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What if we made advertising illegal?

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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#641

Post by barnabee »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #597
gcp123 wrote: post #262

I 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…

I’m over 40 and I think banning advertising is perfectly reasonable and should be done. I have been certain of this since at least my 20s, and since before the emergence of the current fully formed hellscape.

I have long thought advertising is the new smoking. One day we will look back and be amazed that we allowed public mental health and the wellbeing of our civilisation to be so attacked for profit.

I also manage to fairly easily live a life in which I see remarkably little advertising.

* I use a suite of ad/tracking blockers

* I don’t use apps that force ads on me

* I watch very little TV, and never watch broadcast TV

* I live in the UK which has relatively little outside advertising, and I mostly get around by walking/cycling (thus avoiding ads on public transport)

* etc…

It astounds me when I speak to friends and travel just how pervasive advertising is for some people, and particularly in some places.

The US, for example, is insane. I can see how some people used to living in such an environment may think it’s not possible or reasonable to get rid of advertising, and for sure there will be edge cases and evasion, but my experience is that it really wouldn’t be so hard to dramatically reduce the amount people are exposed to.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#642

Post by admiralrohan »

Theoretically, this is impossible.

There is already a concept called surrogate advertising. In India, promoting alcohol products is banned, but companies advertise packaged drinking water instead. Everyone knows what it really represents, yet nothing can be done about it.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#643

Post by barnabee »

grues-dinner wrote: post #514
gcp123 wrote: post #262

I 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…

> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. While we're at radical thought experiments combine that with "what if any entity worth over 100 million (insert arbitrary limit here, perhaps what if it was based on an multiple of average employee salary) was disallowed". And, in fact, if the maximum company size were limited, and thus the marketplace wasn't a swimming pool full of…

I like the direction but some things are difficult to imagine happening at all without extremely large companies.

I have wondered before about restricting a company’s diversity. Effectively giving a time limit after a company over a certain size develops a new line of business by which it must be spun off into a new company. Say 12 or 18 months.

For example, Apple would have been allowed to develop and launch Apple Music but it would have been forced to spin it off.

The rule would need to be carefully crafted, and would need regulators to be active in enforcement as it would require interpretation to be applied (similar to how anti-trust works today, perhaps).

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#644

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

gameman144 wrote: post #249

This feels very similar in my mind to blanket concepts like "let's ban lobbying". There are certainly specific modes or practices in lobbying that are damaging to society, but lobbying itself (specifically, informing lawmakers about your specific perspective and desires) is a valid and desirable function. Likewise, advertising on its own at its core is useful: there might be something that adds value to your life tha…

>is a valid and desirable function

No I don’t think so. I would genuinely guess that 97% of the ads I see are irrelevant garbage or, more commonly, bids by products I know to raise awareness to increase the probability of their sale. I discover the vast majority of what I care about through word of mouth and I suspect I’d be fine without ads. There are so many negative externalities that it’s actually ridiculous.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#645

Post by ohdearsadface »

otterley wrote: post #22

> No one is entitled to yell at you “GET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAY” with a dopamine megaphone in your bedroom. And to track 90% of your life to know when and how to say it. That's not free speech, that's harassment. The author is off their chair. Yes, even commercial speech is protected as long as it’s not fraudulent. And there are already laws prohibiting nuisances. Advertising isn’t a nuisance…

I watch crowd here since 2011, and asking cowards not to downvote will probably have opposite effect :)

if you disagree with the tribe, you will be punished by the tribe. Some of the tribe can down vote you and so they will use this terrible power to silence anyone who might shake tribes life view :)

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#646

Post by nonrandomstring »

dostick wrote: post #615
gcp123 wrote: post #262

I 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…

> What's frustrating is how the tech community keeps treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease. If you think deeper, to first principles, it’s clear that disease is capitalism. I am not advocating socialism/communism, but isn’t it strange that capitalism was never reviewed or updated according to new science about anthropology, sociology, and economics? In 100 years, about 100 countries tried it, and not one c…

> capitalism was never reviewed or updated according to new science about anthropology, sociology, and economics?

