> Advertising is the root of all the evils we face today in this technological society

Overstated a little, don’t you think? What about opioid addiction? Sedentary lifestyle with poor diet? Cost of health care and education? Racism? Should I go on?

Frighteningly, you'll find that there have been advertising campaigns related to each and every one of those issues, which have swayed public opinion drastically one way or another.

> What about opioid addiction? Sedentary lifestyle with poor diet? Cost of health care and education? Racism?

Yes, those are real problems. How's that got anything to do with our digital lives though? That's what I meant by technological society. I could probably have expressed myself better.

What I mean is the internet used to be a lot better and advertising is responsible for making it worse. All of the abuses we suffer today on the internet, especially our lack of privacy, are caused by advertisers and their insatiable need for our attention.

How do you think folks heard about opioids? Word of mouth?

Before these tech monopolies came into power, radio and tv have always been free and have been a way for people especially the poor to get informed and entertained.

If we ban advertising altogether, we're gonna be in a worse situation with many people not getting access to news.

Ban awful advertising practices especially by big tech companies, not advertising itself

> radio and tv have always been free and have been a way for people especially the poor to get informed

Informed? You mean manipulated, right? Watching open television makes me physically sick because of the constant agenda pushing. I can't watch 5 minutes of news without some person imposing their moral judgements on me and telling me what's right and wrong. It's made even worse by all the advertising, the open networks get the bulk of it.

If banning advertisers kills these networks, we'd be doing humanity a favor. Facebook's election manipulation and clickbait news articles have got nothing on these folks.

Exactly.

Advertising is a universal scourge, in my book. I don't care what form it's in. It's a manipulative intrusion and a pollutant. I'd legitimately rather you mine cryptocurrency on my machine than mine advertising photons on my retina.

You can thank the Regan Administration for removing the FCC's Fairness Doctrine [0]. From 1949-1987 if you were broadcasting news you had to present both sides of controversial issues.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

The fairness doctrine in practice boxed out any opinions outside of the mainstream and allowed both major political parties to control public discourse.

It was also compelled speech by the government which plainly violated the first amendment.

Thank you. I hate this increasingly common attitude that free speech should be constrained because [political candidate or movement which I don't like] is in the ascendancy.

You can really see someone's ideals in what they do under pressure, and apparently people's liberal ideals of free speech etc aren't very strongly held.

Unrestrained freedom to intentionally lie to the public and use social media to amplify propaganda is clearly a public health threat.

The question is if there is any cure that doesn't destroy legitimate political speech.

(Illegitimate speech being the calculated, coordinated distribution of false information).

> Unrestrained freedom to intentionally lie to the public

You're presuming that TV and news media never lied to the public before the end of the fairness doctrine, and the giving equal time didn't give undue weight to some bullshit ideas.

The controlled messaging around the war in Vietnam is a great counter point here.

I'm alarmed by anyone who can genuinely talk of 'legitimate speech' and not see the issues here.

“legitimate speech” is not the opposite of “illegitimate speech”. There is a huge grey area in between. It is fairly easy to see egregious lying as illegitimate without trying define “legitimate”.

I'm alarmed that you don't see any danger of intentionally, factually false speech being spread to tens of millions of people a day. Or that you don't have any desire to at least brainstorm on a solution.

During the civil rights movement, politicians in the south accused civil rights leaders of lying and tried to used the state to block their speech. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee called the First Amendment their weapon against oppression. Now I agree that people shouldn't go on TV and say for example that the recent election was "stolen", but I don't think the state should be given the power to stop someone from doing that. Having the power to stop one kind of speech can easily give the state the power to stop any speech. We shouldn't expect every future government use that power wisely. Imagine your worst political enemy having the power to decide what "factually false speech" shouldn't be spread. I wouldn't want that. Do you?

No, but it's a false premise because I disagree that throttling the velocity of known malicious speech and its amplification is equivalent to banning speech.

I see your point but don't think it's an infinitely slippery slope.

You keep not understanding that the problem is using words like 'legitimate' and 'known'. You can't keep sneaking those in, in such a factive way.

In real life, people don't have labels floating above their heads saying 'Liar', and statements don't have labels saying 'Known' or 'Malicious'. Someone, or some group, or some process, needs to decide what is true and what false, who is benign and who malign, and so forth.

And now that I've guided you to this point, I hope I don't need to explain where things can go wrong from there.

>You can't keep sneaking those in, in such a factive way.

We'll have to agree to disagree for the time being. There are things known as facts, and things known as lies.

Again, I'm not saying we should jump to any particular solution to misinformation, but I refuse to watch it happen and say "I immediately know there is nothing we can do".

> There are things known as facts, and things known as lies.

