People actively seek information. People don't seek out advertising noise. They avoid such audiovisual pollution quite actively, so much so that corporations get paid in order to force the noise in front of people's eyeballs.
It's that forceful nature that violates consent. I came to HN to see comments from technologists on random stories as well as cool Show HN posts. So someone showing off a project here isn't advertising, it's just the exact information I asked for. It's when that person pays money to put his project in front of me while I'm browsing news or something that it turns into a massive problem.
The key is to differentiate noise from signal, advertising from information. Advertising is always noise they add to signal in order to get paid. Our brains aren't supposed to be sinks for their noise. Our cognitive functions are absolutely sacred.
My extreme arguments are generally reserved for businesses who are profiting off the abuse. People demonstrating could definitely fall into the unwanted noise category depending on what you believe, but I'm not going to go extreme on them for it.
Besides, demonstrations are easily avoided and ignored. They go to the public square to demonstrate. They don't generally go to your house. Advertisers absolutely would go to your house. They are the sort of people who would calculate the exact viewing angle you have when you look out the window of your home and then set up a billboard covering that exact area so as to mine out every last dime your eyeballs can possibly give. They're the sort of people who'd set up hidden cameras in the house across the street purely so they can monitor you to estimate the number of times you look out your windows every day, all so they can sell the chance to be seen by you to some highest bidder.
You-know-it-when-you-see-it might be a good boundary. It's different for everyone, surely.
Personally I find the Protect The Children charity workers and anti-abortion protesters in large city squares to be right on the line of "mind mild-assault."
TBH the charity people are worse than the anti-abortion protesters because they force images of unfortunate kids into my mind and makes me feel bad. The anti-abortion people are almost quaint to me.
"Mind rape" is obviously an attention grabbing way of putting it, but I tend to agree that advertising is essentially theft.
It goes something like this:
* You only have a finite amount of attention. You cannot obviously "pay attention" to everything around you.
* When someone takes your attention, they are consuming some of your finite resource.
* Taking something from someone else is the very definition of theft.
Now obviously we have social norms around attention that allow for a reasonable amount of this non-consensual attention consumption. Things like, make your signage inoffensive, unobtrusive, and generally placed in a way that it is a net positive (the hot dog prices should be near the hot dog vendor).
But what we don't have, at least in the US, are strong laws and norms that protect people from this. Why does an lawyer get to steal my attention on the beach with a plane dragging a banner? Why does a storefront get to blast an ad at me when I walk by? Does anybody really think these examples are a net societal benefit?
"mind rape". How absurd and inflammatory. The notion of consent here is just ridiculous. Nobody is forcing you to use the Internet, you're happy enough to consume free online services, but then melt down when you see an ad.
> you're happy enough to consume free online services
Of course. If HTTP servers want to send me free web pages, I'm only too happy to consume them. If they send me ads alongside those pages, the ads will be deleted. If they don't like it, they can return 402 Payment Required instead.
Just because somebody handed me a free magazine filled with ads doesn't mean I can't rip out the ad pages and throw them in the trash. I'm allowed to keep only the pages I want and discard the rest.
> melt down when you see an ad
I don't see ads, uBlock Origin does a really good job at filtering them out. Highly recommended.
With physical contact, speech can signal consent or lack thereof. How would you consent to speech itself?