Comment by gcp123
4 months ago
I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry.
The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings painfully true. The mechanical difference between getting someone to buy sneakers versus vote for a candidate is surprisingly small.
What's frustrating is how the tech community keeps treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease. We debate content moderation policies and algorithmic transparency, but rarely question the underlying attention marketplace that makes manipulation profitable in the first place.
The uncomfortable truth: most of us in tech understand that today's advertising systems are fundamentally parasitic. We've built something that converts human attention into money with increasingly terrifying efficiency, but we're all trapped in a prisoner's dilemma where nobody can unilaterally disarm.
Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making.
Is this proposal radical? Absolutely. But sometimes the Overton window needs a sledgehammer.
P.S. If you are curious about the relationship between Sigmund Freud, propaganda, and the origins of the ad industry, check out the documentary “Century of the Self”.
> imagine a world without advertising
I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable.
It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies.
And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
I see this dynamic in tech all the time:
"We'd like to pay/invest in you tremendous amounts of money to make X more efficient": yes, absolutely we know what X is and we understand scaling it is immensely valuable and fundamentally changes everything.
"We'd like to regulate X, making it safer, and therefore harder or even impossible to do": that's ridiculous, you could always do X, what even is X anyway, don't tread on me, yadda yadda.
It's so transparent to me now, and I've passed this curse onto you.
Nothing else in law works this way. No definition is ironclad. This is what legislators, agencies, and courts are for. We all know this.
One reason why the definition is more important when it comes to outlawing behavior is that when you get it wrong you are actually preventing people from doing something that is important and valuable to them.
Ironically this is something lawyers and judges would pick up on immediately. You need an underlying principle of harm that can be applied consistently.
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The difference is that often, particular things are more concretely defined. A ban on advertising might be so onerous you wouldn't even be able to 'advertise' your FOSS projects on HN.
In what way could you learn about novel commercial things in the absence of advertising? Word of mouth alone?
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Out of all of HN’s biases, the violent hatred of advertising is by far one of the most misguided.
Human attention is scarce. Demand for that attention is endless. Scarcity + demand creates a natural market by default, meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely (vs just regulating with guardrails). Disrupting natural markets with authoritarianism usually ends up worse than any downsides of the decentralized market regulation of that scarcity. Instead of something that attempts to land on fairness (even if imperfect), no market at all guarantees unfairness.
Advertising puts a price on the scarce commodity of attention in broad strokes, and it not always, but generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser get seen over lower value messages in any given situation (because those are the ones that can afford the market clearing price on said advertising). I know, please respond with all of your “all these times it didn’t work like that!” throw-the-baby out-with-the-bathwater Anecdotes.
Like all markets, we should regulate advertising to ensure it doesn’t get out of control. But to ban it outright would require an extreme policing of all speech at all levels of society.
Hence why this is a non-serious, silly idea.
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What you can do relatively easily is to control the physical format of advertising. For example, consider how rare "billboards" are outside of the USA. Or towns in various places that prohibit signage that is not in the same plane as the edge of the building (i.e. no sticky-outy signs).
Or for that matter, consider Berlin, which has banned all non-cultural advertising on public transportation. Yes, there's some edge cases that are tricky, but overall the situation doesn't seem too fraught.
You start conservatively, and set up a watchdog to investigate loopholes and punish those abusing them. Fund an astroturfing campaign? Congrats, that's 10 years and a hefty fine to fund the continued operation of the watchdog. You can make promotional material and publish it, but it has to be clearly labeled and opt-in, not bundled with access to something else. The problem isn't small-time promotion that's difficult or impossible to crack down on, it's that we've built a whole attention economy. So long as we make it a bad value proposition for big players we'll have succeeded.
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Billboards being rare outside of the US seems quite incorrect. The developing world is full of billboards, and places in Europe like Milan have some wild Samsung billboards.
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That is requiring advertisers to set the HTTP evil bit. If advertising is fine, they're happy to make it obvious that something is an ad. If you ban that, suddenly it'll all be astroturf campaigns and product placement. I'd be surprised if banning billboards caused advertising budgets to drop.
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Agree, that'd totally work - things like "billboards" or "ads on public transport" are possible to define and regulate. Advertising on the web would be much harder, I'd like to hear a good proposed rule on that.
Sadly, a post titled "A proposal to restrict certain forms of advertizing", and full of boring rules will be much less likely to get 800+ points on HN.
I saw plenty of billboards in London and Paris last summer. Where is this magical place in the world that has lots of people but no billboards?
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> Or towns in various places that prohibit signage that is not in the same plane as the edge of the building (i.e. no sticky-outy signs).
In many places where these signs are banned, old grandfathered-in examples have become beloved heritage landmarks.
The musée Carnavallet in Paris has a fascinating exhibit on the city's history based entirely on old business advertising signs.
An example here in Vancouver: https://vancouversun.com/news/whats-the-future-bow-mac-sign-...)
I detest a lot of modern forms of advertising as much as the next guy, but at the same time I think we'd be choking off a lot of interesting and enriching human expression by trying to remove it entirely.
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That’s exactly right. Even if ad banning isn’t 100% doable, we’d be better off with it done 80%.
All-or-nothing thinking is so common in HN that it’s seriously over-complicating simple problems by trying to find a perfect solution. Such an ideal solution is rarely necessary.
> Or for that matter, consider Berlin, which has banned all non-cultural advertising on public transportation.
Why have I not heard about this. Is this a recent thing?
Billboards are banned in the state of Hawaii.
> It's impossible. How do you even define advertising?
Seems you're insistent on letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. This is precisely why judges exist. It would not be difficult to define Ads well enough to cover 99% of current advertising. Sure there will be gray areas. Advertisers will adapt. But it would make it profoundly more expensive, difficult and risky.
I'm not sure I understand a concrete economic argument other than "anything which makes it harder for businesses to be wildly profitable off minimal value hurts the economy". But that only really holds of you define the economy by things like GDP, which really just capture how wildly profitable companies are and have almost no bearing on quality of life for the people; in other words, the argument is circular.
A sign on the front of a store is advertising. If we ban these how will you even know what stores there are downtown?
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>I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable. It's impossible. How do you even define advertising?
No ads in TV programming. No product placement in movies. No billboards. No subway or bus station advertising posters. No paid recommending of specific products. No promotional material for products - nothing with fictional elements. No web ads. No sponsored links. No social media ads. No paid reviews.
(you could still do some of those covertly, with "under the table" money, but then if you caught you get fined or go to jail)
No tracking consuming preferences of any kind, not even if you have an online store. Just a database of past purchases on your own store - and using them for profiling via ML should be illegal too.
If people want to find out about a product, they can see it on your company's website (seeking it directly), or get a leaflet from you. In either case no dramatized / finctional / aspirational images or video should be shown.
>And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
You're removing cancer.
Are products allowed to have labels? Am I allowed to tell my friends I like a product? What if I put a video on youtube and accidentally include a brand name in it?
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> If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes.
This would result in a better world still, without the authoritarian system you describe. No need to get it perfect the first try, just start small.
For an example of this in action, drive through any of the US states that do not allow billboards.
Many complex problems can become easier if we can accept that the solutions can be malleable and designed to adapt. We just don’t really apply that to laws for the most part.
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But how do you define advertising. What about social media influencers? How to prevent someone from paying people to promote stuff? What if it is forbidden and then only a bad government can promote their agenda, but anyone else cannot.
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One would never reach zero. And it would be challenging both to define and police laws against advertising. But to get to a world with drastically less advertisements than today seems doable.
So we want the government to decide what is advertising and propaganda? Is telling people about the wrongs of government propaganda? Is going door to door about have you made Jesus the head of your life propaganda?
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> you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
I don't see how you reached this conclusion, unless you think advertising/propaganda yields bet positive outcomes more than net negative, which seems contentious.
Here's one way it could be false: the wisdom of the crowds only really works when groups of people independently reach their own conclusions, because people who don't understand an issue are randomly distributed around the correct answer and so they all cancel each other out, leaving only the people who do understand an issue to cluster around the correct decision.
Propaganda/advertising works directly against this, thus undercutting the usefulness of the wisdom of crowds.
In Vermont, we have banned outdoor advertising (billboards) for over 50 years with no such issues.
It's hilarious that you think that advertising is actually necessary for economic prosperity. If anything, it's probably a net drain on it.
I think the article mentions banning “sold advertising”, which seems like a fair way to go about it. You can still advertise your own stuff, but you cannot pay a marketplace to do it for you any more. Advertising would by necessity become a lot more local.
How would I advertise my app? Or my TV brand?
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There's two kinds of advertising: your local mom and pop running a labor day sale in the local paper, and megacorps spending billions of dollars advertising soda and roblock lootcrates or whatever to kids, or plastering every square inch of public and private space with maximally attention-seeking posters and billboards.
One of these is good and one is bad.
That's the tough part - drawing precise line. There's lots of points between megacorps and local mnps.
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It’s impossible to live in a world without murder, and murder is difficult to precisely define and identify, and yet neither of those are good reasons to oppose making murder illegal.
Don’t let perfect become the enemy of good. I spent 5+ years living in Hawaii, where just billboards are illegal. I can’t quantify the effect but qualitatively, it’s something I dearly miss in the concrete hell of Southern California.
> How do you even define advertising?
Almost everyone can tell when they’re being advertised to. And almost everyone can tell when they advertise. Effectiveness of such bans would depend on enforcement, the definition is clear enough.
