Your Head as a Battleground, Dueling Memes

You will never be able to completely avoid advertising without taking yourself out of mainstream society, but you can avoid the most insidious parts, and you can try very hard to condition yourself against the rest of it.

The "second-order" advertising (e.g. critic recommendations, word of mouth) is much harder to deal with, especially if you believe that some people have good, unbiased, not-unduly-influenced opinions that you will benefit from listening to. My only recommendation is to curate the people whose opinions you listen to very carefully, and think hard about who they might be (possibly unwittingly) influenced by.

I am sympathetic to the argument that advertising pays for many of the things I like, particularly on the web. But I don't think that argument is compelling enough for it to be worth handing over control of my head.

Of course, advertising is only one factor, though it is probably the most important factor. Other systems competing for a share of your mind include religions, political parties and/or systems of political thought, philosophical systems, programming languages and/or communities (eg functional vs. object oriented), sports teams, national identities, racial identities, and more.

You may want to allow some of these access to a share of your mind (e.g. many people enjoy supporting a sports team, even when the rational part of their brain knows that their sports team isn't inherently better than any other). But for the most part, I think it's better to avoid falling into these traps.

The best exposition I can recall is one of Paul Graham's earlier essays, "Keep Your Identity Small"[0]. I would probably argue a similar point, but phrase it differently - keep your identity broad. Instead of thinking of yourself as a "Ruby programmer" or a "functional programmer" it is better to think of yourself as a "programmer" (and even better not to think of yourself as a programmer at all!). Instead of thinking of yourself as American, or Chinese, or as black, or white, try to think of yourself as a human. The broader you can make your identity, the less chance you have of accidentally falling prey to any of the theories competing for a space in your head.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

I don't claim to be immune to advertising, or know how to avoid all of it! But knowing you are susceptible to advertising is the first step towards not letting it influence you (too much).

After all, if all the parties in a war are pushing you to ‘join their side’ then they are trying very hard to make you forget that there is another side: your side, non-participation in the war, the ability to opt-out and to refuse to become an unpaid foot-soldier for any one party.

I think this is very difficult. E.g. we are all using technology and most of the tech that we can buy or get for 'free' are stakeholders in a war. I try to make my technology choices on technical merits, but often the perceived merits are influenced by what is said on the internet, simply because we can't try before we buy.

Also, I noticed the social pressure set up by such wars. E.g. I used to use MacBooks and iPhones, basically because the iPhone was so far ahead that it wan't even funny. Later, I switched from iPhone to Android, mostly because of the price/spec ratio. I noticed an immediate effect in some of my social circles: Apple users spoke as if I betrayed Apple, Android users shrugged with a comment like 'oh, I thought you were an Apple fanboy'. It's really surprising that it doesn't occur to people that you can switch due to technical or budget reasons.

But reading this page you weren't reading any other and if you tweet the link or pass it on then you've been successfully enlisted in my army ;)

See also:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5LEYG5TqaI