Re:Asking the Wrong Questions
by dleeftink on Sunday September 08, 2024 @03:05AM
(#41478729)
Maybe not the exact workings of the modern ad industry, but I'd say that as early as Metropolis and possibly some time before, a feared future of mass production and consumption had entered the public eye. It is fascinating though, how little (ad) space advertising itself was warranted in fictional works till relatively recent (late 70s/early 80s) -- Blade Runner made it look as beautiful as it would be inescapable.
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By the time Alien came out, corporate evil was certainly well established. Everything on the space ship had Weyland branding, and the corporation treating its employees as expendable was par for the course.
I'm struggling to come up with an older example of prominent ads in sci fi, but I'm drawing a blank.
So what you are saying is... "even the most dystopian Sci-Fi didn't predict modern Silicon Valley led advertising & surveillance capitalism"!
I guess we as a species (and sci-fi writers) underestimate the banality of evil and its cumulative effect. Nearly 25 years ago, I ran a couple of banner ads on my website to help pay for the hosting costs. Back then it didn't cross my mind that such a trivial bit of HTML would eventually lead to surveillance capitalism. I wonder if any sci-fi writers predicted where this could/would lead...
"Tuesday is Soylent Green day.."
And not to forget how "colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on screen.."
Re:Asking the Wrong Questions
by MrVandemar on Sunday September 08, 2024 @07:27PM
(#41484139)
1984 has a fair few advertising concepts IIRC, not least everything was "Victory" branded, and the ubiquitious Big Brother.
For another glimpse at the feared future of mass production and consumption watch the "Out of the Unknown" series 1 episode "The Midas Plague" from 1965:
https://archive.org/details/come-buttercup-come-daisy
It's episode 12 in the zip file. A lot of the stories for the series came from well known science fiction writers of the time. All four years of the series are on the Internet Archive. The Midas Plague is a comedy, some of the other episodes are truly frightening.