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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: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:52PM
Rewind to the early 1960's.
I was crawling and learning to walk. My favorite toy was electrical outlets and the things plugged in to them. And this could not be stopped (so I am told) no matter what my parents did.
The solution? My dad cut a one foot square board and mounted an electrical outlet in it with a wall plate. Instant favorite toy until I was about 4 years old. I also ended up needing an extension cord to go with it.
Now much later . . . by about the third grade, right after Apollo 11 moon landings, I had this theory. I noticed that all electrical devices had TWO metal prongs that plugged into two outlet slats, which from close inspection seemed to have metal contacts inside the outlet. An electrical outlet has two female outlets. It seems like the left slat of each outlet must in some way be the same, and also the two right slats in some way are the same. It was also obvious that somehow, an extension cord had two wires bound together which came to a head with three independent full outlets on it. I theorized if I partly unplugged something, while it still made contact and was working, I could take the plug of a 2nd device and touch its metal prongs to the corresponding prongs of the partially plugged in device, and it would also work. And it did! I can't express how exciting this was at that age.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.