maleficiumi truly believe that there's an open war between Humanity vs. Advertisers and their allies.
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NONEEverything 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.
Calvin and Hobbes warned us
I agree with Bill Hicks.
https://youtu.be/9h9wStdPkQY
Came here to say that, he called it decades ago. Advertisers, marketers, and developers, all of them parasites
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.
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
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!
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?
They may already be in your house.
Wait... what?
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
You could generalize that to "exploiters vs. humanity", ads are just a part of that.
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.
Yes but now do a search for the item in your cart and buy it somewhere else.
Amazon is everything but a level playing field and it is highly manipulated.
Modern marketing, post WW2 was the privatization of propaganda.
Ads literally make me disabled. There presence challenges my freedom to interact both online and the real world.
Chris Hayes spends a good deal of time on this subject in his book The Siren's Call which I can't recommend enough.
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%.
Exactly, also stop vilifying “advertising” when the cause of advertising is corporations. There would be no advertising without corporations paying for it. It’s like complaining about ashes instead of the fire.
Advertisers are basically just arms manufacturers, supplying the wealthy with the tools needed to manipulate and use the population. Cut the head of the dragon
And majority of them won't do shit about it and keep complaining.
I know, there are user-friendly tools to deal with it, but the problem is that those people are lazy enough to not even bother spending few minutes looking for and implementing them.
Have you seen they live? Seems relevant.
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.
Datavampires.
Meh, the advertisers are the ally, not the other way around. Still, a good point.