A few generations ago many of our brightest minds were building doomsday weapons to incinerate all life on Earth, so maybe this is progress.

Probably not, if you shoot a man, there's a perpetrator and an end. If you brainwash a man, forever his actions will no longer be fully his own. Plus most people view violence as something undesirable (see Vietnam war protests), but advertising still has many hawks who will never stop singing it's praises while all public spaces are consumed by corporate branding until we have no where uninfected

> if you shoot a man, there's a perpetrator and an end

I don’t know about this assertion. It does not ring true to real life for me.

I'd say the state of "forever his actions will no longer be fully his own" is easier to reach with doomsday weapons than with ads.

Is the claim here that working in the advertising industry is worse than working on “doomsday devices to incinerate all life on Earth”? What a hot take!

Is it? Would you rather be dead or a zombie?

Would I rather be dead or use TikTok? Come on now, you know the answer to that.

Dead.

"Better to Die on Your Feet Than Live on Your Knees" as they say.

I'd rather have the choice to do whatever I want with my life instead of a bomb dropped on my head.

Nuclear weapons have killed about ~200k people in all of history.

Advertising probably kills that many people most months when you consider things like:

* Convincing people that various groups needs to be genocided

* Convincing people to use cars instead of less dangerous methods of transportation

* Convincing people to use fossil fuels instead of less polluting forms of energy

* Convincing people to eat unhealthy foods

* Convincing people to smoke cigarettes

I'm not convinced that advertising is less dangerous than nuclear weapons.

> Nuclear weapons have killed about ~200k people in all of history.

So far. Present performance is not indicative of future returns. All it will take is one nut job (who could still be Putin depending on how this turns out) escalating to even a "regional" nuclear war to add a zero or two to that number, and it could happen very quickly.

I've seen and heard and said this before... where is this quote from?

It's from a reworking of Howl by Allen Ginsburg, reframing it for our era.

The original is an amazing poem well worth reading

https://poets.org/poem/howl-parts-i-ii

Jeff Hammerbacher.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/

"Making people click ads" is just applied computational sociology.

Which is a good thing, since the sociology we had before clickable ads was unequivocally less scientific and useful.

"good" and "sociology" are surely carrying a lot of weight in that statement. What does "good" mean applied in this context?

I'm not sure I see the connection to sociology though, do yo mean behavioral economics?

Advertising today is figuring out the preferences and behavioral patterns of different social groups. It's not based on economics, it's mostly stats and probability theory.

But the knowledge we gain is only about triggering the bad paths of human brain, like addiction, greed, FOMO, etc. And who is "we" anyway, this stuff isn't public.

No, because literally every business that exists wants to advertise. (And also organizations that aren't businesses, like NGO's and government agencies and non-profits.)

Well, advertising only stimulates consumption, to the detriment of our planet.

Also, it is a loudness war, that is a race to the bottom in various ways.

As an individual business owner you want it, as society you don't.

That's like saying "money only stimulates consumption and causes pollution".

Technically it is true, but good luck on your crusade of abolishing money.

TikTok was not the first company that came to my mind when I read that comment. I see way more ads on Instagram, Twitter, not to mention YouTube.

TikTok will make $11B in ad revenue this year. It is their business model. This is twice as large as Twitter's business, and a third of Instagram or YouTube.

Still better than wasting away the intelligence inventing something that will never hit the market and make any impact

no. it's better to contribute nothing than contribute net harm.