Drugs and Adblock Plus shouldn't be in the hands of everyone else

I had a friend - three times married, alcoholic, an intermittent pot-smoker - who left a liberal newspaper to become a leader writer for the Daily Mail, where he was paid pretty well to inveigh against almost all his own vices and pleasures, at least when they were practised by the lower classes. I enjoyed his company, and I enjoyed his hypocrisy, too; but he didn't think of it as hypocritical at all. "It's all right when we do it," he would say, and point to the fact that his children had all found work of one sort or another, and that he and his wives had always worked hard (the wives, I suspect, harder) to mitigate the effects of family breakdown.

Similarly, he had only tried cocaine once, because he recognised that it was a drug he simply couldn't handle at all: his reasoning was that all other drugs made him feel inspired, but in the morning he could see that what he had written with their aid was nonsense. On cocaine he had written quite brilliantly, and he knew that any drug so apparently benevolent must exact a terrible price for its help. That at least made him wiser than Sigmund Freud and far wiser than most of the people who tried it.

My friend argued that the feckless poor, who could not be trusted to look after their children after divorce, nor to eschew cocaine because it improved their prose style, could not be granted the liberties he claimed for himself. I think he was probably happier writing leaders for the Daily Mail than the Independent or even the Guardian.

I thought of him the other day when I was upgrading Adblock Plus, the one indispensable plugin for Firefox. If ever there were an example of a vice that is all right when we do it, but far too good for the great unwashed, adblocking is it. This isn't merely pop-up blocking, now accepted as perfectly normal. But Adblock Plus will block absolutely anything. I have it set to block all animated ads of any sort, as well as most banner ads, Google ads on blogs and anything obtrusively large anywhere. Once you are used to Adblock, using an unprotected browser feels like walking from a library into an amusement arcade. With Adblock Plus, even Ryanair's site just looks like the remains of a big night out frozen on to the pavement, rather than the inside of filthy migraine.

Adblock only works with Firefox, although Opera can quite easily be configured in the same way and the last time I checked, only 340,000 people had downloaded it from the main Mozilla site. So I suppose it is all right when we do it - and, boy, do I do it: there are 127 sites blocked in my Adblock file. But if a hundred times as many people used it there would be no money to be made from the web at all. Even Google would be hurt: though I let its text ads through on the main site, I don't see them on blogs. I specifically block all ads from the papers I read most - the Guardian and the FT - and this is in principle fantastically spiteful behaviour, since if no one saw the Guardian's ads, I would go a whole lot hungrier. Yet I can't resist. I will however pay for content online, which is unusual: I have an annual subscription to the FT. But I won't put up with ads that I can't ignore.

This looks one of the most unexpected moral dilemmas of the internet. Using Adblock Plus violates the categorical imperative, since I certainly wouldn't want everyone to act as I do: on the other hand, the internet or even the economy would not be in the tiniest bit improved if I stopped using it. And - if using it is so dangerous - should I really be writing an article which will lead all sensible readers to download it and try it out?

But there is a simple, depressing, and completely unphilosophical solution to this conundrum: it turns out that most people can't be bothered to modify their browsers. Unless Adblock Plus were given away by someone with the reach of Microsoft or Google, it will remain of interest only to the nerds. And, of course, neither Microsoft nor Google would do anything so destructive of their own ecosystem. Even Opera, which had the feature first, never advertised it at all. There isn't really a parallel to my old friend on the Daily Mail, because - hard as it is for a geek to believe - most people get more pleasure out of sex and drugs than from fiddling with their web browsers.