Yes, I understand that. But if you want to give the state the power to ban speech (or 'throttle' speech, whatever that means) then you need to give someone the power to determine which speech falls into that category. Please... do you really not see this problem, after so many people have explained it?

I do see the problem. But you see it as a binary. Government has no control, or all control. Government does something, or no one does something. Like my above post states, I'm not willing to entirely jettison the idea that there are limited steps that either private organizations or the government could take, transparently.

Throttle, by the way, would be something like Facebook not quite banning a topic, but limiting how many times it can be shared per unit time, or by how many people, or how much a particular account can share things, and so on. Not a ban, but a limit on speech via its velocity.

Just to hammer it home: I get the danger. What if the former president, or what if the head of some far-left student group at Yale, got to determine what is legitimate speech or not? Yes, I get it.

But there is a lot of options on the slider between "let all broadcasts continue without challenge" and "have the central committee delete all non-approved govthink".

Who decides that though? You and I may agree today on a particularly egregious claim, but it won’t always be that clear and we won’t always agree.

The problem is that the slope isn’t slippery until someone in power decides to abuse it, then there’s no footing left at all.

There another often overlooked point here. When you cede the ground that there exists speech that should be sanctioned by the state, you are giving a powerful argument to people who stand against pluralism. The troglodytes who shot up the Charlie Hebdo office specifically accused the writers of hate speech. We shouldn’t give ground to people like that. Even abhorrent speech must be free from government sanction or else we allow for state violence to be used to suppress free expression. When we open that door, all manner of vile creatures might push there way through. Within the broad expanse of human beliefs everyone is a heretic open blasphemer to someone.

The argument at the time was that with a limited resource like airwave that the government regulates and licenses out the first amendment doesn’t apply. Harder to use this line of reasoning for modern communications.

I believe that argument was always a fig leaf over restricting speech.

>if you were broadcasting news you had to present both sides of controversial issues.

Down here in Texas, we have a law where teachers have to teach both sides of controversial subjects. So, of course, someone is teaching both sides of The Holocaust.

Because it is controversial. And that is the law.

Is the Holocaust controversial? IS IT?

I am reasonably certain that in the aftermath of Charlottesville we arrived, as a result of extensive public soul-searching, at the nuanced and bi-partisan conclusion that Nazis are Bad, so I am not sure where the controversy lies.

Optimistically, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with a law like this because when engaged with lies, kids should be able to figure this stuff out. It’s not like they’re incapable of critical thinking. They can look up if the claims are true and find that nothing backs them up.

But I get that most children won’t do this, so overall, yeah, it seems like a terrible law.

Ultimately, it comes down to what TX defines as “controversial.” Is this interpretation (teach Holocaust denial) legal or is it some rogue teacher who decided it means they get to teach whatever they want because all their opinions make their family angry at Thanksgiving dinner?

You’re asking a lot of children. Skilled people have been working on improving propaganda techniques for a very long time. It’s rarely just outright lies - there are more effective techniques. For example, it’s easy to find dozens of cherry picked examples and represent them as the thing that was common (instead of say something that happened only 0.001% of the time). Something like this is much harder to refute than an outright lie - you have to do a full blown study figuring out how common the thing really was, and before long you’re demanding everyone to do their own research and verifying everything (in an environment full of bad actors muddying the waters).

My understanding is that it’s a law designed to allow teaching of creationism, since, to their understanding, evolution is “just a theory”.

That makes sense. Guess they think Intelligent Design or whatever they call it now is due for another challenge since the SCOTUS leans more conservative.

What if they look up the lies and only find more misinformation and articles giving "both sides of the story".

Open television can contain a lot than just news. Where I live, it has sports, scripted television shows, movies and more.

The fairness doctrine is anti free speech and evil.

I never said anything about any fairness doctrine. I think we're better off without any open TV networks at all. I'd rather people remained ignorant than serve as pawns in electoral games. That's not even my opinion, it's how the prevailing political ideology of my country describes them. They're "masses" to be "maneuvered" into alignment with the proper ideology. The mass media are the means to do it.

Killing mass media is a favor to these people. They would remain ignorant but at least they would not suffer the indignity of being manipulated, herded like cattle.

Newspapers inform people and aren’t free. They are available in the library though.

Newspapers also misinform people. The content should be accountable. This accountability should be judged on provable factuality, provable profit, provable misinformation, provable conflicts of interest etc.

The point of regulation is to, ideally, force societal institutions to adhere to set of rules. The point of government should be to make sure these rules are unbiased, based in fact, and equally applied to all sectors of society.

It's a crazy dream. I don't know a single country in the world that gets this right, but certain individual countries get different elements of the equation right, so my hope is not yet in tatters.

PBS.