> the definition is clear enough.
It really isn't though. There's so many different forms that we can't reduce it to "I know it when I see it" territory and depend on case-by-case enforcement.
Do we ban outdoor billboards? Product placement? Content marketing? Public relations? Sponsor logos on sports uniforms? Brand logos on retail clothing? Mailing lists?
I do love the idea, but doubt its feasibility. Implementation would have to be meticulous, and I expect the advertising industry would always be one step ahead in an endless race of interpretation. We can still try to curtail the most disruptive forms though, we don't have to destroy all advertising at once to make a positive difference.
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>How do you even define advertising?
You nailed it man. My first response even to the headline let alone the article was to reflect on the first line spoken by my professor in my first marketing class: "Marketing is about educating the consumer." Advertising is just one way we attempt to do that, and taken to an extreme, I have no idea how you could ever make it stop. The article is clearly focused on one part of advertising, but even then, someone will always build a better mousetrap.
Vermont seems to have figured this out with billboards. So clearly it is not as impossible as you are making it out to be.
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Perhaps just banning algorithmic advertising would be enough?
No public facing advertising. At all.
No sponsored advertising. At all.
If advertising "skirts through the loopholes", fine - at least we'll recognise it as underground (like darknet now). The liberal version, I don't even understand how you got there so won't comment. That was wild.
And you seem to ignore the issue the OP mentions about not being able to unilaterally disarm.
It's easy if you try. But you won't try ... what a shame.
Ban farmer's markets
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> How do you even define advertising?
You don't define "advertising". You look for things that advertisers do and see if they can be made illegal or unprofitable.
Formula 1 cars used to have displays for tobacco products. At one point, the law in Europe started saying "you can not do that", so tobacco advertisements disappeared.
Advertising is unsolicited content which attempts to trigger or nudge a behaviour.
There should be a limit on the quantity of advertising. Limited to like 100 people a day on average. We already have anti-spam laws.
There would still be advertising but it would be from people from your own communities instead of big corporations.
> Advertising is unsolicited content which attempts to trigger or nudge a behaviour.
So I'm listening to the radio, and one minute I'm hearing someone on NPR (or an equivalent public broadcaster) explaining how to make my back healthier; the next minute there's someone trying to convince me that some product will make my back healthier.
Which one is advertising and which one is not?
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This is just the nirvana fallacy. We need to do our best.
Even if the authoritarianism to enforce it weren't by itself undesirable, banning advertising creates a situation where incumbents (known names) have a significant advantage over new entrants to a market.
It's worth analyzing why a society wants that and who benefits from it.
>banning advertising creates a situation where incumbents (known names) have a significant advantage over new entrants to a market.
The article almost explicitly states that this is precisely the goal. We all understand who those populists in 2016 are, who "bypass traditional media gatekeepers and deliver tailored messages to susceptible audiences".
So I think we are not talking about authoritarianism here, but full-fledged totalitarianism. Such a policy is a powerful lever of control, allowing government to obtain even more levers. And in the end people still vote "wrongly" (spoiler: they are voting "wrongly" not because of some Russian advertisement on facebook), but the government at that point will not care anymore how people vote because that will not affect anything.
> It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies.
This is just the perfect solution fallacy.
Nobody in this conversation thinks there's a set of laws that would work perfectly to prevent all advertising. That doesn't mean it can't be a hell of a lot better than it is. Playing whack-a-mole with loopholes and making careful regulations to avoid inhibiting human rights is still a huge improvement over letting corporations trample human rights at will.
> It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies.
I've been on the advertising, is an evil parasite around useful transactions bandwagon for a while and thought this was really hard to define properly.
So far my best take is around that what's good is being discoverable instead of something that you run into. This allows people to do what they want, without the evil side of unconsciously or in-competitively driving them to your business/deals.
This is a classic case of perfect being the enemy of good.
We don't need to 1984 listen to every conversation for any hints at product endorsement. We can start with obvious things - for example, prohibiting a company from spending money on marketing. Banning ads on the air, whatever.
There's levels to this. There's really evil slot machine marketing. You know, try to get people addicted to your social media and use that addiction as a way to generate profit. And then there's not so bad marketing. Like my friend telling me he likes his new pair of pants.
Well, I think the point is your friend can still tell you he likes his new pair of pants, he just can't be a paid actor.
I think you’d do better banning the sale of advertising than the purchase.
Demand-side is a mess and hard to draw the line. It’s not a perfect / good thing, it’s a feasibility thing.
There is no reason it has to be so immoral, annoying, and evil. There could be a whole gamified system where people who choose to voluntarily participate can find things they want to buy from people eager to sell
I don't know about 'advertising', but Bahai don't allow campaigning when running for leadership position. I would imagine it would be some where along line of that. It encourage action speakers louder than words.
With all the modern techniques (used by neurosciences) in the modern advertising is pretty all entrainment and brain washing at this point any way. So no harm in making all that illegal. I'm pretty ok with a world with no advertising, and just function by word of mouth and network of trust.
> you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
What is your evidence that there is any economic advantage at all to have unregulated advertising?
I'm fairly sure advertising is regulated in all sovereign states. And I am also quite certain that the jurisdictions in which gambling advertisement is illegal fare better economically than those in which it is illegal. It only makes sense: gambling is not productive, the less of it you have the better your population spend their money on productive things, the more advertising you have the more people spend on gambling (otherwise what is the point of advertising?), if you forbid gamling advertising there will be less gambling advertising (if not, what is your complaint even?).
Nothing about this statement of yours makes sense.
>> imagine a world without advertising
> I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable.
I don't know, in my country advertising tobacco products is forbidden since at least 20 years, how did they pull this magic trick?? go figure
For the same reason weights and measures legislation is of course impossible.
This is why every time you go to the shops you have to carry your own standard weights and balance scale! The idea that society could regulate the weight and volume of every product in every shop is simply preposterous!
Advertising is a nuance of action in the informational world the way combat is a nuance of action in the physical world.
We can draw the line between an aggressive blow and a firm handshake. We can distinguish that.
We will figure out how to distinguish manipulatory mindfucking from regular conversation too.
I don’t think that’s the issue. Whatever advertising is, it’s clearly been industrialized by technology in ways that
a) did not exist 100 years ago
b) can be limited in effectiveness by removing that technology
> And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
Does advertising confer an economic advantage?
"It's impossible. How do you even define advertising?"
"How do you define it?" is an oft-repeated and weak argument against regulation used by online commenters who likely are defending a self-interest in maintaining tha status quo behaviour of so-called "tech" companies.
Online advertising services are obviously capable of being defined as these are bought by advertisers and sold by so-called "tech" companies every day. These so-called "tech" companies define "products" and "services", offered for "free", all the time. The commercial purpose is facilitation of online advertising. This can be regulated.
Before the internet was opened to the public, commercial use was prohibited. Today, HN commenters would no doubt try to suggest that defining what is and is not "commercial use" would be "impossible". But it's too late. It was already done.
The uncomfortable truth for so-called "tech" companies is that _any_ regulation that affects the ability to collect data, conduct surveillance and assist the injection of advertising into people's "user experience" could have a significant impact on their "business model". Hence they try to argue _any_ regulation is unworkable. All-or-nothing. Perfect, 100% solution or nothing at all.
But regulation does not have to define _all_ advertising. It may only define advertising that meets certain criteria. All-or-nothing thinking is nonsensical in this context. By analogy, when so-called "tech" companies propose alleged "solutions" for privacy issues, do they propose one solution that offers total, complete "privacy". How do we even define "privacy". What they propose is usually some incremental improvement.
It is possible to limit online advertising through rules and regulations. Of course this is a unacceptable proposition for so-called "tech" companies. Their only viable "business model" depends on usurping the bandwidth of internet subscribers for surreptitious, unwanted data collection, real-time surveillance and online advertising.
It's impossible, that's why you still see all those cigarette advertisements everywhere.
As a fantasy it sounds nice but it immediately hits the wall of the 1st amendment.
Amplified messaging from corporations is not the same as the free speech of individuals. Just as we disallow advertising for cigarettes and hard liquor on TV, a democratic society should be free to select other classes of messages that corporations are not permitted to amplify into public spaces.
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How is that? There are lots of things that are illegal that are just “speech”.
Fraud, threats, impersonation, etc etc.
It doesn't sound nice. It sounds utterly insane and totalitarian.
There is such a disturbing element of society that seems to want to "save democracy" by any means necessary. By "save democracy" they mean get the election results they want, in other words it has nothing at all to do with democracy.
They just want power.
"We should ban advertising so the people I agree with can have absolute power" is really what these insane people are saying.
Yeah unfortunately Citizens United really did a number on the judicial stance on funded “speech”
> It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes.
It's quite easy though. Just remove incentives to advertise. Remote the possibility of profit. Will it destroy the economy? Of course, but the advertising will cease.
I grew up in a communist country. There was some advertising (in TV, radio, magazines; very little outdoor), but since all the profits went to the state anyway, there was no real competition, and also often shortages, the advertising was not really serious. It didn't influence people a lot. It was harmless.
Of course there was a lot of communist propaganda in the media, in the schools and workplaces, outdoor banners etc., and that is advertising too. But also this was already at the stage when nobody took it seriously anymore.
hey why try to do anything ever, people will just find a way around it and it will be worse than if we did nothing. lets make murder legal, fewer people will get killed i guess
>> imagine a world without advertising
> I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable.
