An upcoming feature of WordPad has been discovered by enthusiasts, revealing in-app ads that promote Microsoft Office. The change is hidden in recent Insider Preview builds, and not activated for most users.
WordPad is a very simple text editor, more powerful than Notepad, but still less feature rich than Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer. It is good for creating a simple text document without complicated formatting.
The more advertisements and preinstalled junkware Microsoft shoves into Windows 10, the more the otherwise decent operating system turns into a user-hostile joke. Apple is going down the same route with iOS, and everything about it just feels disgusting and sleazy.
One of the many reasons I transitioned all my machines away from Windows and to Linux.
What if I need to use WordPad to view Unix text files and I don’t want to be bothered by Word offering to convert them to docx files. Because that’s the only good use for WordPad. It doesn’t open docxes remotely well, so if you don’t have/want MS Office, it’s better to install LibreOffice
Microsoft is clearly drunk with power. Now that Windows is “a service” (as per their own words), you should have no control over it. So, you are getting all the hassles of managing local software with all the lack of control of a “service” like Gmail.
So, what’s next? Desktop Linux still sucks and Windows 8.1 (which I run in all my computers) will get EOLed in 2023.
Notepad supports Unix text files these days IIRC. At least on Windows 10.
Don’t worry, they’ll get around to notepad eventually. I use notepad++ myself.
notepad2 isn’t half bad either. Very very plain and simple interface, and once you rename the exe file from notepad2.exe to notepad.exe and use it as a replacement for the original notepad, you rarely need any other text editor.
Notepad2-mod is a far better version, with words highlighting and stuff. Anyway, I copied my Windows XP’s Wordpad everywhere because it’s the best version, with the ruler and better preview. And of course no ribbon interface and ads.
Please use the Windows XP’s Wordpad version.
hdjhfds,
This is exactly what I do too! It’s one of the first steps I take on windows. Part of me is surprised that microsoft hasn’t bought the assets to make it the default. I guess they don’t put much value in a quality text editor, but it’s just so much more pleasant to use while still being lightweight.
Kochise,
I hadn’t heard of notepad2-mod before, thanks for mentioning it.
kurkosdr,
I for one think desktop linux looks better every year, especially given the direction microsoft is plotting for windows (ie more ads and less control). If you need specific windows software, then I concede linux may not be right for you. But if you are able to start by becoming accustomed to running FOSS software on windows, switching from windows to linux becomes much easier.
So if you use your time now to work libreoffice and other portable software into your daily workflow and distance yourself from windows specific software&tech, it’ll be that much easier to make the transition in the future. You’d be using the same software on linux, in which case you’ll be totally familiar with it on day one.
As for desktop environment, I’d highly recommend KDE as the desktop with the lowest learning curve coming from windows. It looks & feels fairly similar to windows.
Not everyone is willing/able to make the switch, there’s a lot of reasons people cannot or may not want to. You have to make up your own mind on it, but I think most of us who do are ultimately glad to distance ourselves from windows. It’s almost a sense of relief especially as windows has transitioned towards a platform for advertising & monetizing users.
It only looks better, but still ships with the same problems. It will be good enough once a distro ships with no user access to the terminal as it isn’t considered needed for most users. As for replacing your own software with things such as libreoffice, one quicky finds out their feature set is miniscule compared to the commercial alternatives.
dark2,
These “most users” you speak of can get by without using a terminal these days unless they are interested in doing more advanced customization. It’s no worse than editing the registry on windows. I don’t consider the mere existance of low level features a good reason to reject linux (or windows for that matter). Anyways, I think people like kurkosdr can handle it if they have the desire to!
IMHO Libreoffice is perfectly suited for the majority of office users who aren’t otherwise forced to use ms-office at work. How many features can you think of that home users use that are missing?
I actually liked MS office before the ribbon, after the ribbon I felt the UI suddenly became less discoverable. It should have been optional, forcing changes on longtime users for no good reason pushed me away from microsoft office. Maybe you have a different opinion, which is fine, but I found libreoffice to be a compelling alternative that worked for me and personally I don’t regret switching.
Yeah, agreed. These ‘Linux sucks’ folks are looking for a reaction. I don’t regret switching either.
