941–950 of 1001 posts
This idea isn't uncommon because it's beyond the Overton window, it's uncommon because it is silly and unworkable. * Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally. In fact, the author touts as a benefit that you'd stop populists being able to talk to their audience. This is destroying the village of liberal democracy in order to save it! * Absolutely zero thought…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> * Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally. Some limits exist on advertising exist in most countries. Do they respect free speech? > * Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend? Absolutely zero thought is never given on policing boundaries on anyt…
> In my country, advertising alcohol is forbidden. Somehow I still manage to find interesting new beers to try year after year This is interesting. Alcohol companies a well known to bypass this prohibition by all possible means (product placement, influencers,...) and yet I find real benefits in it. It would possibly be similar if advertising was forbidden for everything
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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-soci…
Light property ownership is when this toothbrush is mine. Normal property ownership is when my house is mine. Extreme property ownership is when your house is mine, that section of airspace over there is mine, precisely four tenths of the revenue generated by the billboards on the Eiffel tower is mine - using a heavy dose of the legal system to artificially extend the principle of ownership to all sorts of things that aren't naturally property and things that would naturally be someone else's property. This is a positive action done on purpose by the legal system, not merely natural default like me owning my toothbrush.
---
Did you know one of the common pesticides in the USA but banned in the EU interferes with hormone levels in certain species, making them way more individualist? One of those species is humans. Still a positive freedom?
Is there any concrete evidence that anything bad has ever happened as a result of advertising? I don't like rap music, but I think it would obviously stupid of me to claim that it's harmful because I dislike the aesthetics. What is the steel man for "advertising bad"? Articles like this always take for granted that advertising is harmful, whereas on the contrary I'm starting from a position where advertising is one o…
I agree. Many things we benefit from are free or significantly reduced in price due to the profitability of advertising. I would not want to live in a world where I'd have to find everything through word of mouth and not get to try free versions of services.
Is this actually known to be true? And if so, to what degree and for which products, at which point does it tip into simple manipulation of the customer?
This idea isn't uncommon because it's beyond the Overton window, it's uncommon because it is silly and unworkable. * Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally. In fact, the author touts as a benefit that you'd stop populists being able to talk to their audience. This is destroying the village of liberal democracy in order to save it! * Absolutely zero thought…
Is the right to pay others for speech necessary for free speech to exist? If so it is already non-existent. No functioning democracy allows judges or politicians to sell their speech to the highest bidder for example. Why should advertisement be different?
That surely depends heavily on your definition of functioning democracy.
Rather than ban ads in an absolutist sense, why not think about ads as “bads” (rather than “goods” in economic terms) and then tax them? Let’s define a “good” as something with positive utility and value, and define a “bad” as something that imposes harm or negative externalities. If we treat advertising as a “bad” — not uniformly, but in terms of impact (manipulation, misinformation, psychological harm) — then we ca…
https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/japan....
(I tend to think of the aether in which ads are transmitted as the public, uh, space)
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…
That parallel between propaganda and advertising is why I have a pathological hatred of advertising, I block it in all forms possible, to the extent that if I can’t block it I won’t use the product. I simply hate been manipulated. So much so that I forget what the modern tech landscape is like for the average user til I use one of their devices. We’ve (collectively we for techies) helped create a dystopia.
Of course it's not always possible, but it would be ideal to use services that don't have advertisements for anybody.
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…
> 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…
> I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable.
What? I have world peace on my devices right now with the help of Ublock Origin.
If my county bans billboards, as the county next to me have, I will see no ads except for on paper I choose to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 M…
Large companies diversifying is the unnatural thing. Why on earth should Apple do music, or Amazon do video? It's manipulating their monopoly positions, it's almost inherently anti-competitive, etc.
Just because antitrust in the US at least is so wimpy (exclusively looking for "consumer harm") there's no reason sane antitrust couldn't also protect ... competition itself, in the form of smaller players etc.
I don't think there's a single industry that merits the bloated conglomerates that rule the earth today, whether it's mining, autos, chips. It's just that capitalism inherently centralizes, and capitalism runs the show.