To take the counter argument. Modern technology has enabled me to avoid advertising bullshit. I live in a world devoid of ads.

In the 1990s, I used to watch TV and there were lots of ads. Now I have Netflix and the ad blocker takes care of YouTube. There were magazines and newspapers you had to buy but were full of ads. Now it’s free and the adblocker takes care of the ads. Radio ads. Now podcast where you can fastforward, sometimes before you even hear the name of the company.

I don't think you have avoided it completely. Advertising is everywhere you look. Even in Netflix you still see brands in TV shows.

A better measure than anecdata is looking at actual advertising impressions per capita for the population at large.

There's also the question of qualitative change, such as personally targeted advertising and the infrastructure and methods (massive pervasive surveillance) required to support that.

Given global ad spending trends and the consequences of targeted manipulation and mass surveillance, I'd strongly suggest your life is not nearly so free of advertising's influence as you testify, and perhaps even believe.

> magazines and newspapers you had to buy but were full of ads

Computer magazines (and computer/video game magazines) had pretty good ads. They're still fun to read today.

I still miss the Fry's Electronics ad sections in newspapers.

A few years ago at least, print magazines still seemed to be alive in the UK, perhaps in part because they were often sold by newsagents.

And hopefully the blockers will continue to work, as long as your browser vendor, mobile phone vendor, etc, don't change the APIs to prevent or make it infeasible to do it.

There are still ads on Netflix and YouTube despite that, but yes I agree it is much more convenient.

I completely agree with you, but this is a straight up ancient problem, and if you don't believe me, you can ask Scaurus, maker of the best gaurum in Pompeii. The "get crowd's attention and monetize it" strategy has been around since the invention of begging. It's a fundamental strategy in any large group of people. The bigger the crowd, the better it is as a strategy. Sure, social psychologists and marketers are out there making better an better spam, but that's just tuning. As long as there are large groups of people and a way to communicate with them that's even slightly cheaper than the return, it'll never stop.

I suspect there is no solution, but it's interesting to consider some. What would a society look like if you somehow forcibly limited the number of people you could contact?

The first killer app of AR glasses will be blanking out adverts. I imagine putting on a pair and then all the ads just show my next calendar event or task list, or pictures of my kids.

Cuts out billboards, ads on the screen you're looking at, Nike swooshes on people's shoes.

Let me rejig that idea so it's more palatable to a VC audience that's primarily made its money by investing in ad platforms (FB, IG, Pinterest, Twitter).

1) v 1.0 - blanks out ads, the public rejoices

2) v 1.5 - allow ads from 'trusted partners'

3) v 2.0 - introduce a monthly subscription to blank out all ads

Do you really believe that ?

The first killer app of AR glasses will be ads in places where we couldn't have ads before. Your neighbor's lawn ? Ad space. The sky ? Ad space. Whirlpool in a toilet ? Ad space.

This sounds about right.

Imagine waking up, putting on your glasses and looking into the autumn morning sun, dawn. The rays break into golden lines of light. As the sun rises further, a capri sun ad. You sigh and fall back into you bed and stare at the ceiling, another ad taking advantage of the plainess. Be less Boring- Virgin Galactic.

Its sounds like dystopia but future generations will be collecting banner ads as a quaint little hobby like we do stamp collecting.

Now imagine that but on a cold, dark rainy day. Putting on AR glasses makes it look like your house is on a beach with the most beautiful morning sunlight view, except there's a company logo on the sun and the company slogan is floating on the sea surface.

This will work because the goggles and associated services are freely given away. Who would spend so much of their own money when they can have it for free with ads? /sarcasm

Sigh. I guess it depends on whether you can afford the good version. I guess it will be a github project that only people who can operate a compiler and root their headset will be able to do.

I always close the lid on toilets before flushing. I don't want to be spraying toilet water on everything around it.

Exactly.

>What would a society look like if you somehow forcibly limited the number of people you could contact?

You just need to look back into history and see. We've basically been increasing the reach of contact, being the end game: globalization.

So you'd have:

- several monopolies spread across many countries instead of Google for example;

- less massive companies like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Apple;

- less access to services and goods;

- less emigration and brain power leakage;

- less economic growth;

- and the list goes on

Like this board wouldn't exist if you forced that limit.

Is this bad? I don't think it has to be bad necessarily, it's a choice that wasn't made in the past and some countries/organizations have benefited from it more then others.

Thank you for the unique perspective!

Click on random shit to cost the advertisers money lowering their roi and ruin the analytics at the same time

The profile on you in various advertising scumbags databases will eventually be so inaccurate it will be worth the cost to store in a rust platter

Over indulge the scummy advertisers. Cost them as much money as possible for worthless clicks. They crossed so many lines over the last couple of decades people should be embarrassed to work in that industry. Honestly if i did I would lie and say I do animal experimentation. It's basically the same thing after all

By clicking random ads you may be actually encouraging publishers to keep deploying them?