> radio and tv have always been free

Yes. And they achieve this through advertising too.

I think that was their point (though I'm not altogether sure where they were going with it). Anyway, there's a case to be made that radio and television advertising are less malign by virtue of being less targeted. They can only run adverts which appeal to everyone in the region they cover, which is a much less powerful tool.

Until you consider groups like Sinclair Broadcast Group[1] who control enough region's media to start playing games.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group

I've read about that. It's astonishing. That's much more of a worry, admittedly, the way they target local news. It's still much less potent than Facebook-grade targeting, but it's a rung above national news, granted.

Media intended to manipulate. Neither truth nor falsehood, agnostic to both. Weaponized bullshit.

Sprayed willy-nilly over the population, driving us insane. Propagating down the generations, driving our grandchildren insane.

Contagious memetic cancer.

Perfectly legal?

Months ago I saw someone here compare advertising to mind hacking. It's a really interesting analogy. These people want to hack our minds in order to inject their little brands. Like the bots hammering away at ports of servers, they keep hammering away at our senses until something sticks.

Like an hour ago I was writing a post and reached the conlusion advertising is mind rape.

I've also often thought advertising are like military psychological operations except run by civilians.

I should probably start keeping track of these analogies...

It really is. They use stuff like political wedge issues to hook people in, not unlike like the payload delivery mechanism that installs the daemon which enrolls your computer in the botnet.

And then they use their botnet against the actually useful targets, which aren't the wedge issues like trans people in toilets, but rather the tax breaks, going to war, electing biddable politicians, etc. Fox's viewership is one of the most potent and malign botnets in the world. It's quite a relevant metaphor, really.

Those ideas are amazing. Advertising implants ideas into minds. People so convinced essentially join a human botnet, fighting for a cause, spreading the same ideas. Yes.

I wonder if we can draw even more parallels. What other conclusions we can reach?

Reminds me of “ghost hacking” as pioneered in Ghost in the Shell franchise. Entire personalities and belief systems embedded into a person. The rise in parasocial relationships verges close to fulfilling the ghost hacking premise of implanting a belief in an entire wife and kid that don’t exist, or at least not as such. That franchise was a warning, but it’s also an instruction manual for a high tech dystopia that no one even realizes isn’t a utopia.

GitS SAC 2045 has a scene with Togusa being exposed to augmented reality advertising while investigating the major's disappearance. Advertising fed directly to his brain through his optic nerves and it's even more annoying than internet popups.

There's a scene in Greg Egan's "Diaspora" where a couple of AIs wandering in the wild encounter an old soda can imprinted with Coca Cola's logo, marketing slogan, etc.

They freak out (having read about this ancient evil called "advertising" in their history books). Afraid that even looking at it will infect them with memetic plague.

They carefully look away from the soda can while burning it to ash with a laser.

this is already pretty thoroughly explored by accelerationists

Accelerationists?

> Sometimes, and often in a pejorative sense, it may refer to the theory that the end of capitalism should be brought about by its acceleration.

Huh. I certainly believe in this. I think capitalism will end itself by automating everything and depriving people of disposable income with which to consume. We'll end up either in a post scarcity society like Star Trek or a cyberpunk dystopia with corporations making artificially scarce goods for the sake of the status quo. The latter is looking more and more likely...

Had no idea people with similar ideas existed. It's nice to discover I'm not alone.

startrek is too far away to provide any meaningful perspective or insight on things that matter today. cyberpunk is already upon us, it predicted a lot but today it's just the world.

you won't get anything out of the introductory texts of accelerationism, and a lot of the more famous politics of people who take on the mantle of accelerationism are really just crude and uninteresting justifications for (often distasteful) pre-existing ideology. there are a lot of people who embrace that "should" you quoted with a bit of bloodthirst, they fail to approach acceleration as descriptive/analytical rather than an ideological -ism, and then disappointingly apply the -ism to whatever cruel bullshit they were already thinking.

what's interesting, to me at least, is the willingness to think about superstructure and culture as a techno/memetic hyper-ecosystem, really integrating psychology and sociology into political thought, and providing an analysis that works on a continuum through history.

i haven't seen anyone say or do anything useful with it yet, but it's there, and it's not anywhere else.

> We'll end up either in a post scarcity society like Star Trek or a cyberpunk dystopia with corporations making artificially scarce goods for the sake of the status quo. The latter is looking more and more likely...

The most likely outcome is a post-scarcity world for the owners of the companies and automation that make goods. We, and all of our descendants, would have starved to death long before that since we aren't needed anymore to generate goods or wealth.

It goes both ways too. Using the perfectly human sentiment of not separating families at borders to justify electing politicians that want bigger government, higher taxes, and more power.