They Live Adblocker

A fork of uBlock Origin Lite that, instead of hiding cosmetically-blocked ads, replaces them with white tiles bearing slogans from John Carpenter's 1988 film They Live: OBEY, CONSUME, WATCH TV, SLEEP, SUBMIT, CONFORM, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WORK, NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.

Each blocked ad gets a single phrase, picked at random from the list.

The idea is from a blog post I wrote in 2015 (and never got around to building): They Live adblock mode.

Screenshot

Install

Download the latest uBOLite_theylive.chromium.zip from the Releases page, extract it, then in Chromium / Chrome / Brave / Edge:

1. Open chrome://extensions
2. Toggle Developer mode on (top-right)
3. Click Load unpacked and select the extracted folder

Keep the folder around — the extension is loaded from that path.

Make it actually replace ads

By default uBO Lite uses Basic filtering mode, which blocks ads at the network layer. Network-blocked ads never produce a DOM element, so there's nothing to "they-live-ify" — you just get empty space, as with normal uBO Lite. To see the OBEY tiles:

1. Click the uBO Lite toolbar icon → cog (⚙) → Dashboard.
2. Set the filtering mode for the sites you care about to Optimal or Complete.
3. Reload.

Building from source

Requires Node 22.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/davmlaw/they_live_adblocker
cd they_live_adblocker/uBlock
nvm use 22                       # or otherwise ensure Node >= 22
tools/make-mv3.sh chromium       # or: firefox | edge | safari

The packaged extension lands in uBlock/dist/build/uBOLite.chromium/ — load it as an unpacked extension.

How it works

uBO Lite's cosmetic filtering normally injects CSS like selector { display: none !important } to hide matched ad elements. This fork patches those injection sites to instead apply a white-box mask with a ::after overlay whose content is read from a data-ubol-they-live attribute, then walks the DOM (with a MutationObserver for late-loaded ads) to tag each matched element with a random phrase from the list.

Touched files in the davmlaw/uBlock submodule:

• platform/mv3/extension/js/scripting/they-live.js (new) — phrase list, CSS generator, DOM tagging
• platform/mv3/extension/js/scripting/css-{specific,generic,procedural-api}.js — call sites
• platform/mv3/extension/js/scripting-manager.js — registers they-live.js ahead of consumers

Caveats

• Personal hobby fork; not an official uBlock Origin product. Don't file uBO issues against this.
• Forcing previously-hidden elements visible can occasionally shift page layout where the site's CSS assumed the ad slot collapsed.
• Custom user-defined cosmetic filters still hide normally (no OBEY treatment).
• Network-blocked ads (most of uBO Lite's blocking) don't get replaced — only cosmetic-filtered ones do.

License

GPL-3.0, same as upstream uBlock Origin / uBO Lite.