What if we made advertising illegal?

Counterpoint: ads are non-issue.

I've been on the internet for over 25 years and there wasn't a time in which ads were more than a mild annoyance. Sure, a 5-second ad before watching a video, or a porn ad in The Pirate Bay, or an ad in a news site - I could do without them. But it's a nothingburger, and I'm grateful for those ads, as many of the sites I use would not exist without them. For anyone who's really bothered by them, there are ad blockers.

Furthermore, user data and tracking is a huge bogeyman, and it's extremely overblown. I'm yet to see any evidence of anyone having any relevant data about me AT ALL. With any luck they can profile me in that I use certain sites, or that I'm a male in my 30s and I live in X country. Generic shit at best. Relevant read: https://archive.is/kTkom

If anything, so-called targeted ads have been failing on me because I'm never suggested producs or services I'd actually buy.

So, what's the issue here? For all the issues we currently have, ADS are the worse? No.

What I think is:

a) This is an elitist in-group "luxury belief". It's like saying I hate ads signals a sort of superiority, as if you're part of people in the know, and ads are for normies or NPCs. That's for inferior people, I'm above that.

b) This is a problem for people in the autist spectrum, in which those who say they hate ads are overrepresented.

But I think there's a darker undercurrent since this view has been lobbyied and astroturfed to oblivion:

c) This is a propaganda effort to distract you from more nefarious things, or to encourage them. Such as normalizing banning and prohibiting things. Normalizing strict state-enforced regulation of the internet.

> framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters.

They're not the same mechanism, they're the same thing. Propaganda is advertising one doesn't approve of, and advertising is propaganda that one does approve of. The fine-slicing is the result of people who want to make money doing propaganda attempting to justify themselves.

> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow.

Through what mechanism? Wishes?

I'm getting annoyed with people who made a bunch of money in advertising talking about banning advertising (or in general people who made a bunch of money in X trying to create careers as X-bashing pundits or gurus.) Advertising has a purpose; it's how I find out what products and services are available, and at what cost. People working in advertising who don't realize that have clearly never given the only honest aspect of their occupation a moment's thought. They thought the job was to distract people while robbing them. From that perspective, I can understand why they now think that they themselves should have been banned.

If you want to ban advertising, you have to replace advertising. We have a highway system, there's no reason why we can't have a state products and services that are available system, or in the same vein a matchmaking system between employees and employers. We don't, though. Banning advertising without one would be like banning Human Resources departments without any other hiring process.

What we should do is regulate advertising, since is is commercial speech and we can, but we don't do that either. Talking about banning advertising when we can't even ban direct to customer drug advertisements (which can be easily done, as it was done, by creating standards for the information that has to be included with a drug advertisement, and the format that it has to be done in.) We can't even get the basics; banning advertising, in addition to being a bad idea, is a pipe dream.

I actually think that pre-internet ads were okay. Even the tv ones, before the era of obnoxious marketing came (but not really). I read a bunch of journals my and my friends's parents have ordered and it was even cool to see ads that weren't targeted. I remember looking at pages with watches, suits, condoms, beauty lines, hair shampoos, etc. It was sort of natural and wasn't as stupid and repulsive as modern internet ads. The ads were consistent with the auditory of the issue, so if you're reading it, chances are you're interested. And the best part was, when you put it down, it doesn't follow you.

So I think more about making internet ads illegal, just to wash out all the spying filth from it. Alphabet, meta, parts of amazon, etc. They are natural cancer and prone to propaganda attacks because it's the same thing.

As per entertainment, people will find the way. Kids these days may not know, but nothing has as much energy as a bored teen/20+ ager. We formed physically local groups based on interests and had life that wasn't 99% passive peering into the screen.

Citation needed. I'll take a free media which is held accountable for not misstating basic facts over social media any day of the week.

If you can’t imagine it, try a bit harder. We can build a better world, but it takes effort.