What? I have world peace on my devices right now with the help of Ublock Origin.
If my county bans billboards, as the county next to me have, I will see no ads except for on paper I choose to.
We cant define the beginning and end of human life/consciousness, and we've regulated it for thousands of years. That it is hard to define does not make it impossible to control
>> imagine a world without advertising > I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable. > It's impossible. How do you even define advertising?
Yet, in some countries advertising for tobacco or alcohol is banned, if it's possible to ban these advertising for these product why would it be impossible to ban every advertising.
> And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
Uh? You can advertise in these other nation but they also won't be able to advertise in your country, so I don't understand your point.
There was almost no advertising in my country when I was 7. I live in Poland and till 1989 it was communist puppet state of USSR (not through our choice, obviously, so the moment we could - we noped out of it).
There was no point advertising because there was no competition, all the companies were nationalized and no matter how well or badly they did - their employees earned the same. If you persuaded people to buy your washing powder instead of the other available washing powder - that just means the queues for your washing powder will be longer.
There was A LOT of communist and anti western propaganda tho. But no advertising is perfectly possible.
I live in Ukraine, and we still suffer from soviet limitations on advertisement and entrepreneurs. Every time when govt and parliament need to make some urgent reform, nobody could predict, what will really happen - as they could just raise taxes, or deform some industry with some unreal regulations, and only in few cases implement some adequate, for example synchronize with EU regulations.
For example, for banks appear problem, people avoid to pay credits, so need some enforcement - powers approved confiscation of property to pay credit, but with exceptions of unprotected people, so bank cannot confiscate from pensioners, when child registered in property, and few others, so literally huge percent of citizens now protected from banks, and this new law is step back, not progress.
Eh, even if you exclude any potential side effects like that I don't see it being workable. I believe advertising as done today is _mostly_ a zero sum game, but without any advertising at all, it's going to be _really_ hard to find out about stuff!
> that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
What? How? Advertising isn't a good or service. About the only way I could see it economically being damaging is if you subscribe to the "broken windows" theory of economics.
If advertising isn't a service, why do so many people pay for this, uh, "non-service"?
Advertising tells me what goods and services are available, and at what prices. This is a service.
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“GET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAY” with a dopamine megaphone in your bedroom“
If you can’t imagine it, try a bit harder. We can build a better world, but it takes effort.
Would you be interested in making a comment that adds to the conversation, instead of whatever this was? The person you're replying to identified constraints that prevent him from imagining it - any system for restricting advertisements will either be permissive enough that it's ineffective, or strict enough that it will be abused for political reasons. This sounds like a reasonable concern.
Can you imagine a realistic way around this issue?
The problem is the harder you try to imagine it, the less it looks like a better world.
Letting people communicate freely is a good thing in its own right, and fundamental to so many other good things we enjoy. Getting rid of a billboard for something I am never going to buy sounds great, but it kinda sucks for the person who actually is interested in the thing that billboard is advertising. Even if there were some type of advertising that provided no benefit to any part of society, the restriction on the freedom to communicate those advertisements is something that harms all of us.
Sometimes the part of building a better world that takes the most effort is recognizing where we already have.
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Agree with this entirely. In fact, I would go as far as saying if advertising was illegal, then expressing opinions would be illegal. Everything is an advertisement.
Reductio ad absurdum? I want to live in a world where we understand the difference between opinion and sales.
There's a fairly clear line between opinion and advertisement. For instance, one is paid for and the other is given freely.
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That parallel between propaganda and advertising is why I have a pathological hatred of advertising, I block it in all forms possible, to the extent that if I can’t block it I won’t use the product.
I simply hate been manipulated.
So much so that I forget what the modern tech landscape is like for the average user til I use one of their devices.
We’ve (collectively we for techies) helped create a dystopia.
100% agree.
I am happy to pay for an ad-free version of a product I want but I will never use your product if I cannot block or remove the ads.
Blocking the advertising itself only shields you from the advertising, it still lets these services set up the underlying surveillance/advertising system that harms society (and you) in the long run.
Of course it's not always possible, but it would be ideal to use services that don't have advertisements for anybody.
I am the same exact way.
When I visit my parents it's eye opening how much advertising they're bombarded with daily.
Isn't Hacker News for advertising for Y Combinator and topics which are important to Y Combinator?
You don't have to drive every argument/position to its logical extreme ...
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It's not a well-enough-thought-out proposal to call "radical"; it assumes that making advertising illegal would make advertising go away and that there would be no drawbacks to this. Even if we all agree that it's bad for people to say things they're paid to say instead of what they really believe, there are many possible approaches to writing specific laws to diminish that practice. Those approaches represent different tradeoffs. You can't say anything nontrivial about the whole broad set of possible policy proposals.
To me it sounds a lot like "What if we made drugs illegal?"
> it assumes that making advertising illegal would make advertising go away
It would? I don't understand why you and others see this as a hard law to craft or enforce (probably not constitutional in the US).
The very nature of advertising is it's meant to be seen by as many people as possible. That makes enforcement fairly easy. We already have laws on the books where paid advertising/sponsorship must be clear to the viewer. That's why google search results and others are peppered with "this is an ad".
> To me it sounds a lot like "What if we made drugs illegal?"
Except drugs/alcohol can be consumed in secret and are highly sought after. The dynamic is completely different. Nobody really wants to see ads and there's enough "that's illegal" people that'd really nerf the ability of ads to get away with it.
There's not going to be ad speakeasies.
Well, I agree that for the most part consumers try to minimize their exposure to advertising, but not always. Some extreme examples of commercial advertising that was or is highly sought after by its target audience include eBay listings, Craigslist posts, the Yellow Pages, classified ads, the Sears catalog, job offer postings, the McMaster–Carr catalog, Computer Shopper before the internet was widely accessible, and "product reviews" by reviewers who got the product for free. So it seems likely that there would, in fact, be "ad speakeasies".
But let's consider the other side of this:
> I don't understand why you and others see this as a hard law to [...] enforce
Suppose we consider the narrowest sort of thing we'd get the most benefit out of prohibiting, like memecoin pump-and-dump scams, which are wildly profitable for the promoters but provide no benefit at all to the buyers, so nobody goes looking for. We can get a preview of what that prohibition would look like by looking at the current state of affairs, because those are already illegal.
And what we see are fake Elon Musk live streams with deepfaked mouth movements, fake Elon Musk Twitter accounts that reply to his followers, prominent influencers like Javier Milei for no apparent reason touting memecoins they claim to have no stake in themselves, prominent influencers like Donald Trump touting memecoins they openly have stakes in, etc. I haven't heard about any memecoins making ostensibly unpaid product placement appearances in novels or Hollywood movies (probably crime thrillers) but it wouldn't surprise me.
How about sports stars? Today it's assumed that if a sportsball player is wearing a corporate logo, it's because the company is paying him to wear it. Suppose this were prohibited; players would have to remove or cover up the Nike logos on their shoes. Probably fans would still want to know which brand of shoes they were wearing, wouldn't they? Sports journalists would publish investigative journalism showing that one or another player wore Nike Airs, drank Gatorade, or used Titleist golf balls, and the fans would lap it up. How could you prove Titleist didn't give the players any consideration in return?
A lot of YouTubers now accept donations of arbitrary size from pseudonymous donors, often via Patreon. In this brave new world they would obviously be prohibited from listing the donors' pseudonyms, but what if Apple were to pseudonymously donate large amounts to YouTubers who reviewed Apple products favorably? The donees wouldn't know their income stream depended on Apple, but viewers would still prefer to watch the better-funded channels who used better cameras, paid professional video editors, used more informative test equipment, and had professional audio dubs into their native language. Which would, apparently quite organically, be the ones that most strongly favored Apple. Would you prohibit pseudonymous donations to influencers?
Commercial advertising is in fact prohibited at Burning Man, which is more or less viable because commerce is prohibited there. You have to cover up the logos on your rental trucks, though nobody is imprisoned or fined for violating this, and it isn't enforced to the extent of concealing hood ornaments and sneaker logos. But one year there was a huge advertising scandal, where one of the biggest art projects that year, Uchronia ("the Belgian Waffle") was revealed after the fact to be a promotional construction for a Belgian company that builds such structures commercially. (I'm sure there have been many such controversies more recently, but I haven't been able to attend for several years, so I don't know about them.)
Let's consider a negative-space case as well: Yelp notoriously removed negative reviews from businesses' listings if they signed up for its service. We can imagine arbitrarily subtle ways of achieving such effects, such as YouTube suggesting less often that users watch a certain video if it criticizes Google or a YouTube supporter (such as the US government) or if it speaks favorably of a competing service. How do you prohibit that kind of advertising in an enforceable way? Do you prohibit Yelp from removing reviews from the site?
Hopefully this clarifies some of the potential difficulties with enforcing a ban on advertising, even to people who don't want to be advertised to.
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I thought drug laws were a fine example, but let's look at another. It's illegal to bribe politicians. Does that mean there is no grift in Washington?
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There are no drawbacks to making advertising illegal as long as the laws are written conservatively. Point out one. Notably "it won't actually prevent all advertising" isn't a downside--preventing, say, 80% of advertising is a heck of an improvement.
And FFS let's skip past the childish "how will people find out about products???" nonsense. You're an adult, use your brain. Consumer Reports exists, and in the absence of advertising that sort of content would flourish.
