30 minutes with a stranger

> Pointing out an egregious case of advertising that does not deliver a net positive does not disprove that point.

Coke/Pepsi were your own examples. I don't believe there are just a limited number of bad cases in an otherwise good system, but rather that at it's core is a huge zero-sum game of burning resources to take market share back and forth, with even the non-zero-sum impacts (people hearing more about sugary drinks instead of other things, and consuming more sugary drinks than they otherwise would) being of questionable value in most cases (in some cases potentially good, but still disproportionately small benefit compared to resource wastage).

I think it's similar to Bitcoin mining as an example of what happens when competition is not directed towards a useful end like improving the product.

> But from that extrapolating that all advertising is bad and calling all jobs related to it as useless is excessive.

A job working on serving web ads is almost guarenteed to be a net negative to society in my eyes.

I wouldn't really consider someone writing a travel blog to be working in advertising (unless they get paid to push certain destinations) and I don't think anyone here's claiming that to be useless.

I disagree that removing an emotional connection removes emotional responses of hate and wild dehumanization. I would categorize all such interactions as emotional. I argue that it is in fact the opposite: Having no analytical consideration for how another human might respond enflames emotions, not dampens them.

It's called flame wars, not analytical wars.

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I have significant social anxiety and was bullied much growing up, but I painstakingly built a small but close group of friends as a teenager and into my 20s. At the same time, the Internet was changing everything, I thought for the better, and goodness it really did seem like it made things much easier for me. Like my meatspace friends, I fell into a familiar pattern of carefully constructing a consistent circle. More often than not this translated into online friends becoming IRL friends.

Then social media happened. Again, that feeling that this makes things so much easier for me. Occasionally I noticed I was not carefully curating friends anymore, I was unwittingly in a race to collect acquaintances and to attract attention. But I’m working at a startup, I don’t have time for the old ways! I stopped seeing people so much (even old friends and family), it seemed we had nothing to talk about because everything was already posted online. I’m spending more and more of my time arguing with strangers, who I see as little more than NPCs, through distant connections. I’m getting more angry, feeling more hopeless and alone, disliking people more, and finding myself brimming with hostility governed by a hair trigger. I am thinking about moving to a more remote place with my wife to get away from people.

This is what social (and mainstream traditional, I suppose) media has wrought. It’s hard to say if it was always intended to be this way, but the truth is all sorts of malevolent individuals and groups picked up on its ability to divide and conquer us unlike any propaganda tool in history, so it certainly is now.

I few years ago I killed all my accounts (except this and one other thing… I do still feel a need to find and connect with interesting people, but sparingly and only where I feel relatively in control). I started calling people and trying to hang out in person again. I have even found myself daring to talk to strangers, even when I know we are on completely different ends of the ideological spectrum. And much like the subjects in this article, I almost always feel better. I am rediscovering the terror and joy of making friends and temporary acquaintances again.