“Most users” is a Linux fa’ns favorite anecdote. Until a Linux distro puts it’s money where its mouth is and strips out the terminal GUI application from the default install, it’s meaningless. I find most Linux users pretty quickly need to do something in terminal too often and crawl back to Windows/Linux (which is an anecdote far more supported by the numbers). It’s all meaningless unless you can prove it, and the best way to prove it is to strip it out of the default install.
This is dumb. Both Windows and OS X ship with terminals. This seems more like a bunch of troll comments than actual contributions to the discussion.
Thom Holwerda,
+1
I came to the same conclusion reading dark2’s post. Not only was he hypocritical, but he’s wrong. You don’t have to use terminals on any platform if you’re just going to run linux desktop apps. Users may be missing out on some powerful piping & scripting capabilities, but that’s ok, not everyone’s needs are the same and one can do plenty of productive tasks without a terminal.
Oh well, it’s not my intention to convince people to switch to linux who don’t want to, quite the contrary I feel everyone should stick with what makes them happiest. dark2’s choice to run windows doesn’t bother me whatsoever. It is unfortunate that someone’s preference for linux bothers him, but frankly at the end of the day that’s not my problem.
Try ubitmenu. I also despise the ribbon. What am I? 5 years old? Why am I being shown logos of commands, rather than their names?
But I have another qualm with libreoffice. It works well… until it fails to correctly open a complicated document a customer sent. At those times I strongly feel the urge to uninstall it and replace with the old office 2007 I have around.
hdjhfds,
I feel the same.
I’ve never seen libreoffice completely fail to open a document, but granted if you need everything to be positioned and paginated identically then libreoffice isn’t an option because the text rendering engine it uses is not a clone of msoffice. It usually imports the formatting instructions ok, but they’re not always rendered the same. In some cases it matters, other times it doesn’t. I use it for business without issue, although if I were in an industry such as printing/publishing where documents needed to be 100% reproducible, the expectation would naturally be would to use the same software as the customer (whether that’s MS Office or Libre office). Although often PDF is used instead for exact positioning, which renders the whole point mute. So in short, it depends, haha.
Perhaps if you at least alluded to what these ‘same problems’ are we could have a grown-up discourse.
My suspicion is you’re miffed that it’s over your head and so you have this overblown hate reaction, but with the little information you’ve provided that’s really all I can assume at this point.
The lack of nice GUI based configurators/wizards (allowing users to avoid terminal if they want) is only scratching the surface.
The biggest problem is the “divided we fall, let’s divide everything into 100 different distros” mentality. For open source stuff, repository maintainers are spending a huge amount of time to make updates work (while things inevitably get overlooked causing updates to break). For commercial software very few companies are willing to throw bucket loads of cash at the “which package format, which desktop environment, which shared libraries, …” problem, or deal with the same hassle trying to provide support for their software. For support, you’re essentially screwed unless you do it yourself (try to take a Linux computer to a local computer shop to get them to fix a software problem and you’ll get blank stares followed by an attempt to sell you a copy of Windows; have trouble with your Internet connection and the help desk operator you get stuck with will be reading from a script and telling you to go to Windows settings and won’t want to listen when you tell them you’re not using Windows because that’s not part of the script; etc).
The next biggest problem is marketing. There is none (and there won’t ever be any because it takes a long time to save up enough to cover the price of advertising campaign when you’re making “$0 profit per sale”). Most normal users don’t even know what Linux is (and are less likely to know any distro). Half don’t even know what an OS is (Windows is just “the computer”). Then you make the mistake of saying “it’s free” and they assume “worthless” (because they’ve spent their lives learning “you get what you pay for”) and won’t care after that.
Then there’s the technical problems. There’s no effective use of priorities, so the scheduler is crappy (which is getting less obvious now because the more CPUs you have the higher the probability is that the app that needs CPU time to handle a key press will get CPU time by accident, but that’s about as impressive as winning a participation award); and if/when it starts thrashing swap space it won’t have any clue that X/wayland or task manager are more important than other stuff so you’ll have to kill the power to recover. Of course if you disable swap to avoid that problem then you just fall into the next trap – the OOM killer wiping out your whole desktop (or something else that the kernel doesn’t know is important), where they’ve spent 20 years trying to introduce work-arounds for that idioticy (and mostly failed repeatedly). There’s also no pre-fetching anything when disks are idle and there’s nothing much in RAM (e.g. because you just booted, or closed a large app freeing its memory) – it’s simply too stupid to realize it can use idle time to prefetch “mostly likely wanted” files into VFS cache and/or “most important pages” back from swap space (and wouldn’t know what is wanted/important anyway); so when you boot and go make a coffee (or close some apps and go to lunch) you come back to find the computer being significantly slower than it should’ve been. Then there’s power management – the awesomeness of trying to run unimportant work at max. CPU speed to drain your laptop battery and heat the CPU up so, that when you want to do something where performance actually matters the CPU is already too hot to go fast for long. Not that the important task is going to get anything close to max. performance anyway – it’ll be sharing a core with a unimportant task (going slow due to hyper-threading) and won’t get “turbo-boost” for similar reasons (did I mention the scheduler is crappy already?).