I note that you, too, have failed to make a policy proposal that is concrete enough to discuss usefully.
If only 80% of advertising were illegal, probably Consumer Reports could continue to exist, although they would be exposed to some legal risk of being ruled to be illegal advertising, probably prompted by a letter to the Attorney General from a company whose products they reviewed poorly or neglected to review at all. Stricter regimes like most of those being proposed here would make it difficult for CR to discover the existence of products to review.
But possibly you are thinking of a different structure of regulation than I am, rather than just failing to think through its unintended consequences. It's impossible to tell if your proposal stays so vague.
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Current administration already made a bunch of radical decisions. What's another one?
> The uncomfortable truth: most of us in tech understand that today's advertising systems are fundamentally parasitic.
Which was obvious at every step of the journey. Google was, is, and always will be an advertising platform. Advertising was, is, and always will be the manipulation of human emotions and desires for the purpose of corporate profit. This is not a good thing! How did you ever justify this to yourself?
I’ve had recruiters push the poker machine jobs, the ad jobs, the high frequency trader jobs… You get to look at the business before taking the job; work for better people. No shade on anyone who’s there because they just need a job, but if you have a choice, pick something better.
> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making.
We would no longer be tricked into buying a bunch of crap that doesn't make us happy.
But because GDP is what it is, we will have a recession. Quite a big one, because a lot of the economy is reliant on selling people stuff they could do without. Perhaps people would be happier once things settle down, but we have locked ourselves into measuring things that are easy to measure, and so we're all going to think it was a failed experiment.
> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising.
While we're at radical thought experiments combine that with "what if any entity worth over 100 million (insert arbitrary limit here, perhaps what if it was based on an multiple of average employee salary) was disallowed".
And, in fact, if the maximum company size were limited, and thus the marketplace wasn't a swimming pool full of whales, but instead full of a much larger number of a broader mix of smaller fish, what would advertising look like then?
For example, large categories of industry would have to change hugely into cooperative non-owning groups of smaller companies. Would they still have the same advertising dominance, or would the churn within the groups break things up?
I'd rather cap salaries than company sizes. The logistics of certain industries may naturally require more manpower than others and put them at a disadvantage.
But someone earning $10m a year while their workers are on food stamps is unacceptable. Having a dynamic limit of total comp would mean they either take less money and put it into the company, or raise the wages of those employees.
Sure it's just a thought experiment.
But even in the strict context of the experiment for very heavy industry, like a steel mill or chip fab, they could be co-operatively owned in whole or by parts.
You could also extend the experiment to allow capital assets to be discounted, or allow worker-owned shares to be discounted. So you can get big, but only by building or by sharing, respectively.
Obviously the big industries today would not be possible as they are structured. But what would we get instead? Would the co-operative overhead kill efficiency dead, or would the dynamism in the system produce higher overall efficiency and better worker outcomes than behemoths hoarding resources and hoovering up competition? And if no one can be worth over 100 million (say), what would that do to the lobbying and deal-making system at the higher levels? One 10-billionaire would have be be replaced by 100 people.
> But someone earning $10m a year while their workers are on food stamps is unacceptable
So you get the main company with salaries from $1m-10m, they subcontract their operations to a company with salaries of $100k-1m which manage the cleaning contracts, and the people doing the work are just gig workers on less than $10 an hour.
But the main company doesn't have the CEO:worker imbalance
I like the direction but some things are difficult to imagine happening at all without extremely large companies.
I have wondered before about restricting a company’s diversity. Effectively giving a time limit after a company over a certain size develops a new line of business by which it must be spun off into a new company. Say 12 or 18 months.
For example, Apple would have been allowed to develop and launch Apple Music but it would have been forced to spin it off.
The rule would need to be carefully crafted, and would need regulators to be active in enforcement as it would require interpretation to be applied (similar to how anti-trust works today, perhaps).
Is it really that hard to imagine "large companies not diversifying"?
Large companies diversifying is the unnatural thing. Why on earth should Apple do music, or Amazon do video? It's manipulating their monopoly positions, it's almost inherently anti-competitive, etc.
Just because antitrust in the US at least is so wimpy (exclusively looking for "consumer harm") there's no reason sane antitrust couldn't also protect ... competition itself, in the form of smaller players etc.
I don't think there's a single industry that merits the bloated conglomerates that rule the earth today, whether it's mining, autos, chips. It's just that capitalism inherently centralizes, and capitalism runs the show.
It's better to limit companies by number of employees, not worth. That way, you break up the economy into modular components that humans can more easily understand (and whose outputs can be used by other companies). Also, it pushes for more efficiency. And it lowers barriers to entry.
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> framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters.
They're not the same mechanism, they're the same thing. Propaganda is advertising one doesn't approve of, and advertising is propaganda that one does approve of. The fine-slicing is the result of people who want to make money doing propaganda attempting to justify themselves.
> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow.
Through what mechanism? Wishes?
I'm getting annoyed with people who made a bunch of money in advertising talking about banning advertising (or in general people who made a bunch of money in X trying to create careers as X-bashing pundits or gurus.) Advertising has a purpose; it's how I find out what products and services are available, and at what cost. People working in advertising who don't realize that have clearly never given the only honest aspect of their occupation a moment's thought. They thought the job was to distract people while robbing them. From that perspective, I can understand why they now think that they themselves should have been banned.
If you want to ban advertising, you have to replace advertising. We have a highway system, there's no reason why we can't have a state products and services that are available system, or in the same vein a matchmaking system between employees and employers. We don't, though. Banning advertising without one would be like banning Human Resources departments without any other hiring process.
What we should do is regulate advertising, since is is commercial speech and we can, but we don't do that either. Talking about banning advertising when we can't even ban direct to customer drug advertisements (which can be easily done, as it was done, by creating standards for the information that has to be included with a drug advertisement, and the format that it has to be done in.) We can't even get the basics; banning advertising, in addition to being a bad idea, is a pipe dream.
> Advertising has a purpose; it's how I find out what products and services are available, and at what cost.
When I am unable to avoid it (which I’m relatively successful at), it’s how I explicitly decide what to avoid. See an ad, penalise the company.
But yet I have no trouble finding and evaluating products when I actually need something.
Search engines, real and virtual marketplaces, word of mouth, reviews all exist already, and all can work without paid shenanigans.
There’s no need to replace advertising, we can just ban it.
I find it hard to imagine. I hate advertising as much as the next guy - I intentionally try to associate negative thoughts with any adverts that interrupt a video I'm watching (I nearly ordered hellofresh after getting a voucher, but they've interrupted my YouTube experience too many times in the past).
But how do you separate advertising from product recommendations? Would it only apply if the person doing the recommending is getting paid for it?
If they are paid and the consumer didn’t ask to see it, either because it’s inserted into the web page / video stream / whatever they are actually trying to consume, OR because because the whole thing has a paid bias or ulterior motive.
> I nearly ordered hellofresh after getting a voucher, but they've interrupted my YouTube experience too many times in the past
I totally relate to the “I’m OK with certain types of advertising” angle here.
does youtube exist without advertisers?
Yes it's called YouTube Premium and its not free but also not expensive. It's possible that the cost would go up without ad revenue from "free" YouTube.
peer to peer, yes.
It is a tricky and uncomfortable truth that human minds are hackable.
On the flip side, we've had many thousands of years of adversarial training, so it's not as if protections don't exist—at least for a very classical modes of attack.
There are manipulation techniques we really can't protect ourselves against. It's like the optical illusions where even when you're fully aware what the trick is, you know the horizontal lines on the café wall are actually straight, you still see it incorrectly. Awareness of our weaknesses isn't enough to correct them.
Even when we can use that awareness to notice the times that we're being manipulated and try to remind ourselves to reject the idea that was forced into our brain surveillance capitalism means that advertisers can use the data they have to hit us when they know we're most susceptible and our defenses will be less effective. They can engineer our experiences and environments to make us more susceptible and our defenses are less effective. They're spending massive amounts of time and money year after year on refining their techniques to be more and more effective in general, and more effective against you individually. I wouldn't put much faith in our ability to immunize ourselves against advertising.
This his how I look at it. If a lesser computing device's vulnerabilities were exploited to alter its intended behaviour, especially for financial gain, it would be considered hacking and criminal penalties would apply. Why that applies to a mobile phone, and not to a far more critical computing device (the human brain) is the question.
The reality of "mind control" of those perpetually exposed to media has been a popular topic throughout the last half century at least.
Humans don't have those protections. Although, ego deludes oneself to believe they do. Ask anyone if they are susceptible to advertising. Maybe 1 in 5 have the humility and awareness to state the truth.
This is precisely why I try to see as close to zero advertising as possible, and also why I will always actively avoid buying something when I do see an ad for it (if I realise this).
I do not trust my in-built protections, so I’d rather not be exposed in the first place.
Thousands of years of adversarial training is what made us controllable — stick with the group, and we’ll defend ourselves against the enemy.
Read up on psychological warfare techniques. And these have been embraced by adtech companies and are being applied to children ...
It's a pattern recognition machine dominated by reward feedback mechanisms.
It's not hackable so much as it lacks resistance to environmental noise.
A lot of winners today are those that get away with greyzone illegal practices. The same would happen in a "ads are illegal" world. People would pay for word of mouth, or even pay influential people to casually talk about it, but it'd be off the books etc.
