tldr: I think VR is bad news because it will become the ad-infested oppressive MMORPG version of the cyberpunk future written about in books like Snowcrash, and not the idealized romanticized version that you remember reading about in books like Snowcrash.
The VRs of Snowcrash and Neuromancer were ad infested. It would be silly to believe that any system that gets used by millions or billions of people wont have ads. But no one's going to use VR if the ads are ultra annoying. The author doesn't mention what exactly he thinks VR ads would look like.
What is annoying? The level of intrusive advertising that the median North American is subjected to now is annoying to me, as someone born about 40 years ago.
So, no, the ads won't be annoying to people who have been slowly conditioned to think the ads aren't annoying. It's valid to ask whether we, now, want that or not.
Also this:
> It would be silly to believe that any system that gets used by millions or billions of people wont have ads.
Why? Given our current assumptions, perhaps, but why can't we try to innovate socially, as well as technologically?
Better TL;DR: cyberpunk is awful, and its tropes should be taken as a guide for what to avoid. Unfortunately, some small number of highly enthusiastic people in the tech industry haven't noticed they're the only ones who actually wanted to live in a cyberpunk novel.
