Say it with me:

"Its Capitalism"

The profit motive is killingbus and the planet.

I think you mean Capitalism

On the one hand, yes. But also, it's mostly capitalism.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with "I'm starting a frisbee club for fun. We're going to meet saturdays in the park. I'm going to put up some flyers and tell my friends about it".

But at some point that can mutate into "i put a 30 second unskippable ad for FrisbeeFranchise on youtube, and a giant billboard over the subway stop that implies if you don't play frisbee you'll never be happy". That's bad.

I think targeted ads should be illegal as a first step. I don't think anyone except the worst sort of advertisers would go to bat for those. Old fashioned static ads where they put an ad for bike stuff by the bike lane in town is annoying, but somehow we've invented things so much worse than that.

LOL no, the advertisers won that war decades ago. It's been an occupation ever since.

i don't know what happened to us as a society... we seem to have lost all semblance of media literacy.

it feels like in the 90's we were all very ad-aware, and actively opposed the idea of 'selling out'... then the rolling stones sold the rights to Start Me Up to windows and we've been in a race to the bottom ever since. why are we talking about 'monetizing your hobbies'.

what happened to shows like Media Television, magazines like AdBusters? does nobody remember reading Naomi Klein's 'No Logo'??

edit: Remember when Adam Curtis made 'A Century of the Self?

Advertising exists to manipulate behavior beneficial to clients, out of target groups. It is propaganda and psychological manipulation. The days of simply informing people of products and services is a fairy tale. Maddison Avenue was built off of Nazi Germany's mass media propaganda strategies.

Advertising is the reason why privacy is nonexistent now... it is kinda incredible just how much information they gather.

In centuries past when people were writing constitutions and what rights people have they had privacy and warrants and spying and all that shit done based on what evil governments can do to their citizens. I don't think a single one of them ever realized just how fucking massive corporations would be and how much shit they steal from us.

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.

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.

What Bill Hicks said

If I had a magic internet/media button I know what it would be.

It would be a brand banish button. If I see an ad, I wanna just have a button to banish them from all my devices…forever. I already have a rule you poss me off with adverts …I defo won’t buy.

So much tech potential that just does not exist!

I feel the same. Besides what you mentioned, there is also the effect on what news and content will be produced and shown (see Manufacturing Consent). The advertisers who are the customers of shows want the viewers in a buying mood. So while "if it bleeds it leads" works fine but controversial topics that disturbs people or make them think will not be shown.

Best example is youtube - once the demonetization came there must have been significant effects on what topics were discussed and how. Without sponsorings and patreon it would be worse, but this or rule is shaping our global civilization for the worse.

People pay far too much attention to ideology, but it's the rules of a system that lead it to converge to different outcomes. And advertising is a big one.

Yes, but you misspelled "capitalism".

The wildest part is that advertising has become so poisonous that now over 50% of a Americans use adblockers and over 1/3 of people world wide. It's not just techies installing adblockers for their grandmas, it's become mass market!

Advertising, marketing, and the stock market are the worst aspects of capitalism, and the system could be improved dramatically with heavy restrictions on all of those. Yeah it would shrink the economy, but the new steady state would be much better. Less waste, better stuff.

I agree with Bill Hicks.

https://youtu.be/9h9wStdPkQY

They're building the internet for AI now, and were building it for advertisers for years before that, what with SEO choking up search results.

What should have been a wonderfully expressive, collaborative, and unifying medium is just being completely ravaged.

I, unfortunately, work in web development.

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.

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!

At least you are an adult so you have the tools, cognitive and cultural, helping you see the problem. Imagine a very young kid, say 5 years old, watching exciting video content. They do not yet possess such ways to protect themselves from for-profit manipulation.

Just few days ago I finished the IMHO excellent "Buy The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence" by Henry A Giroux and Grace Pollock so you can already understand where I'm going with this.

Yes, advertisers are terrible, they make money by manipulating our thoughts, probing our deepest desire, toying with our emotions in order to sell us whatever is made by whomever pay them the most. But... you and I are fully formed human beings in the sense that we are adults. We spend years navigating through the world, getting scamming, learning how to spot lies and marketing pitches. The problem is, as showcased by Disney in that example (a very important example!), the process is not random. It is a very thoughtful and strategical one, namely how to transform a human being to a consumer from the youngest age.

Anyway I won't dig into the obvious but the book ends with a couple of practical links e.g. commercial free childhood (what a name, how can how even imagine that would be needed?) which since then became https://fairplayforkids.org/

If you prefer a video on the topic the 2001 yes still relevant 2001 documentary (52 min) "Mickey Mouse Monopoly - Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power" https://films.mediaed.org/Film/Mickey_Mouse_Monopoly/f56fd530-8724-460b-b2bc-6eba9868f0e7

I personally pulled that thread also thanks to the more recent 2016 article "Teaching Disney Critically in the Age of Perpetual Consumption" https://www.jstor.org/stable/45157190 but, again, the point is that it's systemic.

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.

Advertising as a concept is not bad. But given the realities of capitalism, the greedy executive and shareholders can never resist the easy money. As a result anything that implements ads will eventually be completely overrun and ruined by them. Might take a year, might take 10, but once that door is opened it is inevitable.

Very Cyberpunk.

Just another battle ground of the class war that has been waged since ruling class figured out they can dunk on pedons

Advertising is the blistering puss of an underlying Capitalist stage four cancer that has broken the surface of the body.

The advertisers are merely a tool for the investors, the people who own everything. The "haves" as it were. They are always at odds with and trying to squeeze money and labor from the rest of us, you know, the "have nots".

Something something you basically just figured out communism on your own

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.

You just need some special sunglasses to see the real messages.

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.

There's a French film called "BigBug" that makes an interesting parody about this.

Advertisers waste our time which is the only measurable currency we are all spending at the same rate

You could generalize that to "exploiters vs. humanity", ads are just a part of that.

Datavampires.

we have ads because services paid for with attention are more accessible and get more traffic than services paid for with a monthly subscription ... we could probably subsidize a lot of websites or make them community efforts (like Wikipedia), but because there is a desire to profit from websites, we have this aggressive push for ads and monetization in every corner of the web.

Commercialization, though, is the problem more than advertising itself is. Monetization through "native ads" or affiliate link marketing is just as insidious and toxic, and pervasive. Just like people hate loot boxes and games that have mechanics where skill is less important than paying cash for in-game content to gain an advantage, the root problem is commercialization.

This is just capitalism, and cyberpunk as a genre is meant to be critical of capitalism and its rotten fruits.

I think it misses the mark to interpret the war as a war between humanity and advertisers when it's a war between the powerful and wealthy and the 99%.