Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

Communicate in what way? And at what point are you going to differentiate between "art" and "not art"?

These are rhetorical questions, because their implementation is a pipe dream. Getting rid of "advertising" would require the most draconian anti-speech laws imaginable.

Very odd dichotomy. Did you never consider living in a world that has no bread lines nor advertisements? That seems like the one most would choose. In this country, we have both bread lines AND advertisements!

I completely agree, though I haven't been thinking in terms of the cancer metaphor myself. I have been thinking a bit about how we could limit the negative effects of both advertising and other phenomena like social media algorithms:

1. Almost all advertising is based on manipulation of human cognitive biases. There is a limited set of biases, and the mechanisms by which they can be exploited are both limited and easily detected – we can most likely train AI to do it. Therefore, it's possible to start thinking seriously about making laws that ban corporations and organisations from creating marketing that exploits these cognitive biases.

2. When it comes to social media platforms, there are two routes we could go down. Either we could regulate their algorithms the same way – or we could force social media platforms to both make their recommendation algorithms open source, and to open up their platforms to third-party recommendation algorithms that people can choose to use instead. This would be like a recommendation algorithm app store that the company has to provide to their users. You might want to select a youtube recommendation algorithm that optimises for personal development – or a facebook feed that optimises for creating real-world connections

Of course corporations would fight this kind of legislation with tooth and claw, but that's how it is. I would be happy to get some thoughtful feedback on these ideas, their technical and legal plausibility, and any potential negative unintended consequences or loopholes that could undermine them

Informing potential customers of products that might be useful to them.

Let's say you are the inventor of the chainsaw, you need to tell lumberjacks that chainsaws exist, that's advertising. Otherwise you won't sell any and your invention will be lost, while lumberjacks will continue struggling with inefficient tools.

I put on plays. Some people would enjoy seeing them. I can only do four or five performances so I can't wait for people to rave to their friends about it.

I put up polite, attractive, informative ads in forums that I think will have people who might come to my shows. Not everyone will; the large majority won't. But some of these are web sites that talk about theater, where my ad spend pays for the site itself to exist.

I recognize that the ads we most notice are nothing like that. But the idea that all ads are automatically a bad thing misses out on the fact that the original purpose of ads, as cited in the article, does still exist. If you waved a magic wand and got rid of ads my theater probably wouldn't exist. No big loss, I suppose, but the world is very slightly poorer for it.