Everything that makes advertisers happy is to the detriment of humanity as a whole. Everything that makes advertisers’ jobs easier also makes it easier for authoritarian governments. “Innovation” is no longer about creating new things, it’s about taking what already works, breaking it, shoving ads on it and charging a ransom in the form of a premium subscription.
On the other hand, there are endless ad-skipping tools, pages and sites where the main attraction is the lack of ads without a subscription. More and more people are talking about how intrusive and annoying ads are, even those who make their living from them. As the efforts of big tech to please advertisers grow, so do the efforts of ordinary people to screw them.
Very Cyberpunk.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
It’s that…the reason we are so dissatisfied with our lives? We may not even pay attention to most adverts, but subconsciously, they affect us and make us fell unhappy?
yep, it’s a psychological attack (on your subconscious) to create unrealistic expectations and feelings of inadequacy among consumers who do not experience the same outcomes.
whether you pay attention to it or not, it’s still a psychic attack
I think that is literally, objectively evil. How can we fight back? I already use adblocks online, that is one way, I think.
Stop giving your money to the giant companies that fund and perpetuate surveillance ad tech. Shop local.
hi. you must be new here. welcome to capitalism, consumerism, and the modern dystopia. what will you be doing to destroy it?
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I think you mean Capitalism
Say it with me:
“Its Capitalism”
The profit motive is killingbus and the planet.
On the one hand, yes. But also, it’s mostly capitalism.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with “I’m starting a frisbee club for fun. We’re going to meet saturdays in the park. I’m going to put up some flyers and tell my friends about it”.
But at some point that can mutate into “i put a 30 second unskippable ad for FrisbeeFranchise on youtube, and a giant billboard over the subway stop that implies if you don’t play frisbee you’ll never be happy”. That’s bad.
I think targeted ads should be illegal as a first step. I don’t think anyone except the worst sort of advertisers would go to bat for those. Old fashioned static ads where they put an ad for bike stuff by the bike lane in town is annoying, but somehow we’ve invented things so much worse than that.
i don’t know what happened to us as a society… we seem to have lost all semblance of media literacy.
it feels like in the 90’s we were all very ad-aware, and actively opposed the idea of ‘selling out’… then the rolling stones sold the rights to Start Me Up to windows and we’ve been in a race to the bottom ever since. why are we talking about ‘monetizing your hobbies’.
what happened to shows like Media Television, magazines like AdBusters? does nobody remember reading Naomi Klein’s ‘No Logo’??
edit: Remember when Adam Curtis made 'A Century of the Self?
Oh god the “side hustle” hobby culture gets me fuming mad.
LOL no, the advertisers won that war decades ago. It’s been an occupation ever since.
Advertising is the reason why privacy is nonexistent now… it is kinda incredible just how much information they gather.
In centuries past when people were writing constitutions and what rights people have they had privacy and warrants and spying and all that shit done based on what evil governments can do to their citizens. I don’t think a single one of them ever realized just how fucking massive corporations would be and how much shit they steal from us.
What Bill Hicks said
I feel the same. Besides what you mentioned, there is also the effect on what news and content will be produced and shown (see Manufacturing Consent). The advertisers who are the customers of shows want the viewers in a buying mood. So while “if it bleeds it leads” works fine but controversial topics that disturbs people or make them think will not be shown.
Best example is youtube - once the demonetization came there must have been significant effects on what topics were discussed and how. Without sponsorings and patreon it would be worse, but this or rule is shaping our global civilization for the worse.
People pay far too much attention to ideology, but it’s the rules of a system that lead it to converge to different outcomes. And advertising is a big one.
Advertising, marketing, and the stock market are the worst aspects of capitalism, and the system could be improved dramatically with heavy restrictions on all of those. Yeah it would shrink the economy, but the new steady state would be much better. Less waste, better stuff.
The economy doesn’t represent the people, doesn’t feed anyone and doesn’t reflect their well being.
You have my vote.
The wildest part is that advertising has become so poisonous that now over 50% of a Americans use adblockers and over 1/3 of people world wide. It’s not just techies installing adblockers for their grandmas, it’s become mass market!
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Advertising is pollution
All advertising is a psyop
All advertisers are eco terrorists and gaslighters.
They are enemies of normal people.
They have forgone their humanity and our planet and our own well being.
They should not exist.
I’m a walking ad for PostgreSQL, free and open-source RDBMS. It’s so much better than any other database, you should give it a try.
I am none of the above.
Advertising doesn’t have to exist.
Like, we could just pass laws restricting or outright banning certain kinds.
I think people just forget that we can tell corporations they can’t do whatever the fuck they want.
Think about how much waste in bandwidth and electricity happens just to make a webpage unreadable.
Marketers are the opposite of accomplishment.
It’s a job that only exists in capitalism
If you’re a marketer and you read this, fuck you personally.
It’s a job that only exists in capitalism
Not true. Government-sponsored propaganda campaigns need advertisers (“ads” are just corporate propaganda), public works projects need to be advertised for awareness, politicians will need people to advertise their candidacy, political movements will advertise their positions, and unless this is a command-control economy where one thing is delegated to exactly one entity, you’ll probably be advertising some service or product you do or make.
lol capitalism AND propaganda.
I stand corrected.
Is advertising just capitalist propaganda?
Your name is Punk Rock Sports Fan.
Suppose a local punk band wants to inform people that they will be playing a show. So they print out some posters and hang them around town.
That’s advertising.
Valid point.
But worth saying, while it’s not unheard of for punk shows to post fliers, it’s mostly a word of mouth kind of thing.
You only advertise because you want people do take some action of some kind.
Totally possible to put on a show without explicitly advertising it. It just depends on your notifications for doing the show.
they forget because the corporations pay for propaganda to tell them it’s impossible
And then those people can go do something useful with their lives!
The catch: it’s honest work
They could just make media that people actually enjoy with that advertising budget…
Like, you get that’s an option, right? I don’t think anyone wants their creative visions to be used to sell beer to college kids with burping frogs.
We don’t all have to like the same 10 movies a year the big studios decide we have to like either.
Those resources could be spread around to more people making a much higher quantity of media that doesn’t have to try to appeal to everyone.
Prioritizing profits over everything doesn’t lead to a better life except for a very very small percentage of us, so why do we all go along with it?
We can literally just stop putting profits over everything and 99.99% of our lives would improve immediately
Are these, like, the opening lines to an awesome, dystopian sci-fi novel?
I agree with Bill Hicks.
Came here to say that, he called it decades ago. Advertisers, marketers, and developers, all of them parasites
