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Advertising is a cancer on society
I know it's a blog post, but you're not going to get this kind of thing in a news article. Hopefully SoylentNews' many advertisers won't be offended.
[...] Advertising as currently practiced shares these characteristics. It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them. Limited to honestly informing people about what's available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it's moved way past that role.
Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet. It infected every communication medium in existence, both digital and analog. It shapes every product and service you touch, and it affects your interactions with everyone who isn't your close friend or family member. Through all that, it actively destroys trust in people and institutions alike, and corrupts the decision-making process in any market transaction. It became a legitimized form of industrial-scale psychological abuse, and there's no way you can resist its impact.
The growth of advertising is fueled by the enormous waste it creates. In any somewhat saturated market - which, today, is most of them - any effort you spent on advertising serves primarily to counteract the combined advertising efforts of your competitors. The same results could be achieved if every market player limited themselves to just informing customers about their goods and services. This, unfortunately, is impossible for humanity, and so we end up with a zero-sum game instead (or really negative-sum, if you count the externalities). If you have competitors, you can't not participate.
The blog/article goes on to describe Robocalls, telemarketing, Spam, Leaflets, snail mail spam, SEO, and much, much more, all for the same low price! (Now how much would you pay?)
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:55AM (3 children)
This is an excellent writup, I will repost on my site.
I have always thought this way and our current society is obviously failing and these are the types of questions we should be asking.
We live under a tyrannical cultural hegemony and advertising/marketing is one of the pillars upon which it stands.
This is a hard problem that should be attracting the best people.
The current system is already falling, the % of real vs fake users is haunting the same people driving the problem. If we can just find a way to spam the spammers and turn all of their 'market research' into a pile of pencil shavings no more effective at predicting sales than reading tea leaves, we might yet survive with some freedom intakt on this planet.
Graffiti en mass in the right channels could be very effective. I hope I am giving some people ideas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:06PM (2 children)
You're going to turn on all of us fake users now? Including all of us fake Soylentils? I hope you get your fake penis caught in a fake lawn mower!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @03:02PM
Is that (fake lawn) mower, or fake (lawn mower)?
(Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Friday August 02 2019, @07:16AM
I don't think you got what I said.
I'm saying we use their tools against them. The marketers and propagandists are literally .000001% of people trying to pretend go tbe 10000000 people.
If 10000000 people start doing what they are doing, it will break the systems they are using to manipulate things and cost the worst people on the internet a lot of money, force them to get real jobs.
Get to it.