[revolvingocelot]

You maintain a connection to the telephone network, which the telemarketers utilize in an entirely uncontroversial way to speak with you. "Using the web" is like "having a telephone", in that I can select what I wish to experience, and screen out that which I don't.

Telemarketers have chosen to architect their business on the predicate that people trustingly pick up their phones and interact with those who call them. That social norm is fading; people screen their calls, or even use eg that Pixel phone thing in which a robot picks up, confronts the telemarketer, and texts the user.

The DOM doesn't live out there somewhere, it lives inside my browser. Being choosy about which parts actually get displayed, as opposed to dropped on the ground, isn't taking food out of people's mouths, it's my failing to adhere to a social norm of naively rendering a webpage exactly as it's sent to me. It reminds me of psuedo-moral panic about WFH coring out once-lively commercial real estate and all its downstream consequences (eg, the absence of cubicle drones needing to go out to eat at lunch hour, etc) -- who owes who a living, and why?