Sadly; none of this really matters for a server that’s doing the same thing for 24 hours every day, so none of it will ever be fixed, and Microsoft will continue to do whatever it likes knowing that the only real competition for Windows PC is people switching to smartphones and tablets (where Microsoft makes billions of $$ from “Azure Mobile Services” behind the scenes) and game consoles (X-box).
Uhhh use Metapad or Norepad++ or any of the bazillion free third party tools? Lets face it Wordpad is for grandma and that is who the ads are aimed at, to get grandma to see they have made MS Office dumbed down enough even grandma can use it.
Those that need to do real work? Haven’t used wordpad in years. I know I keep a copy of metapad and a batch file that lets me replace notepad with metapad in my tools folder, works great.
Hopefully some day we will be able to do the same on phones too. Move to GNU/Linux and get an experience of the similar quality as the one involving the move on desktop. Most people don’t want to do that just yet, but some of us are already leveraging the benefits of such move.
Me: Clicks on Bold Font
Wordpad: You know what else is bold? – a nice, smooth cup of coffee at Starbucks!
Me: Clicks on File-Save
Wordpad: You can open a new savings account at First Banks and save all day!
Me: Throws computer out the window.
Wordpad: Prices are falling at……Splat!
ahahahaha, thanks for the laugh.
Firstly, this must be an A-B situation because I’ve looked at the latest version and get no such results.
Secondly, the reaction seems a bit over the top, a few words in a status bar are hardly a full blown marketing campaign, and they are certainly not hijacking the interface! Most Apps seem to promote some function or advanced feature via a tool-tip or similar status bar message, so I feel the outrage is misplaced. In fact this sort of behaviour is so common I’d say it’s pretty much ubiquitous in retail software development.
Even advanced expensive CAD or Modelling packages and similar do this, and they are at least 10x the price of Windows and not made by Microsoft. Is it hypocritical to criticise one and not the other?
As long as they are not invasive and do not require you to specifically stop what you are doing to dismiss the dialogue who cares? I’m not going to read it for more than a fraction of a second.
Um, you might care because you have no idea what those ads are downloading and what said ads are sending? Then again, maybe you don’t…
While I agree some paranoia is justified, I don’t think being extremely paranoid about everything is healthy! In any case, it’s not something in my general control, so most users have to have some faith in the machine. I’m sure the purveyors of security software including MS itself are onto potential avenues of pain and suffering.
Not everybody is a Putin!
On the flipside, how many people actually use WordPad, Before today I’d have never encountered this because I’d never opened WordPad. I seem to recall a story painting a picture of so much diminished use of WordPad just last year that MS are considering removing it, to the protests of a select few!
Use Windows XP’s Wordpad, it’s really like a mini Word, that actually works and is usable. Plus the RTF files are so tiny and easy to open with another application, unlike DOC files with the formatting completely screwed up in Libreoffice.
Windows 10 a “user-hostile joke” and iOS “just feels disgusting and sleazy” are erudite observations. Unfortunately, the Microsoft strategy of embrace, extend, then masturbate and poop all over anything perceived as competition extends to Linux (follow the money), as does U.S. intelligence interest, so, Linux is not long for the kind of future anyone that wants individual privacy or autonomy that can be easily and objectively corroborated…
I believe micro kernel design will offer the only way forward for individual privacy and security; GNU licensed kernels like MACH/HURD, and Andrew S. Tanenbaum’s Minix 3 OS where kernel code can be read, understood, and audited by one person and everything else a similarly compact service that can be stopped, audited, uninstalled if licensure, financing, or code takes things in an undesirable direction.
