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.