> The only criticism I'd make against GP's claim is that the advertising industry is just one spoke in the global wheel of impossible growth and consumption. GP's claim is not nutty, it's too narrow and limited. Ogilvy and Saatchi are only footsoldiers.
Sure - guilty as charged. I was making a pretty limited somewhat rhetorical gesture.
> The only way this game of musical chairs ends without tears is if we luck into some awesome technology that leads to post-scarcity economics.
I don't believe this to be possible, because the global ecological crisis (of which economic crashes are minor phenotypical efflorescences) doesn't have the kind of simple single causes that short-term big-bang technological innovation can fix. It's the progressive erosion of hundreds of complex evolved systems whose components are being broken at multiple levels. The kind of technology required to 'fix' this would have to have similar types of complexities at multiple scales as are found in those complex evolved systems. That may be achievable, but given the crudeness of our current technology, surely over a timescale of centuries, not the decades we have available.
The one possibility would be to slow so-called 'growth' down dramatically enough to allow evolved systems to recover, and in the meantime develop complex technologies on a slow, centuries-scale, burn. But obviously that's politically infeasible, so global ecological collapse it will be.