I live in Vermont, where billboards are illegal. It's great, there is so much less visual pollution driving anywhere.
And yes, some people do try to push it, renting space to park their hay carts that happen to have their business information on the side.
But you know what? Those cases eventually get dealt with too, and overall, the law is a complete win, even with a few people testing the line.
This is the best and most obvious example of successful anti-advertising legislation, NYC as well prohibits billboards in most places which is a blessing.
The fact that the MTA is now plastered in flatscreen ads is an example of huge overreach, and also an example of how better funding for public utilities like the subway eliminate the "need" for advertising that the MTA claims.
Unfortunately, this is the system working as designed per the capitalists. Underfund public utilities to make the public more dependent on the for-profit private sector. Banning ads is communism for this mindset.
If you followed this line of reasoning consistently you'd advocate for no additional regulations to ever be imposed by government and all existing regulations to be walked back. That is, to most of us, patently absurd. The answer to your objection is to enforce the laws that we have, not to never make new ones.
People do actually advocate for exactly that.
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not every line of reasoning is intended to be followed to its fullest extent. one can advocate for regulation without advocating for prohibition without contradiction.
People still steal, but we aren't contemplating to just abolish the laws that prohibits theft.
A new law is proposed and people may break it in the future. Is that a reason not to implement that law, because that seems to be the - in my view crazy - insinuation.
I wonder a bit if this point of view is an 'age' thing, which is to say if you're under 40 it rings true, if you're over 40 it sounds silly kind of thing. I don't know that it is, it just feels that way a bit to me.
What if we outlawed surveillance capital instead? "Ad tech" is about exploiting information about individuals and their actions, what if that part of it was illegal because collecting or providing such information about individuals was illegal? (like go to jail illegal, not pay a fine illegal).
By making that illegal, collecting it would not be profitable (and it would put the entity collecting it at risk of legal repercussions). "Loyalty cards", "coupons", "special offers just for you", all gone in an instant. You could still advertise in places like on the subway, or on a billboard, but it would be illegal to collect any information about who saw your ad.
If you're over 50, you probably read a newspaper. And in reading the newspaper might have looked at the weekly ad for the various supermarkets in your neighborhood. That never bothered you because you weren't being "watched". The ad was made "just for you" and it didn't include specials on only the things you like to eat. When read a magazine you saw ads in it for people who like to read about the magazine's subject matter. Magazines would periodically do 'demographic' surveys but you could make that illegal too.
Generally if you're under 40 you've probably grown up with the Internet and have always had things tracking you. You learned early on to be anonymous and separate your persona in one group for the one in another. That people have relentlessly worked to make it impossible to be anonymous angers you to your core and their "reason" was to target you with ads. By maybe that it was "ads" was a side effect? That is probably the most effective way to extract value out of surveillance data but there are others (like extortion and blackmail).
I resonate strongly with the urge to slay the "Advertising Monster" but what I really want to slay is how easily and without consequence people can violate my privacy. I don't believe that if you made advertising illegal but left open the allowance to surveil folks, the surveillance dealers would find another way to extract value out of that data. No, I believe choking off the "data spigot" would not only take away the 'scourge' of targeted advertising, it would have other benefits as well.
I’m over 40 and I think banning advertising is perfectly reasonable and should be done. I have been certain of this since at least my 20s, and since before the emergence of the current fully formed hellscape.
I have long thought advertising is the new smoking. One day we will look back and be amazed that we allowed public mental health and the wellbeing of our civilisation to be so attacked for profit.
I also manage to fairly easily live a life in which I see remarkably little advertising.
* I use a suite of ad/tracking blockers
* I don’t use apps that force ads on me
* I watch very little TV, and never watch broadcast TV
* I live in the UK which has relatively little outside advertising, and I mostly get around by walking/cycling (thus avoiding ads on public transport)
* etc…
It astounds me when I speak to friends and travel just how pervasive advertising is for some people, and particularly in some places.
The US, for example, is insane. I can see how some people used to living in such an environment may think it’s not possible or reasonable to get rid of advertising, and for sure there will be edge cases and evasion, but my experience is that it really wouldn’t be so hard to dramatically reduce the amount people are exposed to.
Fair enough. One of the things that has influenced my thinking on this topic was living through the laws on smoking being enforced. But perhaps a better analogy is noise laws. For me, it's preferable to use the power of the state to _prevent_ someone from pushing something on you that you object to. Not to outlaw the objectionable thing, but rather to insure that people have a straight forward way to avoid the thing and can be assured that if they take those steps they won't have that thing imposed upon them. When we use state power to deny people agency, that's when it gets dicey for me and that was what I 'heard' when I read the original article. I dislike drug laws for that reason, I think it is reasonable to ban the use of drugs by people who are doing things where the effects of drug use can cause harm to innocent bystanders, but I think it unreasonable to ban their use by individuals in their own home where all the consequences are landing on their own head.
I too use ad blockers and privacy protectors, and people are constantly trying to get around them. THAT behavior should be outlawed I think. If I'm choosing to use blockers and you don't like that, then deny me your website. That's your choice. Deploying exploits so that my adblocker doesn't work? Or convincing the people who wrote browsers that adblockers are theft? THAT is bad behavior (again in my opinion of course).
This is IMHO the right angle.
Advertising is virtually impossible to stop, but more than that, is not inherently evil. Most countries include laws on how you can advertise. For example, you can't lie and make a claim that your product can't live up to, you can't use certain words or phrases, and you have to have disclaimers in some situations.
In the mid-90s when Yahoo was a young company, they had a simple advertising model. The ad would be placed next to the section of the site relevant to the category. If you were searching for watches, a watch ad would be next to it. The advertiser would know how many times the ad was served and how many times it was clicked on.
They didn't have deep demographic data like they do today.
The surveillance capitalism model is the predatory model. Advertisement is only one part of that industry.
I do wonder if there is any legitimate societal value this "surveillance capitalism" or is it all just pure net-loss for the society? I get that corporations make money from it and sell data to whatever entities, but is there truly nothing of positive value in it?
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> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen.
But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out.
Advertisement get the source money from the viewers, it does not create any money in itself. So, if advertisement is banned, people will have more money, and this money can be used to finance what they want to consume.
This is something that I still struggle to wrap my head around: if a company is paying X$ for advertisement, it means that people subjected to this advertisement will give Y$ to this company that they would not have paid otherwise, Y higher than X, otherwise there is no reason for this company to pay for advertisement. Yet everyone is saying "yeah, advertisement, I don't care, I just ignore it". Surely it cannot be true.
Even if it seems like everyone is saying this, it's just statistically not true / in the aggregate, at least in the context of direct online ads. Otherwise the direct ad industry would be totally dead (ad performance is measured to death by companies).
Conversion (getting someone to purchase) at scale with ads is not so simple as person sees ad, clicks, and buys. There are many steps along the funnel and sometimes ads can be used in concert with other channels (influencer content, sponsored news articles, etc). Within direct ads you typically have multiple steps depending on how cold or warm (e.g. have they seen or interacted with your content previously) the lead is when viewing the ad and you tailor the ad content accordingly to try to keep pushing the person down the funnel.
Generally if you know your customer persona well and have good so-called product-market-fit, then (1) you will be able to build a funnel that works at scale. So then (2) the question is does the cost to convert a customer / CAC fit within the profit margin, which is much more difficult to unpack.
However, it's worth keeping in mind that digital ad costs are essentially invented by the ad platform. There is a market-type of force. If digital ads become less effective and the CAC goes too high across an industry/sector, the platform may be forced to reduce the cost to deliver ads if the channel just doesn't make enough financial sense for enough businesses.
All this is to say, the system does/can work. Tends to work better for large established companies or startups with lots of funding. In general, not a suggested approach as a first channel for a small startup/small business. Building up effective funnels is incredibly expensive and takes a lot of time in my depressing personal experience.
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"This is something that I still struggle to wrap my head around: if a company is paying X$ for advertisement, it means that people subjected to this advertisement will give Y$ to this company that they would not have paid otherwise"
You seem to be assuming that, in the absence of advertising, the company will sell as much as it did before -- just with lower overhead costs -- rather than advertising driving more sales and possibly lowering costs because the company has more customers. For some items / things this may be true-ish. I'm going to buy paper towels because I need paper towels, and advertising has little influence on that -- except, maybe, which brand I buy. But I'm going to spill things, and my cats are going to keep barfing on the floor from time to time, so I'm going to need paper towels regardless. And I'm not going to buy a bunch of extra ones just because the ads are so good.
Don't get me started on soda advertising and such because the amount of money those companies spend on ads is mind-boggling and I don't think it moves the needle very much when it comes to Coke vs. Pepsi...
But, would I go see a movie without ads to promote it? Would I buy that t-shirt with a funny design if I didn't see it on a web site? Sign up for a SaaS offering if I don't see an ad for it somewhere?
If a SaaS lands 20% more customers because ads (and other forms of marketing) that's not necessarily going to mean I pay more for the SaaS because ads. It may very well mean that the prices stay lower because many of their costs are fixed and if they have 20% more paying customers, they can charge less to be competitive. If a publication has more subscribers because it advertises, it may not have to raise rates to stay / be profitable.
In some cases you may be correct -- landing customers via ads equals X% of my costs, so my prices reflect that. But it's not necessarily true.
Parent's point about ad being close to propaganda is key: people getting advertised at are often not the ones with the money.
