Comment by imiric
2 days ago
Advertising is a cancer on society. It corrupts all forms of media, ever since the invention of publishing and broadcasting. The internet is its most lucrative victim yet. It's where they've taken the sociopathic ideas pioneered by Bernays to their maximum expression. It is the most powerful global psychological manipulation machine, influencing everything from what we spend our money on, to how we think and act. It is unequivocally a major cause of the sociopolitical unrest and conflicts we see today. The really insidious part is that most people don't consciously realize they're being manipulated, and are happy to exchange that for some "free" products and services. This has, of course, made many companies very rich, by operating in a dark data broker market exchanging the data we've given them, and more prominently, data they've stolen or inferred from us.
To people working in these companies: you're complicit in the breakdown of society. Grow a moral backbone, quit, and boycott them.
If somebody works for tobacco or predatory lending they are stigmatized. Perhaps we should extend it to people working in advertising or anything causing the major problems in society today. From sugar drinks to algorithmic timelines.
I can assure you that the employees of Altria at least are not stigmatized in their community.
It's well trodden ground already. Bill Hicks had it worked into his routine 30+ years ago.
Advertising is like pollution. Normal people realize they’re getting poisoned, but they still get to where they need to be, so don’t bother to change it.
We need to make collected data and metadata public. If a cabal of advertisers is considered an ethical steward of the information, a public database can’t be much worse. Scare the bejeezus out of moms and pops and watch the tide shift.
I disagree, the problem is the race to the bottom in advertising.
Drugs ads being able to show 30s of the one positive side effect and then spend 0.5s speed talking through all the negative ones is not a fair description of the drug.
Almost every product advertising being here's a celebrity (who has no idea how the product works) using the product without any real description of what the product does. Imagine a car ad that had to show you had to pump gas!? It's like one of the most common things you do with a car.
And other product advertising being 100% vibe based. We're the company of tomorrow! The fuck does that even mean?
Conceptually, you need advertising. How else will you learn about new technology? The problem is that current advertising only teaches you the existence of something and not what it does.
> Conceptually, you need advertising. How else will you learn about new technology?
Check in with trade organizations or whatever? I mean, fundamentally, this is what a sales catalog for a retailer is. That can be, and has been, one of the functions of a store as opposed to a manufacturer selling directly.
I don't think any sane ban on advertising would prevent people from requesting information about new products (which could functionally be ads) which could well include uncompensated reviews in interest magazines or newspapers or whatever.
"This store exists (on your maps app), here are their hours and the category of thing they do, and a link to their website" and once you're on the site, they can go nuts telling you about what they offer.
There is very nearly zero value provided to society by advertising.
I disagree. Who decides the relevant use cases for a given product? How does one handle the unforeseen use cases and advertise those?
In my opinion, ads should be much more limited to brief, factual information to satisfy the “learn about new technology” piece.
“This message is to inform you of a new product, X, made by company Y, intended to do A and B without the side effect of C.”
OK great, taking what you've said as true, what's your solution?
How will one fund the server costs for newspapers, social networks and search engines?
Note that lots of people won't (or mostly can't) pay, so how does a social network work in this case?
> How will one fund the server costs for newspapers, social networks and search engines?
All of these currently exist without advertising. The problem is advertising sucks all of the oxygen out of the room, convincing you it's the only business model because it's so lucrative.
Look around at the businesses that are entirely supported by advertising and ask yourself honestly how worse off we would be if they disappeared overnight. Do you believe that the vacuum they left would never be filled by other business models? Sure, it would probably look a lot different, but that's the point. What we have now is horrible, and I don't think society collapses if we got rid of advertising.
Be careful what you wish for. I hate the current data collection paradigm but advertising allows media to pay their own way and remain independent.
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It's not my place, nor am I smart enough to propose a solution. But if you ask me, I would start with much stricter regulations regarding company transparency, data collection, and data privacy. There are two things making this very unlikely, though:
- Governments and companies are in symbiosis. Companies can influence which laws are passed and how they apply to them, and governments depend on these companies both financially, and practically for their services. Nowhere is this clearer than in the US, where actual CEOs are now running the country.
- The general public doesn't really care about these issues. For most people their data and privacy isn't a concern, and even when it is, it's not a large enough of a concern that they would be willing to stop using these services, or use alternatives. Since advertising/propaganda works on a subconscious level, they're literally brainwashed to not see a problem at all.