Of course there are no perfect solutions, but I wouldn’t bet my privacy, security, or sanity on anything but derivatives of GNU derivatives of MACH and Andy’s work. When kernel size becomes asymptotic with man-years of work just to read, no less comprehend and audit — so too does opportunity for malfeasance, bad choices and ineptitude.
The kernel stuff is one thing, drivers and applications are something else, entirely. Of course you can port applications, but regarding our current topic (Wordpad) Libreoffice is still very far from Office’s usability. In Libreoffice, I even get my formatting or font changed when I undo some typing. That’s the reason Minix3 decided to embrace the BSD driver layer, to avoid lagging too far behind. But that still doesn’t makes Minix3 the next desktop OS replacement. The purpose of Minix3 is education, despite it has proven being of industrial use in the IME.
While I don’t disagree with your premise, ‘if’ privacy and security becomes more important than familiarity — ease of use in these contexts is subjective, and even the slowest of the slow will pick up alternative applications and in less than three weeks, half will like the alternative as much or more than want it replaces just because of differences.
The things that make Minix 3 a good educational OS also make it a good high security, availability, privacy and feature granularity OS; even for end users — it may not be as superficially “user friendly” as Windows or Linux, but businesses large and small and millions of people got by on vastly less “user friendly” operating systems than Minux 3 and the applications it runs, or MACH/HURD and the applications you can run on a Debian distro with this kernel.
It just depends on people’s priorities, if they don’t mind being “the product”, zero privacy, monetization of their every action, and incessant advertising through every vehicle imaginable, and many that are not even been discussed yet — obvious they’ll be very happy with Windows or Microsoft Linux indefinitely…
For the rest of us, Windows and Linux are not even options…
Haven’t used Windows at home in ages, but I’ve always liked Wordpad. Sometimes in work situations it’s nice to have a light, quick editor that can do fonts, bold, and basic formatting without having to use a full word processor or a coder’s text editor. I’ve sometimes wished Linux had a tool like that: lighter than Abiword, more office-work friendly than gedit (or leafpad or what have you). Notepad++ is lovely, but I wouldn’t want to write a memo with it.
As I’ve said above, try the Windows XP’s Wordpad, all my regular letters are written in RTF files, more than enough. When I need arrays and pictures, I use LibreOffice, despite its thousands formatting bugs, what Wordpad have not.
Really, if you were going to test a feature like this, then perhaps picking a feature to test it in that is rarely used by the majority, but when used mostly by software developers or other IT administrators, would be just the right choice!
Windows 10 is still Windows, and it’s still horrible. Just awful.
Nope, I still use Windows 2000 and XP, these where real “get the job done without nuisance” machines. Sure, not always secure, but doing the job. Then Vista arised with its UAC “sudo” prompts…
From what I have been able to figure out (*) this is known as the “BlankDocOfficeUpsell” feature that is only available in build 19546 that is in the Insider Fast Ring. Since build 19536 (**) this is simply where Microsoft checks in all their latest code whether it will eventually be released or not. Anyway, this should mean that
1) No regular user will suffer from this for a while
2) You should only see this message if you open WordPad, not if you open a file that opens with WordPad
3) Everyone that would really like to could disable this feature either directly themselves or through future updates to privacy tools like O&O ShutUp10 that they would run for other reasons anyway
I personally really dislike this feature and hope it never makes it to production releases. I could theoretically understand a more userfocused message on first use like “You currently started WordPad which is a rudimentary legacy Rich Text Editor. We recommend the free Word Online or similar tooling from https://alternativeto.net/software/wordpad/ instead”. Something similar like they are doing with the Snipping Tool, although that is being replaced by another local tool. Having upsell for other Office Online tooling and not mentioning alternatives is not acceptible to me in any way.
I am actually still surprised by how much MS-hate is showing on this topic although the mentioned change literally does not affect anyone that has posted here negatively in any way. It is just a trigger to spew some of the build up frustrations I guess.