For newspapers for instance, Exxon or Shell could be paying a lot more to have their brand painted in favorable light than the amount the newspaper readership could afford to pay in aggregate.
The same way Coca Cola's budget for advertising greenness is not matched by how many more sales they're expecting to make from these ads in any specific medium, but how much the company's bottling policy has to lose if public opinion changed too much. That's basically lobbying money.
News would still exist and would not be competing with engagement driven news because there's no engagement=ad views. I wager it would be very helpful to news.
TV would absolutely still exist, given that people pay for it and there is a big industry around ad-free streaming services already.
Almost no online newspaper survives from subscriptions.
Non public broadcasters are rarely if ever and free. Meaning that their business model requires this as revenue to survive.
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For news, I feel it's another can of worm altogether.
Right now we've already having oligarchs owning news groups and very few independent publications. But getting rid of other revenue sources won't help that situation, we'd get more Washington Post or New York Times than Buffalo's Fire.
It's a lot easier IMHO to have an independent newsroom if the business side can advertise for toilet paper and dating sites than if it needs to convince Jeff Bezos of its value to him.
And investigation journalism costs a lot while not getting valued by many, there's no way we get a set of paid-only-by-viewers papers from all relevant spectrums covering most of the news happening every day.
"But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out."
The missing part of this sentence is "as they exist now". There are other models that exist that could support broadcast and publications. There are other models yet to be explored or that have floundered because they've been snuffed out or avoided because the easiest (for certain values of "easy") path to dollars, right now, is advertising.
It is a pipe dream, of course -- and the author of the piece doesn't really do the hard work of following through on not just how difficult it would be to make advertising illegal, but the ramificaitons. While an ad-free world would be wonderful, that's a lot of people out of a job real quick-like. Deciding what constitutes an "ad" versus content marketing or just "hey, this thing exists" would be harder than it might seem at first thought.
Which models are there? The only other ones I know is patreon-like, which totally destroy the long tail.
And long-tail ones are the best. There are some great videos on youtube which are 10+ years old and do not have millions of views. I am sure many of their uploaders already forgot about them. I cannot see them existing without being supported by "something", and if that's not advertisement, than what?
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I don't know. I would GLADLY pay for ad-free youtube if the price were set at what they'd otherwise make on ads for me. In which case, that'd be about $3.50/month.
Instead they want to price-gouge me for 5x that so... no thanks. I'll just use my ad blocker.
Could you explain how you arrived at the $3.50/month figure?
The model I understand you're suggesting is individual pricing based on usage and value as an ad target. A lot more complex and opaque than a straightforward fixed fee for all users.
Also, it's worth noting that YouTube Premium includes YouTube Music, which serves as your Spotify replacement. You might not need this, but the subscription fee covers more than just the lost ad revenue on YouTube.
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I would gladly pay for ad-free youtube if they weren’t double dipping by tracking me (which is now more valuable because you have my cc#)
* “the newspapers, tv channels and YouTube content that had so little value to society that no one was willing to pay for will die out.”
Yes.
TV and YouTube would definitely suffer. Not sure if that's an issue or benefit. But I'm not sure newspapers or journalism would be so bad. My expectation would be that people would still need/want information from somewhere might begin paying to get it.
They already have this choice and don't pick it.
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Very little of value would be lost.
It's interesting that you leave out Google (and similar search engines).
We would lose one of the most useful tools introduced to mankind in the last 3 decades.
> But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out.
Good. They're but shells of themselves, eaten through and bloated up by cancer of advertising. Even if they were to die out, the demand for the value they used to provide will remain strong, so these services would reappear in a better form.
I thought people in tech/enterpreneurship circles were generally fans of "creative disruption"? Well, there's nothing more creatively disruptive than rebuilding the digital markets around scummy business models.
(Think of all business models - many of them more honest - that are suppressed by advertising, because they can't compete with "free + ads". Want business innovation? Ban "free + ads" and see it happen.)
Yeah, some loss, a very visible one. But what we are losing now is much bigger, albeit much harder to point finger on and quantify. Some inner quality and strength that probably doesnt even have a name.
Most people never even thought about ads that way.
For my own little part - firefox and ublock origin since it exists, on phone too. To the point of almost physically allergic to ads, aby ads, they cause a lasting disgust with given brand. I detest being manipulated, and this is not even hidden, a very crude and primitive way.
> I detest being manipulated
It's even worse when you can't even be detested because you don't realize it is happening.
Is that such a bad thing? Are they really providing that much value?
The remaining YouTube channels would be concentrated around the ones that are of higher quality, rather than easy slop produced to push ads. Nobody would try to clone someone else's channel for money. They would only be produced by people who were passionate about that topic. There would be fewer channels by passionate people, but the percentage would be much higher, so it's not necessarily a worse situation overall.
TV has always cost money - you pay for satellite or cable, and the free-to-air programming available to you is overtly subsidized by your government - they shouldn't need to double-dip by showing ads.
We used to pay for newspaper subscriptions too. A lot of newspapers are trying to go back to that, but it's a market for lemons. Maybe if advertising was banned, we'd each subscribe to one or two online newspapers and discover which ones are decent and which ones are crap. Remember, it's harder to make someone who was paying $0.00 pay $0.01, than to make someone who was paying $10 pay $20. Would the market be more efficient at price discovery if there was no $0.00 at all?
> Maybe if advertising was banned, we'd each subscribe to one or two online newspapers and discover which ones are decent and which ones are crap.
I keep hoping that decent aggregators will emerge - or I will find the ones that exist.
I am happy to pay for news, but I cannot afford to pay for all the ones I want, and I cannot afford the time to read all I want. I would like to pay good aggregators....
> The remaining YouTube channels would be concentrated around the ones that are of higher quality, rather than easy slop produced to push ads. Nobody would try to clone someone else's channel for money. They would only be produced by people who were passionate about that topic. There would be fewer channels by passionate people, but the percentage would be much higher, so it's not necessarily a worse situation overall.
I have some questions about your vision.
- How many content creators would no longer be able to make passion videos as their full-time job because they're no longer getting revenue-sharing from YouTube?
- Okay, some content creators also have Patreon etc. What's the incentive to post these videos publicly for free, as opposed to hoarding them behind their Patreon paywall?
- What's the incentive for YouTube to continue existing as a free-to-watch service? Or even at all? Take away the ad money, and I can't imagine that the remaining subscription revenue comes anywhere close to paying for the infrastructure.
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only the shit ones
What I'd really like to see is a study on how much advertising drives consumerism and thereby eventually climate change / pollution. Maybe this could start some discussion.
I got the thing for you : a governmental report that showed that advertising as it exists today and ecological transition are not aligned. Pardon my french, though.
https://linforme.files.sirius.press/files/1742914627793-Rapp...
Can anyone say why the sibling comment, pointing to this official document (see link), is heavily downvoted?
https://linforme.files.sirius.press/files/1742914627793-Rapp...
One bright spot is that I find it much easier to avoid ads in my media than in say the 1990's. There is usually a higher paid tier with no ads. Youtube, X, HBO, etc and ad blockers on the web. I'm off of Google search with Kagi. I mostly use services that I pay for an much prefer that model.
But everything going to LLMs will make it harder to see/know about the ads. Google search was great when it first came out and then SEO happened. How long before you (NSA, CCP, big corp) can pay OpenAI to seed its training data set (if this is not already happening)?
Treating the symptoms is easier and cheaper. And let's be real, the money would rather treat symptoms than the cause. Convincing monied interests to stop advertising is not a realistic thing. This would have to be done through legislation and force. And I agree it should be done.
Neither convincing them nor compelling them through law would work. I’m surprised the author can’t see that as an ad person himself. The incentives are too strong; if you outlaw them, they’ll just be circumnavigated in more nefarious ways.
Law can be very strong but our "representatives" as of now aren't very good at representing the will of the people.
The system can work but we vote in horrible people to execute it.
> framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism…
You’ll likely be pleased to hear they use the word “propaganda” for advertising in Portuguese, at least in Brazil.
Same in Spanish. Propaganda and publicidad are interchangeable
Which makes it actually really hard to talk about political propaganda
> Which makes it actually really hard to talk about political propaganda
In Portuguese, I never found it difficult - mostly because, as the OP suggests, there is no material difference. If you want to talk about political propaganda, either say "propaganda" and let the other person deduct from context that you mean political propaganda, or explicitly say "political propaganda" (propaganda política).
In some ways, it might even be better as it will require you to actually characterise whether you mean political in the party-electoral sense, or in the ideological sense, etc.
The first time I heard the word "propaganda" in the English language, I assumed it was a less used synonymous for "advertisement". Despite having lived in an English-speaking country for over a decade, I still see them both as one and the same.
I sometimes feel like the separation is mostly used as a means to purport corporate and commercial advertising as legitimate, good and desirable (or at least acceptable) whilst keeping the idea of political and ideological advertisement as evil.
Both are bad. Both are means to manipulate an individual's opinion in favour of the advertiser. Commercially it is so I feel compelled to trade a portion of my life and health (in the form of money that I earned through work) to them in for a good or a service that I may otherwise not have thought worth the exchange.
Politically it's the same, only this time instead of my money they want my vote or my support for a certain policy that might even be against my personal or collective interests.
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In tech specifically: is it the same mechanism? I mean, does commercial advertising and political propaganda flow through the same channel?
