Ooh, he's playing the cynicism angle--that's a hot market right now. Very huge potential for profit.

I love Hacker News.

You should check out the 'Ultimate Bill Hicks' DVD available. Amazon have got it at reduced price at the moment and it is excellent. I laughed and laughed.

Ironic that you literally threw an ad right in the parent's face through this simple comment.

That's not an ad, that's genuine interaction. The poster is not an actor(or someone trying to act a role), not an algorythm, not a corporation, not a marketer or salesperson. We must learn to discern between stuff if we want to consider ourselves "real-worlders" or whatever. If you get the concepts mixed up in your mind then your discernment gets distorted and you start conflating what's authentic and what's artificial. That's why it shits in your head.

Seemingly-genuine comments like that could be a plausible future step for escalation of advertising.

I'd guess there are people who would "rent" access to their active social media accounts to a company operating a bot capable of writing subtle "recommendation"-style comments. Sort of a merger of blog-comment-spam-bots and paid "influencer" posts.

It's certainly possible, although repulsive.

What an interesting idea.

> That's not an ad, that's genuine interaction.

Well... Hopefully :-/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z696bTiP8Ro

I structured my comment to be as close to an obvious paid-for advertising comment as possible.

I'm gratified that you thought it was a bona fide comment. I've never actually watched Bill Hicks.

heh, funny. But that's the point, deceiving is REALLY easy. But without trust and good faith, things start to get weird exponentially, it adds up. And so, as I saw in another article, truth becomes the roadkill.

He doesn't want advertising in his life, but guy goes and immediately "shits in his head" using Bill Hicks of all people!

I think that's the joke.

Bill Hicks never figured out the meaning of life.

The entire purpose of life is to market.

You get up in the morning and brush your teeth so that you're more marketable than the slob that doesn't.

Everything you do can be traced back to marketing. The more people understand that, the better off they will be at handling life.

I brush my teeth so that they last longer and I can chew food longer and thus stay alive longer, marketing only comes into it for people in marketing.

You want to stay alive longer so that you can have a positive influence in the lives of the people around you - your family, your friends. It's well documented that "happiness" comes from positive interactions with other people.

In fact you are posting here because you seek to influence, which is great! That's what we're here for.

Desire to influence = Marketing.

I assume you work in marketing. To you guys everything is marketing.

Well, I do not work in marketing (and I don't think he does, either) and I see where he's coming from. Like it or not, we (humans) are a social species.

And so are bots, mind. :-)

Nope. Try again.

Which toothpaste do you use? And how did you come to choose that brand?

I prefer the Spider-Man toothpaste, but if I want to feel particularly impressive I've found you can't go past the Incredible Hulk toothpaste. It's hard to find though.

I check the Fluor ppm and pick the most inexpensive one with the highest ppm personally

Wow your pineal gland must be bout closed shut.

Highest or lowest? I do the latter, obviously, for reasons of self-preservation (learnt this from a dentist).

I buy the cheapest brand that is ADA (American Dental Association) approved.

My wife chooses for me :)

You are getting downvoted because people feel like it's not adding to the conversation, however, I disagree.

I also use toothpaste, and other products,that my wife chose and came to the realization that even though I might not be directly marketed to, I am still reached by a so-called influencer, who has way more power then some random instagram person or ad.

I wouldn't be surprised to find more Marketing dollars are spent on advertising to women (probably, no proof, just an assumption). Since if they can target the person who purchases for the family, the company adds multiple consumers, regardless if they realize it or not.

To me, that's an interesting introspective and your comment did contribute.

Thanks.

There is a reason soap operas are called soap operas.

The one that was on offer in the supermarket.

I use the most inexpensive whose taste I like

As Nassim Taleb says, "the map is not the territory", just because you can say a lot of things are "kind of like a market", it does not, in any way, means that everything is a market, for example, higiene exists before market, nature exists before market, just because you can draw parallels it doesn't mean you've figured everything out. In the age of machines people wanted to think as if everything was like a machine, then in the age of systems they think everything is "just a system", then "everything is market".. This is faulty cognition, IMHO, in other words: fallacy.

Taleb may have repeated it, but the expression "the map is not the territory"[1] first appeared decades earlier in a paper by Alfred Korzybski[2], developer of the self-improvement movement known as general semantics[3].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics

Just because we are biologically tuned to "market" ourselves, for leverage in survival/gene-spreading, I don't think it's correct to state that the "entire purpose" of life is to market oneself. Nor does it make sense to say all actions are rooted in this need. In-fact, it seems _most_ actions are in service of other basic or secondary needs. Where is the marketability in taking a piss? Or reading a novel? Or taking the dog for a walk?

>The entire purpose of life is to market.

Maybe my target market isn't slavish devotees of a vapid consumerist culture who assert their identity with commercial brands?

