Social media is nearly the same as those home shopping channels from the 90’s.
What if we made advertising illegal?
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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#592> But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence.
But humanity has never been free of non-current forms of advertising
> The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear
No the wouldn't, you can still monetize addictive without ads
> Think about what's happened since 2016 ... fracture our social fabric along existing fault lines.
Just think about what happened before 2016 and how many times the social fabric had been fractured (sometimes also with foreign actors) ...
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#593Earlier quoted context omitted.
> imagine a world without advertising I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable. It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies. And in all cas…
Agree with this entirely. In fact, I would go as far as saying if advertising was illegal, then expressing opinions would be illegal. Everything is an advertisement.
There's a fairly clear line between opinion and advertisement. For instance, one is paid for and the other is given freely.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#594Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can’t imagine it, try a bit harder. We can build a better world, but it takes effort.
The problem is the harder you try to imagine it, the less it looks like a better world. Letting people communicate freely is a good thing in its own right, and fundamental to so many other good things we enjoy. Getting rid of a billboard for something I am never going to buy sounds great, but it kinda sucks for the person who actually is interested in the thing that billboard is advertising. Even if there were some t…
> Letting people communicate freely is a good thing in its own right, and fundamental to so many other good things we enjoy
I would argue that paid advertisement is a force distorting free speech. In a town square, if you can pay to have the loudest megaphone to speak over everyone else, soon everyone would either just shut up and leave or not be able to speak properly, leaving your voice the only voice in the conversation. Why should money be able to buy you that power?
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#595Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can’t imagine it, try a bit harder. We can build a better world, but it takes effort.
The problem is the harder you try to imagine it, the less it looks like a better world. Letting people communicate freely is a good thing in its own right, and fundamental to so many other good things we enjoy. Getting rid of a billboard for something I am never going to buy sounds great, but it kinda sucks for the person who actually is interested in the thing that billboard is advertising. Even if there were some t…
> it kinda sucks for the person who actually is interested in the thing that billboard is advertising
and it also sucks for the billboard's location owner, who is drawing a revenue from it.
People who proclaim that doing XYZ to make the world better, is not really considering the entirety of the world - just their corner. To claim that it would make the world better, they must show evidence that it doesn't hurt somebody else (who just happens to be in a different tribe to the proposer).
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#596I'm so happy to read this, I've been thinking about this question for a while now, and I think it would help a lot:
Big companies where revenues are based on marketing would collapse, the market fragments (which is good), smaller companies are created instead, better diversity of local products and services. Better wealth distribution. More money for the government, hopefully better public services.
With less flashy products and services, people have a better purchasing power, even considering they'll have to pay for services they use, like reviews. Review companies would need strict controls to be put in place against corruption.
It would probably also change a lot of nonsensical landscapes (ex: sports)
Advertising is evil.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#597I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry. The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings p…
I wonder a bit if this point of view is an 'age' thing, which is to say if you're under 40 it rings true, if you're over 40 it sounds silly kind of thing. I don't know that it is, it just feels that way a bit to me.
What if we outlawed surveillance capital instead? "Ad tech" is about exploiting information about individuals and their actions, what if that part of it was illegal because collecting or providing such information about individuals was illegal? (like go to jail illegal, not pay a fine illegal).
By making that illegal, collecting it would not be profitable (and it would put the entity collecting it at risk of legal repercussions). "Loyalty cards", "coupons", "special offers just for you", all gone in an instant. You could still advertise in places like on the subway, or on a billboard, but it would be illegal to collect any information about who saw your ad.
If you're over 50, you probably read a newspaper. And in reading the newspaper might have looked at the weekly ad for the various supermarkets in your neighborhood. That never bothered you because you weren't being "watched". The ad was made "just for you" and it didn't include specials on only the things you like to eat. When read a magazine you saw ads in it for people who like to read about the magazine's subject matter. Magazines would periodically do 'demographic' surveys but you could make that illegal too.
Generally if you're under 40 you've probably grown up with the Internet and have always had things tracking you. You learned early on to be anonymous and separate your persona in one group for the one in another. That people have relentlessly worked to make it impossible to be anonymous angers you to your core and their "reason" was to target you with ads. By maybe that it was "ads" was a side effect? That is probably the most effective way to extract value out of surveillance data but there are others (like extortion and blackmail).
I resonate strongly with the urge to slay the "Advertising Monster" but what I really want to slay is how easily and without consequence people can violate my privacy. I don't believe that if you made advertising illegal but left open the allowance to surveil folks, the surveillance dealers would find another way to extract value out of that data. No, I believe choking off the "data spigot" would not only take away the 'scourge' of targeted advertising, it would have other benefits as well.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#598[Slavery is immoral] is a corollary of the principle that [human autonomy is sacred]. It is not very farfetched to have the moral principle that [human attention is sacred]. If we take this principle seriously, a large number of manipulative dark patterns would be considered wildly unethical.
I fundamentally disagree. You are basing your tenets on two overly-broad ideas that don't make for a good basis for an actionable framework. You are kinda motte-and-baileying.
First of all, I dispute that "human autonomy" is the basis for the immorality of slavery. Rather, it is the preservation of human dignity. The subtle difference being, you can cede a certain amount of your autonomy without losing any dignity such as when taking on a specialized role to function in a society (in other words, a job). Actions that violate another's autonomy has some overlap with actions that violate another's dignity but "some overlap" is all that is really there to it.
"Human attention is sacred" therefore...what? Would, for example, schools count as a violation of human attention? A good book? A perfectly fine movie with a smattering of product placement? There's no telling what the blast radius of your principle here is.
Rather than thinking of human attention as a sacred inviolable thing, it is more akin to a currency each of us can spend. We just have to facilitate wiser spending.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#599I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry. The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings p…
I wonder a bit if this point of view is an 'age' thing, which is to say if you're under 40 it rings true, if you're over 40 it sounds silly kind of thing. I don't know that it is, it just feels that way a bit to me. What if we outlawed surveillance capital instead? "Ad tech" is about exploiting information about individuals and their actions, what if that part of it was illegal because collecting or providing such in…
This is IMHO the right angle.
Advertising is virtually impossible to stop, but more than that, is not inherently evil. Most countries include laws on how you can advertise. For example, you can't lie and make a claim that your product can't live up to, you can't use certain words or phrases, and you have to have disclaimers in some situations.
In the mid-90s when Yahoo was a young company, they had a simple advertising model. The ad would be placed next to the section of the site relevant to the category. If you were searching for watches, a watch ad would be next to it. The advertiser would know how many times the ad was served and how many times it was clicked on.
They didn't have deep demographic data like they do today.
The surveillance capitalism model is the predatory model. Advertisement is only one part of that industry.
Re: What if we made advertising illegal?
#600I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry. The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings p…
> check out the documentary “Century of the Self”.
The editing is not for everyone but I thoroughly enjoyed it. You come out of it not really knowing what it did to you, but something changed.
This is a fantastic recommendation, and Adam Curtis' documentaries are all on YouTube somehow.