I would love your input as someone on the inside. My understanding, broadly, is that when there’s commercial advertising, it goes through a different channel; there’s an auction, the ad is marked, CTR is tracked etc. whereas I think the political polarization and the use of propaganda on social media happens much less explicitly: it’s “mixed in”with the non-ad content that’s posted, and therefore much harder to detect or remove.
I’m also curious how you might handle influencers. Those, like propaganda operations, are an attempt to influence people’s behavior but “from inside” the ad/non-ad boundary.
And then, I’m convinced, a lot of our politics today is simply an emergent phenomenon of the algorithmic feed. That there is no master, corporate or political, that lead to this condition. It simply happened as a result of “for you.” (I think this is changing, as the powerful are discovering how powerful the algorithm is at influencing their subjects).
I think I agree with you broadly. The total sublimation of human relationships and interactions into “the machine” has a whole host of really bad side-effects. Jacking into cyberspace causes the shakes, at a society wide level and certainly at an individual level as well.
> The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters.
The main difference between advertising and propaganda is that advertising usually is obvious and loud, and in many countries is required to be declared: people need to know they're watching an ad. You have specific placements for ads that are clearly defined: tv breaks, outdoors, even banners. It's true that there are active efforts to blurr those lines, but still.
The problem of propaganda is that it's mainly being done covertly, no one is saying they're speaking on behalf of someone or of an ideology.
> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow.
While this concept sounds good, it doesn't seem to work in the real world. For example, could shops have billboards on their property? What about businesses that didn't have prime locations? How would people know they existed? How would small businesses compete with big retailers?
One of the things the internet brought, for better and worse, was to lower the barrier of entry—you wouldn't need to be a massive brand that could afford to have its product placed on TV Shows or even to have sales teams selling door to door.
Probation only moves the activities underground. Not focusing on ad tech specifically but removing all advertising would mean finding other ways to get your message out which is advertising. The only way to stop it is to stop communication in form and function.
Limiting certain types of advertising or changing tax codes to not allow dedicating expensive could shape it in a way that meshes with society.
Trying to rein in the abuses you saw in the adtech world starts with Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft being dissolved.
> Probation only moves the activities underground.
That implies that people want ads and they're going to be consuming underground ads from their ad dealers. Which actually already impinges on advertising because advertising doesn't want to be secret, advertising wants to be as visible or popular as possible. Advertising is inherently easier to regulate because of this.
[content creators] want ads and they're going to be consuming underground ads from their ad dealers. Examples: AudioGO, PodcastOne, Acast.
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Google and Facebook sure, you could even make the argument that their non-adtech businesses would be collateral damage, but Amazon and Microsoft have substantial non-advertising related businesses. I'm curious why you lumped them in?
Amazon makes a lot from Amazon ads in their own search results. Also Amazon prime. Microsoft from bing / Windows ads. Just in news/search they made over 10 billion. Microsoft / Amazon most the bulk of their money in the cloud.
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"Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow."
I remember a world without advertising on the internet. Products still existed. Commerce still happened. Information still flowed. At first I got access to the internet through universities. Later I paid subscription fees for internet access. Nothing I accessed on the www required a paid subscription.
Bandwidth sucked. CPUs were less powerful, RAM and storage were in short supply. All that has changged.
But I still pay for internet access, much more than I did in the early days. And, remarkably, I see people asking internet users to "subscribe" to websites, in addition to paying internet subscriber fees. This does not stop these websites from also conducting data collection, surveillance and targeted advertsing.
Internet advertising is not like other advertising. People try to argue it makes stuff "free". Stuff that was already free to begin with.
I too spent far too many years in the adtech industry before realising that what I thought I was doing (helping fund cool things on the web) was not what I was actually doing (destroying the web as I knew it.) Having left it behind in the early 10s it's got way worse than I ever imagined, there's effectively no regulation at all now, and certainly no way of knowing where the ads stop and the content begins. Having sat in ad industry self regulation meetings myself I know the author is completely right, they will never do anything about any of the many many problems, so what else is there to do than ban it, nothing else is going to work with the system that currently exists.
> The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters.
Advertising is just a name for a delivery mechanism for propaganda. Its not a difference of master, as is clear in the political realm where when we focus on a particular commercial delivery vehicle we talk about "campaign advertisements" but the content is still "political propaganda".
> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making.
No, the mechanisms would just get even more sophisticated, to work around whatever (inherently, and unavoidably, arbitrary) lines were drawn against "advertising" while permitting the flow of information and opinions about products.
> No, the mechanisms would just get even more sophisticated, to work around whatever (inherently, and unavoidably, arbitrary) lines were drawn against "advertising" while permitting the flow of information and opinions about products.
Probably, but it would make advertising much more costly thus less appealing and reduce its market size. Just like for any other prohibited activity.
> The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters.
A big reason for that is influence from Edward Bernays:
"Edward Louis Bernays was an American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations". While credited with advancing the profession of public relations, his techniques have been criticized for manipulating public opinion, often in ways that undermined individual autonomy and democratic values."
Bernays' mother, Anna, was Sigmund Freud's sister. There seemed to be a talent in that family in understanding the human psyche, and how to utilize that understanding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
Came to this thread to post that. Everyone should read _Propaganda_. It's public domain, found in various places.
>We've built something that converts human attention into money with increasingly terrifying efficiency, but we're all trapped in a prisoner's dilemma where nobody can unilaterally disarm.
We still get a choice about where we work, and we could choose not to put glorified ad companies on a pedestal.
I explicitly refused project related to mobile location data crunching few years ago. I told it loudly to my manager then, I was already thinking I'm too arogant. But it was outlr market, it worked out we've found other project.
Now I would probably bend my neck and accept it. It's just not everyone has choice.
That line about the mechanical difference between selling sneakers and selling a political ideology being minimal - yep. Once you've seen how the sausage gets made in ad tech, it's hard to unsee it. It really is the same machine, just tuned for different outcomes.
> What's frustrating is how the tech community keeps treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease.
If you think deeper, to first principles, it’s clear that disease is capitalism. I am not advocating socialism/communism, but isn’t it strange that capitalism was never reviewed or updated according to new science about anthropology, sociology, and economics? In 100 years, about 100 countries tried it, and not one country can report a harmonious society. It’s always with inequality and suffering.
Every science has new advancements and discoveries, every single one except political sociology. Why is more advanced and modern political economic system never seriously discussed? On what assumption is capitalism still being implemented? It was never working yet still it is referred as something like “word of god” that cannot be argued with.
If this was a situation in an IT company and methodology company uses constant change, it ends in disaster. After about one such cycle, management will be looking into changing processes and choosing something else instead of Agile or Waterfall or whatever is used.
For about 30-40 years now, we produce enough to feed and house everyone. Henry Ford introduced a five-day work week, which should be down to one workday by now. But instead, we got “bullshit jobs,” which are about 50% of employment in unnecessary made-up jobs to keep people occupied (marketing, finance). And still in the AI age, a person who is born now is brainwashed into capitalism and has to find an occupation, study, and work till retirement. Capitalism does not accept you for who you are. It only accepts you if you have some kind of occupation that brings value.
> capitalism was never reviewed or updated according to new science about anthropology, sociology, and economics?
If taking a human-science view, then one interesting take on capitalism is that it isn't a thing at all. It's the absence of a thing. It's a positive freedom. There can be no "science" of capitalism.
It allows the direction of excess human psychological energy. It is the absence of regulation of anti-social criminal behaviours, by creating an allowable "grey area" between moral and wicked behaviours - what so many business people like to call "amoral". But that same energy is innovative, creative - the destruction of what is old and weak is part of any finite-sized system. The need to destroy, dominate and exploit is strong in a significant percent of the population. Any decent study of criminology is continuous with "business".
William James, in The Moral Equivalent of War [0] suggested that we coped with this in the past by having every few generations of males kill each other in wars - and of course implied that it's mainly a gendered issue. During frontier times, as the European settlers conquered America and other lands, there was ample "space" for exploitation as that energy was directed against "nature" (and the indigenous folks who were considered part of "nature" as opposed to "civilisation"). Now we've run out of space. The only target left for that energy is each other.
Social-"ism" etc are projects to try controlling that nature by reducing "individualism" (and insecurity-based consumerism is an obvious first target). It's major fault is that the anti-social criminals tend be want to be the ones doing the controlling - just wearing the mask of civility and preaching the primacy of "the group".
If we cannot change human nature we must find a new outlet for that energy. Space exploration as a new frontier always looked good, but in reality it's something we are unlikely to achieve before self-destructing the technological civilisation needed to support it.
That leaves little else but a kind of cultural revolution. The pharmaceutically catalysed version of that in the 1960s is worth studying to see where and why it went wrong. See Huxley.
Any realistic systematic change would need to address this "problem" of the individual ego, creating some new focus that is the "moral equivalent" of war.
[0] http://public-library.uk/ebooks/65/5.pdf
Capitalism is a positive choice to grant the positive right of extreme property ownership.
Light property ownership is when this toothbrush is mine. Normal property ownership is when my house is mine. Extreme property ownership is when your house is mine, that section of airspace over there is mine, precisely four tenths of the revenue generated by the billboards on the Eiffel tower is mine - using a heavy dose of the legal system to artificially extend the principle of ownership to all sorts of things that aren't naturally property and things that would naturally be someone else's property. This is a positive action done on purpose by the legal system, not merely natural default like me owning my toothbrush.
