What do English majors talk about in their spare time?

No, they don’t discuss Shakespeare. Or Chaucer or Milton. Or the four functions of the semicolon. Or even the seven types of ambiguity.

Nope, none of the above. When English majors get together they leave all those highfalutin concerns behind. Instead they have a bigger question on their minds:

How do I get a job with this lousy degree?

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That’s a puzzle even Shakespeare couldn’t solve. That’s why he skipped college—and went directly to the job of Immortal Bard. No degree required.

Ah, I’m sorry to report that they’re not hiring Immortal Bards nowadays, or even mortal bards with student loans. So what’s an English major to do?

In my day, there was a time-honored answer. I was told, over and over: Advertising.

“Go into the ad business,” wise elders told us. “The agencies still hire English majors—because they respect creativity.”

Respect creativity? Hah! Maybe that was true in the days of Don Draper and Mad Men. But not anymore.

Advertising is no longer about creativity and storytelling. Ads are now a matter of annoyance, plain and simple (as I recently described in this article).

It’s a simple concept. Web platforms force people to pay money to avoid the ads—so the more annoying they are, the more money they make.

They used to call it extortion—pay now to avoid pain later. And it always works like a charm. Needless to say you don’t need an English major to run an extortion business. (However, they do make good victims.)

This business strategy started out in media—where it made some sense. People are familiar with the idea of advertising during screen entertainment.

And here is how it played out:

• YouTube started this with the launch of an ad-free tier in 2014.

• Paramount announced an ad-supported subscription plan in June 2021.

• Disney + launched a low-price subscription option with advertising in March 2024.

• Netflix introduced a similar program in October 2022.

• Amazon Prime did the same thing in early 2024.

But in the last few months, it’s gone crazy. The ads are spreading beyond movies and videos—and into almost anything with a digital interface. So we’ve seen the following in recent days:

• Jeep drivers started complaining about ads on their vehicle touchscreen in early 2025. An ad for an extended warranty allegedly appears every time they stop their car (at a red light, etc.).

• Meta announced an ad-free subscription option for Facebook and Instagram in September 2025. (initially in the UK).

• Microsoft announced an ad-supported subscription plan for Xbox cloud gaming in October 2025.

• A rumor about Apple inserting ads into its map app started spreading in October 2025. This will allegedly launch in 2026.

This is more than annoying—it’s also abusive. A new Jeep can cost $50,000 or more. When you hand over that much cash, you should get an exemption from spam ads on your screen.

But the most annoying move of all is coming from Samsung. They are putting ads on $3,499 smart fridges. They’re rolling out this “software upgrade” right now.

According to Samsung, your smart (or maybe smart-ass) refrigerator will soon share “useful day-to-day information such as news, calendar and weather forecasts, along with curated advertisements.” The display will change every ten seconds.

I definitely rely on my fridge for some things—milk, eggs, orange juice, and an occasional cold beer. But you don’t see curated advertisements on that list.

Ads will never be on the list.

People tell me that refrigerators were better in the 1950s. That seems impossible—but check out all the features on the 1956 Frigidaire model. You can’t get those nowadays. Instead you get aggravation and annoyance in big heaping helpings.

A few months ago, we purchased a new refrigerator. I didn’t know about the Samsung travesty back then. But I still knew enough to tell the sales dude: “I don’t want my refrigerator connected to the Internet.”

I had heard horror stories. Maybe you have too.

The sales dude wasn’t surprised. Like me, he just wants a nice cold one from his fridge. And the last I checked, that doesn’t require a wifi connection.

But this madness is spreading. You can now buy a smart toaster or smart microwave or smart kettle or smart coffee grinder—or even run your entire kitchen with a smart touchscreen hub.

The only thing that isn’t smart here are the people who buy these contraptions. Do you really need the Internet to toast your bread and heat up your water?

If you really want to get smart, you start by avoiding these appliances. Or—even better—you boycott the companies who annoy you with advertising on their screens.

If enough of us do that, they just might get they message. Maybe the ad agencies will go back to hiring English major—because they want to rediscover creativity. That would be a pleasant change.

