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What If We Made Advertising Illegal? (simone.org)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The idea feels like sci-fi because you're so used to it, imagining ads gone feels like asking to outlaw gravity. But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.

The traditional argument pro-advertising—that it provides consumers with necessary information—hasn't been valid for decades.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago (9 children)

Even with an adblock and the best privacy controls available, you cannot escape the effects of advertising. Article headlines will still be clickbait. Online recipes will still have long, unnecessary stories at the start. Companies will still want your email for trivial things so they can spam you. There are a hundred ways that advertising affects culture, and it's not something that can change based on individual effort.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

You also can't escape the society affected by advertising. And it would be reasonable to assume that advertising not just increases consumerism, leading to pollution and worse climate change and genocide, but also must have an effect on the mind.

I would assume that people conditioned with advertising are less able to make rational decisions for e.g. voting. Advertising might have similar adverse effects on developing brains to lead in drinking water. But I doubt there is much academic research on this.

Another thing I always thought about this is how beautiful our cities and world could look if there was no advertising everywhere.

PS: Really good article. There is a sci-fi movie "Branded (2012)" which dramatizes this idea.

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