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.
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!
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
Advertising exists to manipulate behavior beneficial to clients, out of target groups. It is propaganda and psychological manipulation. The days of simply informing people of products and services is a fairy tale. Maddison Avenue was built off of Nazi Germany’s mass media propaganda strategies.
I loved those old Chevrolet commercials from the 1930s that explained things like how a differential or transmission works in a car and I’m not even a car guy
I only remember the one, but yeah that was an absolute gem
Advertising is the blistering puss of an underlying Capitalist stage four cancer that has broken the surface of the body.
Yeah, it’s one of the necessary tools for achieving ever growing profits.
Run away, uncontrollable, unregulated and unlimited growth is known as one thing … Cancer
and it usually eventually kills the host
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.
And then for convenience, add a shopping cart so it’s not a separate research step - congrats, you’ve invented Amazon.
Congrats, you missed the whole point about Amazon.
As others already replied, the business model of Amazon (and any marketplace that sells its own products within it while being part of an oligopoly) is precisely to prevent unbiased comparison. Amazon gets data on all the products being sold on its website, its warehouses occupancy … then make Amazon Basics and replace them. They did that before also with diapers among many other examples e.g. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/emails-detail-amazons-plan-to-crush-a-startup-rival-with-price-cuts/ but they also do the same with software products, e.g. AWS.
So no, clearly Amazon is not about having fair comparisons and a shopping cart. Amazon is about being the ONLY shopping cart one can have fill it with Amazon products.
PS: to clarify also something very obvious but just in case it’s not so, Amazon by the simple fact of controlling the order of search results control what customers can, or can not, see and thus compare and in fine buy. Even if it did not sell it’s own products (which again, it does) it would still be able to manipulate what customers buy. That is, again, the opposite of an unbiased product comparison service.
My idea is a bit different. You would be able to define exactly what you are looking for, and the database would display the results a the order you want.
Let’s say you want a refrigerator with specific dimensions and features. Then, you would sort the results based on how loud they are, with the most silent ones at the top. You look at the results and realize that some models draw too much power, so you filter out all the E and F tier entries.
You know, basic database query stuff.
Yes but now do a search for the item in your cart and buy it somewhere else.
I absolutely agree with you. But where I live, Amazon is cheaper than any other sellers, online or stores. I hate it but I only have so much money to spend.
If you continue to support monopolies, soon you’ll have less to spend.
Average consumers are in a lose/lose situation. Choice is a privilege that not everyone can afford.
Nah, we’re not doing this “vote with your wallet” shit anymore.
That’s just capitalist propaganda really.
Do what you need to do to survive and eek out some small form of happiness.
The time when we could actually fix these problems without direct action is long gone now.
It would be so nice if there was one place to look for housing. So tired of rental scams.
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.
This reads like a total conspiracy theory. I hate that it all rings true.
That’s what the denigration of the term conspiracy theory was about. Did you notice? Conspiracy theory was a term made up by the CIA in order to dismiss peoples claims about government experimentation during the MK Ultra experiments. Media called those questioning 9/11 “truthers.” Which just so happened to include guys saying the planes were CGI and people who questioned how a group of goat herders from a country with literally zero infrastructure, living in caves, managed to hijack and divert commercial airliners in a perfect sequence of synchronistic events and American intelligence agencies, had no idea.
Now conspiracy theory means, The pyramids are ancient batteries, the flat earth conspiracy and heliocentricism. We have been conditioned to associate the term “Conspiracy Theory” with lunatics and junk science. This rejection of intellectualism is all carefully co-ordinated on platforms like tiktok and Youtube. They don’t want you to know things, if you see them for how they are you might rebel.
I think “conspiracy realist” is a good term.
You are totally correct the point is to flood people with so much batshit crazy misinformation that it’s impossible to sort out the “conspiracy theories” that are actually for sure happening right in front of our eyes.
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!
YouTube ads were only ever advertising to me on what not to entertain purchasing.
I agree. Everything being advertised on YouTube is sketch. Same with all the repeated podcast adverts honestly.
The fact that youtube hits me with an ad for a game that says everyone thinks its fake, with the most bullshit sounding voice over, tells me they are happy to take money for obvious scam products.
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%.
Exactly, also stop vilifying “advertising” when the cause of advertising is corporations. There would be no advertising without corporations paying for it. It’s like complaining about ashes instead of the fire.
I know that the advertising problem is just the tip of the iceberg. My observation is in how it seems to me that this antagonism between the Human experience vs. advertisers seems to be the first active front in a more generalized class war.
Modern marketing, post WW2 was the privatization of propaganda.
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.
Recently I’ve become more aware of how intrusive traditional advertising methods are: billboards everywhere, radio commercials interrupting the music, etc. It’s incredible how immersed we are in that crap and how most of us don’t realize it.
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.
Datavampires.
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.
I think you mean Capitalism