So I realistically don't see a way out of this. It would require changes in deeply rooted sociopolitical systems just to get on the right path, and then years of effort to keep us there. And without unanimous public support for all of this, it will never come to pass.
As for alternative business models, that's the least of our problems. Technical solutions for this exist today, and wouldn't be difficult to expand and build upon, but the actual challenge is changing the public perception of what "free" means. The solution likely wouldn't be as profitable for companies as advertising currently is, which is why we would need regulations to force it. When weighing the success of another billion-dollar corporation against our society's mental health and stability, the choice is obvious to me.
> Note that lots of people won't (or mostly can't) pay, so how does a social network work in this case?
If there's not enough consumer demand for a service, and it's not a public utility that's worth funding through taxpayer money to maintain equal access for everyone, the logical, supply-and-demand-based, hundred year-old solution is to just admit it's not a good business idea and move on.
If their leadership teams can't come up with an offering worth paying for, well, tough luck, the list of neat ideas that just didn't atract enough customers is perpetually open.
If (under our current economic system) it is impossible to run generally useful services like that without subjecting their users to advertisements, then clearly, there's something wrong with the economic system itself and we should start investigating alternatives.
The current situation incentives advertising as the only way to monetize something so it's no wonder you want advertising to exist. The fundamental way is always going to be a peer-to-peer network, where you can contribute in so many different ways apart from paying. The majority of the web is filled with people who has no idea on what the original web stood for and frankly, they couldn't care less which is why we are in such a bloated mess
At low cost, like Craigslist?
Businesses not being able to find a sustainable business model is not my problem.
Regardless, I block all of their ads anyway.
Forcing people to fork out money for any product or service they used also made many companies very rich. See Microsoft, Oracle... A very long list. But you're so hyperbolic and hysterical I don't even know where to begin.
There's a world of difference between broadcasting true capabilities of a product or service, and embedding subconscious thoughts into the minds of people to associate a brand with a feeling, in the form of "lifestyle brands", "torches of freedom", etc. The former is informing people about something that exists, while the latter is psychological manipulation straight from propaganda playbooks. Please read about the life and work of Edward Bernays, and this distinction will be clear.
Actual "honest" advertising doesn't exist. Companies that attempt to do that are outcompeted by the vastly superior revenues of companies that don't. The story that marketers tell themselves that they're simply informing the public about a product or service they might not know about is absolute BS. If it were true, large companies like Coca-Cola and McDonald's wouldn't need to advertise at all. The truth is that it's all about constantly molding the public perception of a company in a way that makes them associate it with a positive feeling, so that they will subconsciously choose to give them their money. These are the same tactics used in propaganda, but instead of making people part ways with their money, it makes them think or act in any way that's beneficial to a specific cause.
The language I use is not hyperbolic, analogies aside. It's the only way of describing the insanity of the world we live in, which now resembles in many ways the fictional world novel authors have been writing about for decades. If you want to engage in the discussion, you can start by refuting anything I've said.
> Actual "honest" advertising doesn't exist. Companies that attempt to do that are outcompeted by the vastly superior revenues of companies that don't.
Same with political parties that don't take corporate money (except in sane countries, where this is recognized and forcefully limited).
> you're so hyperbolic and hysterical I don't even know where to begin.
No they aren't.
The situation is just so absurd and extreme, yet normalized, that accurately describing it makes people sound weird. That's why Chomsky speaks in that extreme monotone, to counterbalance the very real horror and extreme nature of the things he is saying.
How does the belief that advertising drives major behaviour change square with 50+ years of psychological research showing that behaviour change is really difficult?
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One small beacon of hope, perhaps, is that I see perspectives like this becoming more common over time. A few years ago there were (anecdotally) way more true believers in the current MO of pervasive profit seeking to the detriment of all else, true believers in the "free market" etc.
It's easy to see how absurd the practice of advertising is if you think about the actual dynamic.
As human beings we all have intentionality. When we want something, we seek it. "Hey, I really need to cut the lawn, let me find a lawnmower"—I'll go out and research lawnmowers to find one that helps me accomplish my intended goal.
Advertising totally inverts this dynamic. Instead, apropos of nothing, some person I don't know and have no relationship with interrupts some other thing I am in the middle of intentionally doing to tell me all about their fancy lawnmowers. At its worst (and most effective) it short circuits my own potential formation of intentions and reshapes my intentions, manipulating me, and at its least effective it's just a completely annoying distraction from what I was originally trying to do. It's horrible and antithetical to any notion of respect and dignity you might ascribe to the limited time of other human beings.