Martin HoffmannDid someone calculate the carbon footprint of the advertising industry yet? Banning it – and making companies pay their advertising budget as taxes that go directly into journalism and culture – feels like an easy win to me.
Michael WestergaardGood idea. Let's also outlaw unhealthy food and crimes. Easy wins. Let's outlaw gravity too, so transport becomes essentially free. Spend the money saved on gravity on unicorns.
Aram Bartholl@partim joana moll did that for cookies https://www.bsc.es/news/bsc-news/the-cookies-the-million-most-visited-websites-produce-more-11000-metric-tons-co2-emissions-month
The cookies of the million most visited websites produce more than 11,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions per month
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) participates in the Carbolytics project, which seeks to investigate the ecological footprint of the ecosystem of advertising technology (AdTech for its acro
texanarchy@partim everything sucks so bad i sometimes forget how bad advertising is. And for how long it’s been bad.
llrd4@partim the biggest issue with advertising is that its a total money sink for society. Marketers contribute nothing besides material to manipulate consumers, devoid of useful information about products
Michel Lind 
@partim one interesting thought exercise is to check how many servers Meta operates (the numbers are not exactly public but you can extrapolate based on the public DC locations) and compare with how much supporting the sort of userbase and the kind of posts and commenting activity if ads are not involved.
(Modulo how much algorithmic feed costs to run, and automated content moderation, but those who dislike ad-based social media tend to dislike algorithmic feed anyway)
@michelin The post was triggered by me receiving a letter that I threw unopened into the waste-paper bin while pondering how this had to be made and delivered and now needed recycling.
But indeed, digital advertisement is equally wasteful and possibly even more annoying.
@partim yeah. I hate junk mail too - esp since I dread being away for a few weeks and losing important mail because the mailbox overflowed. But also the environmental cost (same with digital ads really. The spam problem and the environmental one both).
In the US given how bad we are at funding public goods, the silver lining is junk mail is basically the postal service's largest source of revenue 🫠🤦♂️