Comment by squarefoot

Thought about that years back, and went to the conclusion that you can't kill advertising and political propaganda without strict rules that every big business and their owned politicians would fiercely fight against. Also, advertising is the way they keep barely alive an economic system almost entirely based on overproduction of unnecessary goods built to not be durable; take out advertising and you'll see millions of people bankrupt; not thousands: millions. Advertising doesn't scale anymore: from a handy tool to discreetly let people two blocks away that a new barber shop just opened, has transitioned to a weapon businesses use to fit their product between a thousand others, grabbing more and more space from every free second or square millimeter, in the hope they capture the attention of someone who doesn't give a damn about them; and it can only get worse. I'm all for killing it, but be warned that if you take it out, you take out the entire business universe built around it that depends on it to be kept afloat. It'd probably need a few decades, not even years, to become reality if someone decided to start the process in a harmless way. But would first need a very different political environment to be accepted: more power to the state, less to corporations, and probably that would conflict with ideas that some propaganda, that is, advertising, stuck in the mind of so many people several decades ago, and those are quite hard to undo.