You know your marketing yourself right now with your statements to the audience here, right?

An audience built around silicon valley's capitalist culture...

>You know your marketing yourself right now with your statements to the audience here, right?

I understand your sentiment, but I believe that's a toxic worldview.

>An audience built around silicon valley's capitalist culture...

I am criticising consumerism, not capitalism.

Interesting, what do you think is the distinction? The greatest contributor to flourishing capitalism is strong consumerism. And the biggest driver of the consumerist mind is capitalist manipulation. They feed off of each other, and are so intertwined that it's hardly useful to refer to one without acknowledging that it comes with the other.

>Interesting, what do you think is the distinction? The greatest contributor to flourishing capitalism is strong consumerism. And the biggest driver of the consumerist mind is capitalist manipulation. They feed off of each other, and are so intertwined that it's hardly useful to refer to one without acknowledging that it comes with the other.

It would be disingenuous to pretend the two aren't highly interrelated, but we are still discussing two separate phenomena.

The distinction, I think, can be summarised by "build a better mousetrap". I'll try the new product and mention it to my friends. Soon everyone is buying the new mousetrap. That's competition at work.

You don't need a multi-million ad campaign carrying an implicit, or perhaps explicit, message of "if you don't buy <new mousetrap> your wife will leave you/women won't find you attractive/<insert any other insecurity>".

Consumerism is the encouragement of consumption by encouraging vanity and appealing to emotional insecurities. Fundamentally I object to the application of psychological science to the manipulation of society in order to extract profit by causing psychological distress.

While your distinction about building a better mousetrap is true - the corporation building a better mousetrap needs more money to put into R&D and it can get more only if it is either marketing itself to investors (consumers in this scenario?) or gaining a larger market share by promoting themselves.

>While your distinction about building a better mousetrap is true - the corporation building a better mousetrap needs more money to put into R&D and it can get more only if it is either marketing itself to investors (consumers in this scenario?) or gaining a larger market share by promoting themselves.

There is a distinction between promotion and advertising.

I completely agree with you. But it's much more profitable (and therefore fit to survive in a capitalist system) to manipulate consumers to buying your shit mousetrap, than it is to engineer a better mousetrap.

>The greatest contributor to flourishing capitalism is strong consumerism.

Not if you ask a businessman or a politician. Boosting the supply side is how you get to a robust economy according to them.

The businesses that lobby politicians to hold these positions are simply using the most powerful marketing tools at their disposal allowed under capitalism: money.

That depends on your definition of "flourishing".

Since you have obviously figured this whole life-marketing thing out, what am I marketing when I am taking a shit or picking my nose?

The purpose is not being marketed, is having sex. You market yourself so you can have better sex. At least that's what some people say, like when they claim Zuckerberg started The Facebook so people could get easily laid.

I've also had interesting conversations saying the purpose is not sex but power. We do stuff the way we do because that might get us more power.

Sociology is really interesting.

Life has many disparate potential sources of meaning, and the urge to systematize everything along one dimension represents ideology at work and should be avoided.

Those who go around proclaiming everything to be only about sex or only about money or only about power wish to make it so.

Of course natural selection is true, and we ultimately strive to pass on our genes but the mechanisms we've developed that motivate/enable us to do so are absurdly complex and admit much more than mere power games and peacock strutting.

> Zuckerberg started The Facebook so people could get easily laid.

Off to create a Facebook account, back in a moment.

[ I wish this had been explained to me back in 2008 when it first came out and I couldn't see any use for it. ]

“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”

― Oscar Wilde

> You get up in the morning and brush your teeth so that you're more marketable than the slob that doesn't.

Speak for yourself.

And yet the most creative and inspiring marketing is paradoxically that which is not done for marketing's sake: in other words, the authentic.

You can be a marketer or you can be yourself and I know which one I want to be.

It's inspiring and creative because it's different, right until it isn't anymore.

You can't escape the marketing.

Or as a famous Danish artist once said "I paint to get pussy"

> The entire purpose of life is to market.

The sun doesn't give off free energy to market itself to anyone, and even the the most succesful whore will end up dead. The main difference will be having been a whore.

I don't brush my teeth every morning. And I still manage to have a life that is more than enjoyable

I brush my teeth because I dread and loathe the dentist, false teeth are gross, and toothaches hurt like hell.

You must be enjoyable to interact with at the office.

I brush my teeth several times a day mostly because I had a cavity once when I was a kid and didn't particularly like the sound the drill at the dentist's office made. That and I enjoy various types of jerky and hope to continue enjoying it for the foreseeable future.

shouldnt be afraid of information friend, cant hurt you. closing yourself off is bad for you

Separating signal from noise is work. Dealing with new information is not costless, and there comes a point when closing yourself off is probably the best option.