If taking a human-science view, then one interesting take on capitalism is that it isn't a thing at all. It's the absence of a thing. It's a positive freedom. There can be no "science" of capitalism.

It allows the direction of excess human psychological energy. It is the absence of regulation of anti-social criminal behaviours, by creating an allowable "grey area" between moral and wicked behaviours - what so many business people like to call "amoral". But that same energy is innovative, creative - the destruction of what is old and weak is part of any finite-sized system. The need to destroy, dominate and exploit is strong in a significant percent of the population. Any decent study of criminology is continuous with "business".

William James, in The Moral Equivalent of War [0] suggested that we coped with this in the past by having every few generations of males kill each other in wars - and of course implied that it's mainly a gendered issue. During frontier times, as the European settlers conquered America and other lands, there was ample "space" for exploitation as that energy was directed against "nature" (and the indigenous folks who were considered part of "nature" as opposed to "civilisation"). Now we've run out of space. The only target left for that energy is each other.

Social-"ism" etc are projects to try controlling that nature by reducing "individualism" (and insecurity-based consumerism is an obvious first target). It's major fault is that the anti-social criminals tend be want to be the ones doing the controlling - just wearing the mask of civility and preaching the primacy of "the group".

If we cannot change human nature we must find a new outlet for that energy. Space exploration as a new frontier always looked good, but in reality it's something we are unlikely to achieve before self-destructing the technological civilisation needed to support it.

That leaves little else but a kind of cultural revolution. The pharmaceutically catalysed version of that in the 1960s is worth studying to see where and why it went wrong. See Huxley.

Any realistic systematic change would need to address this "problem" of the individual ego, creating some new focus that is the "moral equivalent" of war.

[0] http://public-library.uk/ebooks/65/5.pdf

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#647

Post by barnabee »

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #298
Terr_ wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a tricky and uncomfortable truth that human minds are hackable. On the flip side, we've had many thousands of years of adversarial training, so it's not as if protections don't exist—at least for a very classical modes of attack.

The reality of "mind control" of those perpetually exposed to media has been a popular topic throughout the last half century at least. Humans don't have those protections. Although, ego deludes oneself to believe they do. Ask anyone if they are susceptible to advertising. Maybe 1 in 5 have the humility and awareness to state the truth.

This is precisely why I try to see as close to zero advertising as possible, and also why I will always actively avoid buying something when I do see an ad for it (if I realise this).

I do not trust my in-built protections, so I’d rather not be exposed in the first place.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#648

Post by ohdearsadface »

dhfbshfbu4u3 wrote: post #163

This is as ridiculous as asking, “What if we made agriculture illegal?” You don’t make a planet of 8 billion people work without the trappings of civilization, good and bad. You certainly don’t make it work without commerce and freedom of speech.

there are people who disagree, they are called communists. and yes, they can ban agriculture, no agriculture for you my friend.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#649

Post by titaphraz »

glacier5674 wrote: post #277
titaphraz wrote: post #236

A start would be banning of misleading statements and half-truths. A panel of randomly selected 100 people will be the judge and jury.

What's the threshold they have to meet to ban? Half of them, give or take, will probably not be able to recognize the lie, and a sizeable portion of them would likely not be convinced in deliberation. It's also subject to nullification, e.g. "I know it's a lie, but it 'owns' the people I don't like"

Yep, it's hard. Let's deter it in the first place with imprisonment for the CEO if convicted. Ads will be amazingly informative.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#650

Post by ohdearsadface »

nojs wrote: post #258

Funny that it literally begins with “Follow @index@simone.org via your Fediverse account (like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Flipboard, Wordpress, Writefreely, Threads, or BlueSky.)” Or is that just helpfully letting us know of something related that we might want ;)

how sad, pointing at hypocrisy met with downvote button :)
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