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 agree with Bill Hicks.

https://youtu.be/9h9wStdPkQY

With modern advertising techniques, adverts mainly work by psychological manipulation - putting a name in your mind, making you associate it with an emotion (for example cars are "freedom", perfume is "lust"), induce fear of a non-existing problem and then sell you a "solution" and so on.

It's like being the focus of a crowd of untiring salesmen who are slick manipulators with training in Psychology and with no ethics at all.

That's how it is every day in every place (even the comfort of your own home) in the advert heavy world we live in if one doesn't fight to keep that shit away.

What’s distressing is the way they’ve been accepted. Ads are baked into many experiences, particularly online. Is this post an ad? Is the recommendation thread? The quiet suggestion that there has to be a solution to some problem? It’s impossible to say.

Hailcorporate used to be active, but now it’s a ghost town where specters whisper to one another, depressed and sardonic. That’s why I love lemmy. Aside from the sticker and knitting scammers, we’re nearly clear of ads. If you’re a human reading this, I very probably appreciate you!

Advertising is the blistering puss of an underlying Capitalist stage four cancer that has broken the surface of the body.

Yes, but you misspelled "capitalism".

Advertisers waste our time which is the only measurable currency we are all spending at the same rate

I propose we make a massive product database. If you need to buy something, you can see your options there on a level playing field. Companies who spend more money don’t get any more visibility than any other. If you don’t feel like spending any money, the database isn’t trying to push you down a spending spiral.

we have ads because services paid for with attention are more accessible and get more traffic than services paid for with a monthly subscription ... we could probably subsidize a lot of websites or make them community efforts (like Wikipedia), but because there is a desire to profit from websites, we have this aggressive push for ads and monetization in every corner of the web.

Commercialization, though, is the problem more than advertising itself is. Monetization through "native ads" or affiliate link marketing is just as insidious and toxic, and pervasive. Just like people hate loot boxes and games that have mechanics where skill is less important than paying cash for in-game content to gain an advantage, the root problem is commercialization.

This is just capitalism, and cyberpunk as a genre is meant to be critical of capitalism and its rotten fruits.

I think it misses the mark to interpret the war as a war between humanity and advertisers when it's a war between the powerful and wealthy and the 99%.

Online ads can be easily circumvented, I am more annoyed with giant billboards polluting public spaces. Oh well, one more reason to spend more time in nature.

Started with 8Chan, where the same radicalised incels who support the rise of fascism worked in unison to move the Overton window. Allowing big Tech and Rupert Murdoch to constantly run propaganda against immigrants, whilst sustaining high levels of legal immigration to afford cheap labour and push the working class against eachother. All while Google, Meta, Microsoft and all of those clowns sell our active location Data collected from our phnes to Saudis, Russia and other extremely wealthy families so they could see businesses with less footfall during COVID, allowing them to bankrupt the global economy by shorting those companies through options. Netting them billions in profit and bankrupting businesses causing further economic downturn, in conjunction with the hostile takeover of the taxi cab and food delivery businesses. Further damaging restaurants and creating more unemployment, leading to fewer entry level jobs, normalising isolation and creating an atmosphere of distrust between people. Allowing for the further radicalisation of now unemployed young men by circulating millions of misleading, and sometimes, totally fake stories about immigrants. People that they brought here in the first place. All in order to push the world into a global conflict, buy up Earth and install themselves as the rulers of the ashes at the cost of billions of peoples lives.

You could generalize that to "exploiters vs. humanity", ads are just a part of that.

The advertisers are merely a tool for the investors, the people who own everything. The "haves" as it were. They are always at odds with and trying to squeeze money and labor from the rest of us, you know, the "have nots".

Something something you basically just figured out communism on your own

One day ads will be unskippable, unless you get a 12 hr AdPass by watching 60 minutes of uninterrupted ads while eyeball tracking software monitors your attention. You will get mini games where you need to sing along or high five a friend. You can get an instant AdPass by purchasing the featured product.

Modern marketing, post WW2 was the privatization of propaganda.

You just need some special sunglasses to see the real messages.

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Datavampires.

There's a French film called "BigBug" that makes an interesting parody about this.

Ads literally make me disabled. There presence challenges my freedom to interact both online and the real world.

Chris Hayes spends a good deal of time on this subject in his book The Siren's Call which I can't recommend enough.

More and more people are talking about how intrusive and annoying ads are, even those who make their living from them.

And majority of them won't do shit about it and keep complaining.

I know, there are user-friendly tools to deal with it, but the problem is that those people are lazy enough to not even bother spending few minutes looking for and implementing them.

Very Cyberpunk.

Just another battle ground of the class war that has been waged since ruling class figured out they can dunk on pedons

At least you are an adult so you have the tools, cognitive and cultural, helping you see the problem. Imagine a very young kid, say 5 years old, watching exciting video content. They do not yet possess such ways to protect themselves from for-profit manipulation.

Just few days ago I finished the IMHO excellent "Buy The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence" by Henry A Giroux and Grace Pollock so you can already understand where I'm going with this.

Yes, advertisers are terrible, they make money by manipulating our thoughts, probing our deepest desire, toying with our emotions in order to sell us whatever is made by whomever pay them the most. But... you and I are fully formed human beings in the sense that we are adults. We spend years navigating through the world, getting scamming, learning how to spot lies and marketing pitches. The problem is, as showcased by Disney in that example (a very important example!), the process is not random. It is a very thoughtful and strategical one, namely how to transform a human being to a consumer from the youngest age.

Anyway I won't dig into the obvious but the book ends with a couple of practical links e.g. commercial free childhood (what a name, how can how even imagine that would be needed?) which since then became https://fairplayforkids.org/

If you prefer a video on the topic the 2001 yes still relevant 2001 documentary (52 min) "Mickey Mouse Monopoly - Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power" https://films.mediaed.org/Film/Mickey_Mouse_Monopoly/f56fd530-8724-460b-b2bc-6eba9868f0e7

I personally pulled that thread also thanks to the more recent 2016 article "Teaching Disney Critically in the Age of Perpetual Consumption" https://www.jstor.org/stable/45157190 but, again, the point is that it's systemic.

Have you seen they live? Seems relevant.

Calvin and Hobbes warned us

Advertising as a concept is not bad. But given the realities of capitalism, the greedy executive and shareholders can never resist the easy money. As a result anything that implements ads will eventually be completely overrun and ruined by them. Might take a year, might take 10, but once that door is opened it is inevitable.

They're building the internet for AI now, and were building it for advertisers for years before that, what with SEO choking up search results.

What should have been a wonderfully expressive, collaborative, and unifying medium is just being completely ravaged.

I, unfortunately, work in web development.

If I had a magic internet/media button I know what it would be.

It would be a brand banish button. If I see an ad, I wanna just have a button to banish them from all my devices…forever. I already have a rule you poss me off with adverts …I defo won’t buy.

So much tech potential that just does not exist!

Is this a self affirmation or are there other people in your shower?