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Did you know one of the common pesticides in the USA but banned in the EU interferes with hormone levels in certain species, making them way more individualist? One of those species is humans. Still a positive freedom?
> capitalism is that it isn't a thing at all. It's the absence of a thing. It's a positive freedom.
This is very wrong. Capitalism fundamentally requires abstract property rights (i.e. someone can own a thing they have never even held or seen, much less used), and it requires a state to provide very strong protections for those abstract rights.
In the absence of the state imposing such a property right regimen, you wouldn't have capitalism, since it'd be impossible to accumulate capital if the only way to own property is to physically use and/or occupy it.
Importantly, capitalism is not the same as free markets! Humanity has had free markets in one form or another for most of its history, but capitalism is very recent historically speaking.
The notion that socialism is always anti-individualistic is also wrong. Left-wing libertarianism is a thing, and goes back to the earliest anarchist writers (who literally invented the term "libertarian" as a political label - and they didn't have the likes of Ayn Rand in mind when they did that). There's even free-market left-wing anarchism.
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You’re right and those are interesting books. And yes, people will not be able to live with alternative to Capitalism. That’s why, I think the only way for human race to survive is to have multi-generation transition plan, people must understand that in their life time it’s not going to get better and fair. It would happen in maybe two generations, or over 50-100 years time span. And it would have to happen in one country first and then propagated to others.
1. this is not new. radio, print, theater... every thing was monetizing attention to great success.
2. all advertising venues (radio, web, print, outdoors) all make boatloads of money during political campaigns AND government "awareness" campaigns (which are all disguised political campaigns with tax money). most radios stations yet around, live exclusively of this revenue.
so, the system was built on the two premises you wrongly consider side effects or unintended consequences. making it illegal is the only alternative. everything else is just ignoring the real cause: it was for exactly that.
It's been tried, in sci fi. The result is Influencers.
If the influencer is actually giving good advice because it's illegal to pay them to promote a product, is that such a bad thing? What sci fi are you talking about?
I feel that the lumping together of advertising and propaganda in the article is very apt. That's why I find it somewhat sinister. You should be allowed to try to change minds. If anything should be outlawed, it's the massive tracking effort involved.
Let's talk about the modern world then. You want to get away from the grind of working for someone else and sustain yourself on your own.
Perhaps you could turn into a subsistence farmer making every home product you own on your own or in a small commune, or perhaps you and a group of employees could buy your existing employer.
But the other more realistic method is that you would start your own business so you no longer have to work for someone else.
19% of all American adults are starting or run a business. It's a very common way to make a living.
IMO the idea of removing advertising entirely would essentially entrench the status quo even further. People would only know brands like Coca-Cola, Tide, and Apple, the brands they knew about the day the ads shut off. There would be no chance for other companies to enter markets because they would have no realistic way of spreading the word about their alternatives, not even for small local businesses.
The proposal is not just radical, it's downright moronic if you've ever been in the shoes of owning your own company.
> People would only know brands like Coca-Cola, Tide, and Apple, the brands they knew about the day the ads shut off.
I wouldn't be surprised if these brands are so dominant because they can afford to flood the country with ads.
I am 50 and I can’t recall more than 3 ads between these three companies. especially apple… ads may get you first X customers but the reason tide/apple/cc are dominant is because they made shit that everyone wants.
coca cola is such a ridiculous product that there isn’t a situation/place/… on the planet where asking for one is odd. you can be in 876 star michelin seven-years-long-wait list restaurant as well as nastiest rats-on-your-should shithole and asking for coke would be the most normal thing
This is true. Big brands that have advertisements all over like Coca-Cola do it precisely because their position is so saturated and dominant.
They need to remind you about them even though you already prefer them and know they exist because they want you to buy more than you would otherwise.
I still think a lack of advertising for smaller competitors really would be devastating. DuckDuckGo and Reddit achieved pretty amazing recent growth aided by major outdoor ad campaigns. These were sites that were not market leaders in their categories and had a lot of catching up to do.
> IMO the idea of removing advertising entirely would essentially entrench the status quo even further.
This doesn’t seem correct to me.
Products would still be searchable, but the wealthiest companies could no longer pay for placement or pay to have their brand name repeated endlessly so it’s on the tip of your tongue but you don’t know why.
People would still talk in their communities and share recommendations.
Reviews (unpaid) would still be a thing.
Markets (real and virtual) where you can compare competing products and make a decision wouldn’t go away.
As one example, I think about how DuckDuckGo was able to grow to a decent size against an impossibly entrenched competitor aided by a large outdoor ad campaigns.
Reddit also grew more rapidly in recent years post-IPO for similar reasons. Reddit used to be more niche with fewer people even knowing it existed.
Knowing alternatives exist is half the battle. This fair comparison you hope people will make is just a hope without the ability to advertise. People have to know all possible alternatives exist in order for the market to be perfectly competitive.
But I think part of the article's point is less about banning all forms of spreading the word and more about dismantling the surveillance-driven, hyper-targeted ad economy that's become the default.
That is really not what the article says at all. It is working in absolutes.
> check out the documentary “Century of the Self”.
The editing is not for everyone but I thoroughly enjoyed it. You come out of it not really knowing what it did to you, but something changed.
This is a fantastic recommendation, and Adam Curtis' documentaries are all on YouTube somehow.
But the way you frame the problem suggests it's not tech people's responsibility at all. It's a much bigger issue of governance that society as a whole must decide. Has there been any society on earth that has made the decision to ban advertising?
Propaganda does not need advertising to disseminate itself, particularly not in 2025. There are multiple channels. Limiting one—advertising—just moves the flow to other channels.
Yes. Not all business models utilize public advertising. For example, MLMs like Amway and LuLaRoe.
Advertising didn’t exist for most of history because mass media didn’t exist. Advertising is part and parcel of mass media.
Marketing existed, it was just a higher ratio of publicity, merchandising and astroturfing than today.
> The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism
You might enjoy reading about– or a book written by– Edward Bernays.
Yes! The century of the self documentary I mentioned is all about Bernays.
>> We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making.
That isn't all advertising. That is the modern algorithm-dependent systems that curate ads for individual viewers. In the good old days of print ads, ads targeted at say the readership of a particular magazine, we did not suffer from the downward spiral. There is no reason websites cannot have static ads. Many do. The issue is not advertising per se.
I would also recommend "Merchants war" by Fredrick Phol. WWIII was won by Madison Ave.
It makes me happy that you left that terrible industry.
> The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings painfully true.
Indeed. Marketing is essentially capitalist propaganda. It promotes capitalism and consumerism in an implicit way, and doesn't even mention it.
It's vaguely of like the statement "X is the way to serve god best". I'm saying that god exists without actually making that statement; it's implicit. If statements of this style were ubiquitous, they work as propaganda in a way far stronger that just repeating "god exists".
I actually kind of enjoy advertising -- most ads are shit, but some are very clever. Low budget ones make me laugh, or admire the (complete lack of) execution. I like to see the graphic design trends, the typography, the strange brand collaborations and IP tie-ins, the vogue cycles of looks, feels, musical choices, the trends that get beaten to death with a hammer. It's all very interesting, not to mention the glut of weird products, insane sales pitches, the general grift on display. Simply fascinating shit.
Intellectually I know most people wouldn't mind living in a world without Slap Chop and those old Quizno's ads and Kylie Jenner solving racism with a Pepsi and Arnold riding a pennyfarthing inside of a Japanese energy drink bottle, but IMO that stuff really brings color to our often-monochrome human existence.
An advertisement ban is also an interesting idea from the theory of free markets perspective.
Consumer needs are met by the most efficient producers, products compete for consumers on the market. That makes a ton of sense. But ad spending inverts this relationship. Consumer needs are no longer an external condition for the market but become subject to producer intervention.
This creates a source of misalignment between incentives for producers and the public good.
I think outlawing ads would go a long way towards fixing capitalism.
> The uncomfortable truth: most of us in tech understand that today's advertising systems are fundamentally parasitic.
While my opinion on ad tech has been negative for years, over the past couple of years I've come to realise how much this business model depends on outright crime to survive.
If you have YouTube ads on any device, you probably noticed (at least in my country) that a large fraction of ads are for either extremely low quality products (such as shitty mobile games, apps of dubious value that probably exist mostly to gobble up your data, or just shady IRL products), or outright scams of various kinds.
In one case I saw an obvious scam ad that impersonated a famous person in my country. I reported it to YouTube, and got back an email a while later that said that the ad did not break any of their rules and my report was dismissed.
Some weeks later I read a news article that reported that that exact scam had scammed some old people out of large amounts of money.
Perhaps I shouldn't have been, but I was genuinely surprised that my report had been dismissed. While I already thought YouTube is to blame in serving users scam ads, I had naively assumed that YouTube doesn't want to serve scam ads, it's just hard and expensive to filter them out systematically.
But no, they want to serve scam ads. Even when they get pointed out they refuse to remove them. A dollar paid by a scammer is just as good as a dollar paid by someone trying to advertise a real product. And they're not liable for the scam, so why would they care?
But surely that's too simplistic. Even a complete sociopath would understand that having your website/app overrun by scam ads will tarnish its reputation over time, or invite more aggressive regulation. So these long-term risks don't seem to be worth it. Unless, of course, scams are a very significant fraction of ad revenue.
So this is my hypothesis: scams ads provide a very significant fraction of advertising revenue on at least YouTube, and possibly most social media, perhaps to the point where the business model would not be viable without them.
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