Everything that makes advertisers happy is to the detriment of humanity as a whole. Everything that makes advertisers’ jobs easier also makes it easier for authoritarian governments. “Innovation” is no longer about creating new things, it’s about taking what already works, breaking it, shoving ads on it and charging a ransom in the form of a premium subscription.
On the other hand, there are endless ad-skipping tools, pages and sites where the main attraction is the lack of ads without a subscription. More and more people are talking about how intrusive and annoying ads are, even those who make their living from them. As the efforts of big tech to please advertisers grow, so do the efforts of ordinary people to screw them.
Very Cyberpunk.
With modern advertising techniques, adverts mainly work by psychological manipulation - putting a name in your mind, making you associate it with an emotion (for example cars are “freedom”, perfume is “lust”), induce fear of a non-existing problem and then sell you a “solution” and so on.
It’s like being the focus of a crowd of untiring salesmen who are slick manipulators with training in Psychology and with no ethics at all.
That’s how it is every day in every place (even the comfort of your own home) in the advert heavy world we live in if one doesn’t fight to keep that shit away.
There’s a French film called “BigBug” that makes an interesting parody about this.
One day ads will be unskippable, unless you get a 12 hr AdPass by watching 60 minutes of uninterrupted ads while eyeball tracking software monitors your attention. You will get mini games where you need to sing along or high five a friend. You can get an instant AdPass by purchasing the featured product.
Thanks to enshittification I’ve gone back to reading books, so, thank you advertisers?
NON ADVERTISER FRIENDLY MEDIA DETECTED WITHIN YOUR HOUSE
PLEASE GIVE IT UP WILLINGLY TO THE DANGEROUS MEDIA DISPOSAL SPECIALISTS DISPATCHED TO YOUR HOME
Online ads can be easily circumvented, I am more annoyed with giant billboards polluting public spaces. Oh well, one more reason to spend more time in nature.
You just need some special sunglasses to see the real messages.
Is this a self affirmation or are there other people in your shower?
I would also like to know who else is in their shower.
Datavampires.
Calvin and Hobbes warned us
I propose we make a massive product database. If you need to buy something, you can see your options there on a level playing field. Companies who spend more money don’t get any more visibility than any other. If you don’t feel like spending any money, the database isn’t trying to push you down a spending spiral.
And then for convenience, add a shopping cart so it’s not a separate research step - congrats, you’ve invented Amazon.
Amazon is everything but a level playing field and it is highly manipulated.
Yes but now do a search for the item in your cart and buy it somewhere else.
Started with 8Chan, where the same radicalised incels who support the rise of fascism worked in unison to move the Overton window. Allowing big Tech and Rupert Murdoch to constantly run propaganda against immigrants, whilst sustaining high levels of legal immigration to afford cheap labour and push the working class against eachother. All while Google, Meta, Microsoft and all of those clowns sell our active location Data collected from our phnes to Saudis, Russia and other extremely wealthy families so they could see businesses with less footfall during COVID, allowing them to bankrupt the global economy by shorting those companies through options. Netting them billions in profit and bankrupting businesses causing further economic downturn, in conjunction with the hostile takeover of the taxi cab and food delivery businesses. Further damaging restaurants and creating more unemployment, leading to fewer entry level jobs, normalising isolation and creating an atmosphere of distrust between people. Allowing for the further radicalisation of now unemployed young men by circulating millions of misleading, and sometimes, totally fake stories about immigrants. People that they brought here in the first place. All in order to push the world into a global conflict, buy up Earth and install themselves as the rulers of the ashes at the cost of billions of peoples lives.
Advertising is pollution
All advertising is a psyop
All advertisers are eco terrorists and gaslighters.
They are enemies of normal people.
They have forgone their humanity and our planet and our own well being.
They should not exist.
Advertising doesn’t have to exist.
Like, we could just pass laws restricting or outright banning certain kinds.
I think people just forget that we can tell corporations they can’t do whatever the fuck they want.
Think about how much waste in bandwidth and electricity happens just to make a webpage unreadable.
Marketers are the opposite of accomplishment.
It’s a job that only exists in capitalism
If you’re a marketer and you read this, fuck you personally.
It’s a job that only exists in capitalism
Not true. Government-sponsored propaganda campaigns need advertisers (“ads” are just corporate propaganda), public works projects need to be advertised for awareness, politicians will need people to advertise their candidacy, political movements will advertise their positions, and unless this is a command-control economy where one thing is delegated to exactly one entity, you’ll probably be advertising some service or product you do or make.
lol capitalism AND propaganda.
I stand corrected.
Is advertising just capitalist propaganda?
Your name is Punk Rock Sports Fan.
Suppose a local punk band wants to inform people that they will be playing a show. So they print out some posters and hang them around town.
That’s advertising.
they forget because the corporations pay for propaganda to tell them it’s impossible
And then those people can go do something useful with their lives!
The catch: it’s honest work
They could just make media that people actually enjoy with that advertising budget…
Like, you get that’s an option, right? I don’t think anyone wants their creative visions to be used to sell beer to college kids with burping frogs.
We don’t all have to like the same 10 movies a year the big studios decide we have to like either.
Those resources could be spread around to more people making a much higher quantity of media that doesn’t have to try to appeal to everyone.
Prioritizing profits over everything doesn’t lead to a better life except for a very very small percentage of us, so why do we all go along with it?
We can literally just stop putting profits over everything and 99.99% of our lives would improve immediately
I agree with Bill Hicks.
Came here to say that, he called it decades ago. Advertisers, marketers, and developers, all of them parasites
Advertising is the blistering puss of an underlying Capitalist stage four cancer that has broken the surface of the body.
Advertisers waste our time which is the only measurable currency we are all spending at the same rate
What’s distressing is the way they’ve been accepted. Ads are baked into many experiences, particularly online. Is this post an ad? Is the recommendation thread? The quiet suggestion that there has to be a solution to some problem? It’s impossible to say.
Hailcorporate used to be active, but now it’s a ghost town where specters whisper to one another, depressed and sardonic. That’s why I love lemmy. Aside from the sticker and knitting scammers, we’re nearly clear of ads. If you’re a human reading this, I very probably appreciate you!
knitting scammers
Wait… what?
I think he’s referring to kitaboga.
Even here I’ve posted about how advertising is a destructive force that ruins everything it touches and literally should not exist and there are people that are so indoctrinated by the industry that they rush to defend it
“But how will small businesses prosper without the ability to annoy you with direct mail marketing and Facebook campaigns!”
And truly misunderstanding the difference between something like a business directory, that you willing submit yourself to as a consumer, and can be listed and compiled objectively without competitive advantage for rich assholes, vs advertising, which intrudes on your life.
Objectively, certain services could never have been created without advertising, and I recognize that. But I’m not going to stan for them or accept an antiquated system just because it was the starting point. Funny that it took a communist Linux forum for me to recognize the viability of passion projects.
Enjoy our time. Eventually they will come. They always come… mostly at night, mostly.
the advertisers, they’re going to come for you at night?
I am so old. Ever seen Aliens?
Mostly
They may already be in your house.