Short-term, certainly. Long-term - negative ROI's would drive away the real customers, who are paying for those ads.

Or at least that's the "Optimism set to 11" plan.

Evil plan: Create a network distributed system (kind of like Seti@Home) specifically for doing this. If there was enough participation to make a difference the advertisers would have to invest in countermeasures which could lead to an arms-race that ultimately erodes all profit from it.

This seems to be a pervasive attitude here.

Pessimistic, cynical, backwards-looking to a golden age that never existed, anti-marketing and sales, etc.

If this is such a huge problem, and you seem to have a lot of passion for it, why not try to create tools to solve it for people?

And if you think business is evil, it doesn’t even have to be a product or service! You could simply create a political organization to try to lobby government to right these wrongs you see in the world.

Your comment is the most upvoted one on this thread so a lot of people must feel the same way.

There’s only one problem.

People are irrationally resistant to change and new things. Even changes that might make their lives better.

To affect this change, you’ll need to get a lot of people’s attention and buy-in via this process…

…called marketing.

Awww crap. This means becoming the thing you hate.

Maybe this is just how the world has always worked and will always work?

And maybe it’s not so bad?

No, it's bad. And while the problem is old the scale of it is new.

It's a false claim often made by marketing people that marketing is synonymous with persuasion and the propagation of ideas. That without marketing everything is doomed to obscurity and irrelevance. Well, that may be true for an increasing number of areas of life in the world that marketing has built but it isn't generally. You've heard of Quantum Mechanics, right? Do you think it says something valid about the world? Did anyone ever market it to you?

Marketing is a fundamentally shallow form of communication. It's the forcing of awareness of something onto people without their choosing to be aware of it. The payload is necessarily low in information content, the interaction is brief and the message is dressed up to be maximally attention-grabbing. These things have negative results, and those negative results become worse the more pervasive marketing gets. The fact that people have always done it doesn't make it good, or make it desirable to allow an unlimited amount of it into our society.

It's worse in modern times for a couple of reasons. One is that our society consumes more information than ever before, and we've made a Faustian bargain with marketing to fund the generation of that information. Another is that marketing drags everything down to its level - the presence of these shallow, maximally distracting signals forces others to do the same in order to be heard. The transformation of politics into marketing (marketed as "inevitable" or "the way it's always been" by marketers) is a case in point. It's cancerous, and I'm glad people are finally waking up to it.

None of us were born with knowledge of quantum mechanics. Some outside force placed that information into your head by sitting you down in a classroom, and incentivizing you enough to remain there under the vague threat of future poverty. Very few things get the privilege of becoming part of a school curriculum. And the way those ideas get there, looks a lot like marketing.

I don't think anything I can say will change your mind. Often, a belief that things were better in the past is more of a personality trait or an emotional disposition motivated by external events rather than something rational.

If you're so inclined though, I highly recommend using the Library of Congress website or Newspapers.com to read what mass communication was like 50-200 years ago.

You'll be amazed at how little has changed:

https://pessimists.co/telephone-archive/

https://pessimists.co/radio-archive/

Again with the equating marketing to communication, propagation of ideas and persuasion. What goes on in a classroom is not marketing, by any useful definition...

Yet.

Any time you have limited attention, and more than one idea vying for that attention, the end result is marketing.

Any argument you make that students should spend an hour learning about quantum mechanics instead of something else on the market of ideas (eg. finance, literature, history, etc.) is by definition an act of positioning.

The curriculum of today is the result of marketing in the past. You just don't see it that way because you weren't around when those decisions were being made.

No, you're defining marketing in a way so broad as to render the term meaningless, as a way of avoiding answering the actual criticisms. An extreme example of this kind of argument would be "murder is doing stuff, here is an example of people doing stuff and it's fine, so murder is fine". This is fallacious (and, if done deliberately, dishonest) so I won't engage in that line of debate further.

Conversely, I would say you’re defining marketing so narrowly that you’re actually just talking about advertising.

But I agree, it sounds like we’re just arguing semantics at this point and have reached the logical end point of all internet debate

What if.. what if we made a spaceship, with cold-sleep capsules, and put them in there, sending them off, to another planet, like Golgafrincham

I've had the same email address for over 15 years and each day I get maybe one spam email at best.

I agree that nearly everything has become a marketing channel but it is possible to avoid most of it.

I agree, but the answer isn't less technology the only way to solve this is with better tech

>I sometimes think, that marketing is one of the worst thing that happened to us. It is constantly destroying all things that worked really well for us.

Oh boy... It's that time of the week again...