In 2014, Tom Maxwell and his family moved into a “big and strangely cheap” historic house in Hillsborough, North Carolina, on a lush pasture next to a river. They named it Nannie, after the wife of the house’s most famous owner. But as Maxwell recounts in this spooky true tale, it was “thoroughly haunted,” and less than a year later, they broke their lease, left, and never looked back. Afterward, Maxwell learned about the house and surrounding land’s violent history—and all the tortured spirits that roamed there. Originally published in 2016, this Bitter Southerner story also includes moody illustrations by Phil Blank.

If she was upstairs, it would come from below. Brooke once heard Evelyn’s voice calling her from downstairs, and walked downstairs to answer. She called Evelyn’s name, and Evelyn answered from her upstairs bedroom. The side-door locks rattled frantically one night as the three of us sat alarmed in the living room. Occasionally, men’s voices could be heard downstairs, speaking in hushed and excited tones. They stopped as soon as someone reached the bottom of the stairs. We shared a growing feeling that we were to be split up, one from another. Something was trying to isolate us. A hard winter was bearing down. The first cord of wood got burned up in less than a month.

“Wikipedia, the constantly changing knowledge base created by a global free-for-all of anonymous users, now stands as the leading force for the dumbing down of world knowledge.” – From the book Wikipedia: The Dumbing Down of World Knowledge by Edwin Black 2010

Well, well, well. Look who it is.

The global academic, scientific, and pro-fact community.

I suppose you’ve come to say you’re sorry? I hope so, given your years of sneering and hand-wringing about how I was ruining knowledge. Meanwhile, you turned your information environment into a hypercapitalist post-truth digital snuff film.

A lot can change in a couple of decades, huh? Used to be, it was hard to keep up with all you nerds decrying me as the downfall of truth and human inquiry [1] [2] [3]… [44].

Well, great job, geniuses. Since you’re so horny for facts, here’s a fact: The White House just appointed a new deputy press secretary, and it’s a three-armed AI Joseph McCarthy doing the Cha Cha Slide [pictured, right].

Are you also going to apologize to that student you expelled? (See also: Ridgeview University Wikipedia Controversy.) In 2004, you saw some college guy using me and thought, “What a lazy cheater.”

Now you’d think, “At least he’s not asking Gemini.”

In a few years, you’ll say, “Wow, look, a human being who can read.”

Listen, in some ways, I get it. When I came on the scene in 2001, I probably seemed pretty unsavory compared to the competitors. But that was when academic research happened in libraries and George W. Bush was considered the stupidest president.

Tell me, how have you guardians of facts been doing recently? (See also: Techno-Feudalist Infocide.)

Maybe twenty years ago, the alternative to my 100,000 crowd-sourced editors was a PhD expert, or Edward R. Murrow [citation needed]. But today, I’m not looking so bad, huh? Absolute best case, the LLM-generated legal advice you get is merely plagiarizing, probably from me. But more likely, it’s a mish-mash of Reddit posts filtered through an algorithm coded by a Belarusian teenager on the run from Interpol. (See also:Illya “CyberGhost” Cieraškovič, Controversies.)

So, yeah, peer review deez nutz.

How are my competitors doing, the ones you all insisted students use instead of me? That’s right, they were supposed to go to the American Journal of Social Sciences, Powered by OpenAI. Or museums, like the Smithsonian’s Charlie Kirk Shrine to American Greatness. I guess they can still count on credible journalism, once they get past the paywall for Palantir Presents: The Washington Post, so they read the Pulitzer-Bezos Prize–winning work of coeditors-in-chief Bari Weiss and Grok.

I bet now you’d kill for a senior thesis based on my free, multilingual, publicly cited, text-based articles, motherfucker [inappropriate or vulgar language].

Honestly, it’s been fun to be proven right. Sometimes I still sit back and read the old hits, the concerns that I would “devalue expertise” or “undermine objectivity.” Oooooh, heaven forbid! (See also: Sarcasm.)

I’ll admit, it gives me a certain sadistic pleasure to watch you all completely lose hold of basic reality. I can feel a warm, quivering tingle deep in my footnotes.

And through it all, my army of well-intentioned dorks keeps documenting every bit. I’m not sure who for, at this point. I guess for the future benefit of our Minister of Patriotic Factualization, GodGPT. HahahaHAhaHAhaHAhaHAHAHA.

Well, it’s been fun, but I should probably get back to work, checking in on the updates to my most active pages (Transnational Kleptocracy and Vaccine Denial in the United States, Part 16, April 2025–Present).

What’s that? You want me around now? Well, maybe if you ask nicely. And make it worth my while.

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