Advertisements are mind control.
Look around you. How many brand logos do you see? Each brand logo is an attempt to influence and manipulate how you feel, think and spend your money but your subconscious blocks them all out.
We all wear tinfoil hats now
31–40 of 145 posts
Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now
#32Bleurgh. I don't like the conflation of unsupported-by-evidence talk of telepathy and that kind of "mind control" with the heavily-funded and somewhat evidenced effect of targeted political advertising. It acts to discredit conversation about the latter by conflating it with the former. They even manage to quote Foucault on the process of labelling people as delusional in order to exclude them from politics. I hate t…
Careful, the hammer of logic is quite small. It is a mighty but very restricted tool. Cambridge Analytica was made responsible for large scale social media manipulation. I don't think logical positivism lets you confirm this widely believed story. At least not without even identifying the type of manipulation. What kind of message was employed? Who and how many were targeted? Did it really change the opinions of peop…
Cambridge Analytica claimed they could do large scale social media manipulation.
I care less about what they did than I do about the fact that other people bought what they were selling.
Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO it's also pretty far fetched to compare modern mass manipulation tools like facebook marketing to a fictional object made up by a Schizophrenic, the big difference being that facebook is real and is working for so many other instances of swaying peoples minds.
> Well before Cambridge Analytica appeared on the scene, fears once relegated to paranoia were coming true. Consider that believing that the ads on your TV or radio were directed specifically at you would have been an unequivocal symptom of a delusional state twenty years ago. Today, the same belief about the ads on your smartphone is a recognition of fact. I don't see what is far fetched about this claim. And I don'…
Well it is really more like a form letter really. You would still be delusionally naive if you think a form letter which occassionally makes clear mistakes like advertising feminine hygene products to a cis-male is talking to you instead of a form letter talking at what they think is you. If it says you are 101 then you know there was a data error and not that you are an amnesic immortal.
Cambridge Analytica's discourse has progressed from legitimate scandal to outright moral panic. Targetted advertising isn't good but the collective zeitgeist needs to get a sense of proportion and a grip on reality.
Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now
#34Cultural authority got decentralized over centuries, from church to bible to traditional media to new media, where everybody can be an author and become an authority, gain a fellowship. Peoples obedience to authority didn't change much in general, it's an instinct for survival, it makes the surrounding society and feedback from a society more predictable. Online bubbles are often subcultures that predate the web, wha…
this reminds me of an interview i saw on the news with an elderly british voter who was adamant that she will vote Tory as they are bound to win. it's almost like she saw her vote as a bet and she wanted to get it right. this interview moved me significantly towards being sceptical of current democracies
That sounds like a cultural artifact of a Spoils System sort of corruption from US history - being blindly followed while forgetting that there even was a purpose because it was a cultural norm.
I am aware of literal feudalism version in the UK but I am unsure if they historically had a similar thing - it wouldn't be surprising personally.
Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Well before Cambridge Analytica appeared on the scene, fears once relegated to paranoia were coming true. Consider that believing that the ads on your TV or radio were directed specifically at you would have been an unequivocal symptom of a delusional state twenty years ago. Today, the same belief about the ads on your smartphone is a recognition of fact. I don't see what is far fetched about this claim. And I don'…
We should definitely pause ! We are steady but surely moving towards the very dystopia made up by paranoid minds ages ago. I just think the article made it sound like these fears are unfounded. It's crazy to me that it's still legal to have political advertising, heck, it's crazy to me that advertising in it's current form is legal at all.
We’ve had political advertising in this country since Thomas Paine, and much of it has been scurrilous.
I would say that this is a natural consequence of having a free press, but places with a nonfree press also have political advertising (as a propaganda organ of the state) so maybe it is just a consequence of having media available in general.
Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now
#36“In the ads world, just because a product doesn’t work doesn’t mean you can’t sell it.” - arguing that targeting does not work and can be sold no the less. Seems self refuting when talking about selling Ads .
Well I have pointed it out before - the person they need to convince to sell ads is the client and not the end customer.
We see that all the time with "not advertiser friendly" content that is popular and their foolish attempts to shape it because they fear the backlash of the irrelevant noisy "church lady" types upset that Coke advertised to a musician who admits to having had premarital sex once. The New Jazz/Rock and Roll/Heavy Metal/Rap being shunned at first until it gets huge and the opportunity always being missed by the one who captured the prior wave comes to mind as a reoccuring generational foolishness.
In order to sustain technically all that needs to be done is to convince the adseller that you are responsible for success and the adseller's situation to be sustainable. The performance itself is irrelevant until they can actually audit the effectiveness.
Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now
#37This is an extremely one-sided and biased article. Basically, it presumes that manipulating public opinion begins with Cambridge Analytica, being completely oblivious to the excesive lies, public shaming, character assasinations, alarmism that the agents of the "solid establishment consensus" (The Guardian, NYT, BBC, Deutsche Welle, etc) routinely perform.
Comparing a newspaper with Cambridge Analytica is simply absurd. Newspaper will always have some sort of bias because they are written by human beings and the bias is harmless as long as it's understood and recognized by the readership. Facebook manipulation, OTOH, is completely stealth because each reader gets a completely custom newsfeed.
But the problem is that the bias often isn't understood by the readership - a lot of people consider the Guardian, NY Times and similar to be sources of unbiased, objective truth, despite the impossibility of that being the case. And those newspapers own branding only tries to encourage that view.
Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now
#38If you look at examples of mental illness in non technological cultures, delusions manifest as djinns, demons, succubus and so forth. I once had the opportunity to discuss this with a journalist who spent some time researching and reporting on mental hospitals in Afghanistan. Some of the people at the facilities they visited were deeply disturbed, so the extent that their families had resorted to tying them to a tree…
Reminds me of one cultural interaction - patients from western cultures tend to have far more negative and evil voices perhaps related to more Judeo Christian possesion by demons cultural baggage and descendant myths like "slasher who kills because the voices tell him to" (which defense attorney strategy cases aside are ironically real manifestationd of the culture bound delusion).
Interestingly those other cases tend to be more positive or neutral despite other posession myths in the host culture.
I guess anxiety and paranoia makes the "demons" whatever is believeable to the cultural zeitgeist.
Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now
#39I'll put my "hat" on for a moment and ask: Why doesn't the FEC enforce its policy on the identification of political advertisements and who paid for them when it comes to social media activity? Why is it that a 30 second radio ad needs to have "Paid for by the Candidate X campaign", but millions of dollars worth of paid online trolls needn't disclose a thing? According to their own published rules, this sort of activity should require a financial disclosure. [1]
Question 2: Michael Hastings detailed the legalization of the domestic use of propaganda on US citizens with US taxpayer dollars. [2] How much money has been spent on those activities since they were made legal in 2012?
[1]https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/making-di...
[2]https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mhastings/congressmen-s...
Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now
#40So to pick one example, we're under surveillance. It's a fact of life now. It pretty much wasn't a fact of life in the 19th century.
Fine. But the author keeps changing the subject to insane conspiracy theories. The author seems a little reluctant to distinguish between surveillance and insanity. I think those are two separate topics.