While I clearly generally do agree with you--this is why I have that second paragraph about pervasive DRM being the enemy here--and have spent much of my life fighting DRM in various ways, I will at least try to offer you a ray of hope: building functional DRM gets much harder as the analog loophole gets stronger, and now that we are nearly at (not quite, but so damned close to) being able to strap a "retina" screen over our eyes and implement real-time AR on our perceptions, to build DRM that functions is going to end up requiring AI detectives that suss out whether we are actually there or not... it will be ridiculous if we get to the point where instead of merely putting a piece of tape over our webcam we find ourselves having to hang a tiny screen in front of it designed to pretend to the computer that we are awake / present / not wearing a headset.

Indeed, that's the endgame. End-to-end DRM, and there's enough money behind it that it will happen. I've been advocating heavily against DRM for many years now and nobody cares. Occassionally when somebody has a need in the moment where they are annoyed, and I explain "you can't share <thing> with your spouse/sibling/friend because DRM" they will say something like, "oh yeah, that's annoying" but just continue paying for DRM-ed media.

Unless perhaps people boycott, but that sure ain't gonna happen (in anywhere near large enough numbers to make a difference), Apple, Google, and Microsoft will build it into their platforms, and anyone not on the big three will be unable to consume more and more as time goes on, including most web browsing. It won't happen overnight. It will be an iterative/progressive encroachment where just a little changes each day. Boiling frogs and all that.

I not only do understand that DRM is what fights against ad blockers and would inherently be expanded (and that that would suck), that was my point: remember that I was responding to someone who was anti-AI as they felt AI marks the end of ad blockers, and yet I think the opposite is true. The consequences of these wars playing out in either direction and whether you like the result is a different scope, one where I don't even disagree with much of what you are saying...

...with two (small) exceptions: you fail to analyze a world where we all end up having to just pay for content as we access it--which is what I want: I also pay for all of the electricity I use and somehow the world doesn't end in the hell people insist microtransactions would cause--and (as I detail in another comment in this thread) I think technological solutions to DRM actually will have a hard time winning vs. AR passthrough ad block technology (though I then think the DRM war continues using legal means like expansions of Section 1201 to make it further illegal to traffic in circumvention tech... which is also bad).