simple as that.
In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today. Paywalls largely don't work for many types of content and advertising is much more lucrative for the sites you patronize. Who's paying for that "Which Harry Potter Character Are You?" quiz on Buzzfeed that you gleefully wasted 5 minutes of you life on? Certainly not you; it was the advertiser who paid in exchange for an opportunity to influence you in some way (either direct action or indirect branding).
When you think about the 'morality' of ad blockers, it's not about the ad networks that we're talking about, it's the publishing sites that produce the content you consume. When you block an ad, the network doesn't pay the site. Simple as that.