(*) https://github.com/riverar/mach2/commit/1e2590d3ef091f572c427f594c138f204a3513c1
(**) active development branch (called “RS_PRERELEASE”) is where the teams check in all their latest code changes into the OS. Moving forward, the Fast ring will receive builds directly from this active development branch and new features will show up in these builds first. While features in the active development branch may be slated for a future Windows 10 release, they are no longer matched to a specific Windows 10 release. This means that builds from the active development branch simply reflect the latest work in progress code from our engineers. https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2019/12/16/announcing-windows-10-insider-preview-build-19536/
So I came up with the objective data for alfman by looking at ubuntu help forums new to ubuntu section and compiling the data so I wouldn’t be called a troll. Out of the random sampling of first page data there are 18 posts. 3 general questions about things like should I choose LTS or latest, If I exclude those and the 6 posts from advanced users starting with terminal/config file use use in their help requests, that leaves 9 requests from true newbies to Linux. Out of those 9 requests, 5 have responses that require terminal use, with one unanswered at the moment. I’m not a troll, but I won’t stand for the lie that “most users will never use terminal” when it’s easy to objectively prove over 50% of help requests are answered with instructions to use the terminal.
dark2,
Hmm, presenting evidence in this way is too vague for anyone to follow along. I found the new to ubuntu forum, but you’ll need to point out the specific threads you are talking about to discuss them here.
Also, it’s one of my peeves when people misquote me. If you want to quote me as lying, then at least get the quote right, otherwise that is a straw man argument. “Most users will never use terminal” is NOT what I said. There’s a big demographic shift from windows to linux. Unlike with windows, linux has a disproportionate share of developers who do use the terminal simply because it’s a powerful tool for us. It’s the same reason microsoft added powershell to windows: many of us find it superior to the GUI for our workflows.
What I actually said was
There is no lie.
I want to address another big factor that puts linux at a disadvantage for novice usage: virtually all PCs have windows preinstalled at the factory, meaning that users skip the entire installation & configuration process. Contrast this to linux, wherein nearly all linux installations have to be accomplished by the end user. Therein lies the rub, I don’t expect a novice to have the skills to format/partition a disk and install an OS from scratch, find compatible hardware, migrate documents, etc. This is why personally, I don’t recommend linux for novices unless they know someone with experience setting up operating systems. Once installed, modern linux desktops are friendly enough for novices to use web browsers, email, documents, etc.
Not for nothing, but my elementary school kids have no trouble using KDE. Obviously they couldn’t install linux themselves without more experience. But being a linux user is much easier and more pleasant than it used to be. In all honesty if an ordinary user were to go buy a linux desktop (just as they buy windows desktops), I am confident they would pick it up fine, just like my kids did. I’ll wrap up by repeating that most users don’t have to use terminals if they just want to use desktop apps. Arguably KDE might have felt more familiar to windows users than windows 8 did at launch, haha.
I tried just that for my wife recently and it didn’t work. The internal microphone doesn’t work and neither does a microphone attached to the headphone jack. That means no Skype or other videoconferencing. Apparently this is a known issue* without an available fix for almost 2 years at least and although it was mentioned it should be fixed in kernel 5.0 it still isn’t working at the moment. If you clean install a default Windows 10 you don’t need to do anything, not even installing any manufacturer drivers…it just works. My wife and I also cannot find a way to make this machine go into standby…and now that I just googled for that I understand why: https://www.linuxuprising.com/2018/06/how-to-access-suspend-button-in-ubuntu.html
[anecdotal evidence is anecdotal of course]
*Apparently the issue is not rare and getting more common. I think the exact model she bought is an acer-swift-5-sf515-51t-77v3
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1082994/acer-swift-3-microphone-not-working-with-ubuntu-18-04
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201251
avgalen,
You’ve said this before, but I’d like to see the actual listing that shows official linux support from the vendor and/or manufacturer. If that’s the case, then you’d be entitled to return it as defective (because it is). Otherwise if you installed it yourself or you assumed it would work even though it’s not officially supported, then alas you are playing the hardware lottery. I know it sucks, but hardware doesn’t always work under linux in part because many manufacturers don’t provide any linux support and 3rd party engineers are left to reverse engineer the hardware. However if you specifically bought a linux laptop then the expectation is that it should work. I looked up that specific acer laptop and it’s actually a windows laptop from acer, with no claims of linux compatibility.
https://store.acer.com/en-us/swift-5-laptop-sf515-51t-507p
I looked up the review on amazon, and the one review mentioning linux says the microphone and finger reader doesn’t work, for all I know that could have been you. So I would like to know where you bought it from to see the actual listing that claims it’s an officially supported linux laptop because what I’m finding is that only windows is supported by this laptop’s manufacturer.
I understand your frustration and I agree with you, it should be more discoverable in gnome shell, For what it’s worth, it’s there in KDE.
For me that means “some piece of hardware that I put the OS on”. I never leave the OS the machine comes with on the machine. That is why I mentioned that on Windows everything just works out of the box without needing to install anything from the OEM. People always mention that on Windows you have to do driver-hunting while on Linux everything just works out-of-the-box because drivers are included in the kernel. I am sure I didn’t post this earlier because we just got this machine a few weeks ago. I had also seen some internet comments for a similar model that showed this didn’t work but should work come kernel 5.0 which seemed like enough research for us. We could live without the fingerprint reader and my wife uses an external microphone so this machine is great for her. It just isn’t something that worked just fine like Windows does.
I understand now you meant “officialy certified” when you said “linux desktop” (ignoring the fact that you also said desktop while I mentioned a laptop). I have never seen an “officialy certified” linux laptop in real life. The only one I have heard of is the Dell XPS Developer and even there some hardware (like the fingerprintscanner) isn’t supported. I just did a quick search and only see machines with Ubuntu 14.x …might just be because I am looking on the Dutch site https://www.dell.com/learn/nl/nl/nlbsdt1/campaigns/dell-linux-ubuntu-en
(my wife and I are both developers. I only need the WSL on Windows to get my Linux needs met, she needs the full monty. I do a yearly test to run full blown Linux on my main machine but always get disappointed and return to Windows)
avgalen,
I don’t mean to nitpick here, but If you didn’t actually purchase a linux computer, then your experience is not a real rebuttal to what I said: “In all honesty if an ordinary user were to go buy a linux desktop (just as they buy windows desktops), I am confident they would pick it up fine, just like my kids did.”
What you are saying is that installing linux as an end user doesn’t always work, there’s no disagreement here. If you buy a windows laptop, of course you should expect windows to work with it. Even if you reinstall it yourself, as long as you have internet connectivity windows update will get all the OEM drivers for you. This works because most manufactures have partnered with microsoft to do this. Unfortunately linux distros often do not have the cooperation of manufacturers and therefor the linux community has to reverse engineer the hardware before it can work. You found the open ticket on bugzilla for your hardware issue, I concede this doesn’t do much improve anyone’s experience, but the thread shows us what goes on behind the scenes when you have hardware that doesn’t yet have linux support. It needs to be assigned to a developer to test and merge new hardware updates, which often requires someone to buy the same hardware and have the skills and time to do the work. Alas, such volunteers are in short supply.
Hey, I admit users can be disappointed if they buy a random (windows) computer and want everything to be supported by linux out of the box, which would be ideal. I don’t recommend novices installing linux themselves without the help of someone knowledgeable due to these pitfalls. For anyone planning on running linux, it is imperative at a minimum to at least look up reviews to see what other users’ experiences are with getting linux to work before you buy it! Sometimes it does work, but why leave it to chance?
Yeah, you’re not alone, I’ve also been bitten by optimistic assumptions as well. I think the lesson is that you are better off buying compatible hardware outright than anticipating it to become compatible. It may well be compatible eventually, but how long can you wait?
I understand, we may not have been on the same wavelength. It’s all good though.
Unfortunately linux desktop computer vendors are extremely niche. Fortunately linux support on server hardware is far better, but that doesn’t help desktop/laptop users, haha. At least with a desktop you can often swap in linux compatible cards, but with laptops you’re often stuck with what you’ve got, linux compatible USB peripherals may be an option for those who don’t mind going that route.
Very interesting. I personally rotate between desktops every few years. I don’t like gnome3 as much as XFCE and KDE. I like the lightweight approach of XFCE, but it’s clear to me that KDE is more refined…can’t have it all, haha. For kicks, you might try KDE next time.
Honestly, I quite liked the windows 7 desktop. Microsoft’s attitude towards incrementally forcing users to take more crap was too much for me and so I was highly motivated to leave. It wasn’t so bad for me though because even on windows I spent a lot of time using putty and network shares to linux boxes, haha.
For me, this is part and parcel of the productisation of all things in society. It started with overt product placement in TV shows and movies. Then having to sit through thirty minutes of previews and commercials when we went to watch a film in a theatre. Then having to put up with in-your-face web advertising and clickbait that slows our computers down to such a degree. We’re not citizens; we’re merely consumers. Some of us remember Dubya’s response in the aftermath of 9/11: ‘Go out and shop!’