This shouldn’t have been the least bit surprising — since this is what happened to every mass communication technology over the past few centuries: print, then radio, then television. The OG computing folks at Xerox PARC indeed foresaw all this, and McLuhan wrote about this in the 50s/60s.
A lot of the bad parts of computing originated in hollywood. They wanted certainty that you could only play "protected" music or video.
This sort of thing made it "necessary" to lock bootloaders and eventually with the iphone... The ship of theseus didn't belong to theseus anymore, it was just a license.
now lots of devices are cash registers, surveillance devices, e-meters and pop-up generators.
Advertising is a cancer on society. It corrupts all forms of media, ever since the invention of publishing and broadcasting. The internet is its most lucrative victim yet. It's where they've taken the sociopathic ideas pioneered by Bernays to their maximum expression. It is the most powerful global psychological manipulation machine, influencing everything from what we spend our money on, to how we think and act. It is unequivocally a major cause of the sociopolitical unrest and conflicts we see today. The really insidious part is that most people don't consciously realize they're being manipulated, and are happy to exchange that for some "free" products and services. This has, of course, made many companies very rich, by operating in a dark data broker market exchanging the data we've given them, and more prominently, data they've stolen or inferred from us.
To people working in these companies: you're complicit in the breakdown of society. Grow a moral backbone, quit, and boycott them.
If somebody works for tobacco or predatory lending they are stigmatized. Perhaps we should extend it to people working in advertising or anything causing the major problems in society today. From sugar drinks to algorithmic timelines.
One small beacon of hope, perhaps, is that I see perspectives like this becoming more common over time. A few years ago there were (anecdotally) way more true believers in the current MO of pervasive profit seeking to the detriment of all else, true believers in the "free market" etc.
It's easy to see how absurd the practice of advertising is if you think about the actual dynamic.
As human beings we all have intentionality. When we want something, we seek it. "Hey, I really need to cut the lawn, let me find a lawnmower"—I'll go out and research lawnmowers to find one that helps me accomplish my intended goal.
Advertising totally inverts this dynamic. Instead, apropos of nothing, some person I don't know and have no relationship with interrupts some other thing I am in the middle of intentionally doing to tell me all about their fancy lawnmowers. At its worst (and most effective) it short circuits my own potential formation of intentions and reshapes my intentions, manipulating me, and at its least effective it's just a completely annoying distraction from what I was originally trying to do. It's horrible and antithetical to any notion of respect and dignity you might ascribe to the limited time of other human beings.
Advertising is like pollution. Normal people realize they’re getting poisoned, but they still get to where they need to be, so don’t bother to change it.
We need to make collected data and metadata public. If a cabal of advertisers is considered an ethical steward of the information, a public database can’t be much worse. Scare the bejeezus out of moms and pops and watch the tide shift.
I disagree, the problem is the race to the bottom in advertising.
Drugs ads being able to show 30s of the one positive side effect and then spend 0.5s speed talking through all the negative ones is not a fair description of the drug.
Almost every product advertising being here's a celebrity (who has no idea how the product works) using the product without any real description of what the product does. Imagine a car ad that had to show you had to pump gas!? It's like one of the most common things you do with a car.
And other product advertising being 100% vibe based. We're the company of tomorrow! The fuck does that even mean?
Conceptually, you need advertising. How else will you learn about new technology? The problem is that current advertising only teaches you the existence of something and not what it does.
> Conceptually, you need advertising. How else will you learn about new technology?
Check in with trade organizations or whatever? I mean, fundamentally, this is what a sales catalog for a retailer is. That can be, and has been, one of the functions of a store as opposed to a manufacturer selling directly.
I don't think any sane ban on advertising would prevent people from requesting information about new products (which could functionally be ads) which could well include uncompensated reviews in interest magazines or newspapers or whatever.
"This store exists (on your maps app), here are their hours and the category of thing they do, and a link to their website" and once you're on the site, they can go nuts telling you about what they offer.
There is very nearly zero value provided to society by advertising.
> How will one fund the server costs for newspapers, social networks and search engines?
All of these currently exist without advertising. The problem is advertising sucks all of the oxygen out of the room, convincing you it's the only business model because it's so lucrative.
Look around at the businesses that are entirely supported by advertising and ask yourself honestly how worse off we would be if they disappeared overnight. Do you believe that the vacuum they left would never be filled by other business models? Sure, it would probably look a lot different, but that's the point. What we have now is horrible, and I don't think society collapses if we got rid of advertising.
I guess one other model that seems to beat out advertising is billionaire ownership for influence peddling. Still remains to be seen if this model will remain successful in the long term. We should probably eliminate billionaires though just to be safe.
It's not my place, nor am I smart enough to propose a solution. But if you ask me, I would start with much stricter regulations regarding company transparency, data collection, and data privacy. There are two things making this very unlikely, though:
- Governments and companies are in symbiosis. Companies can influence which laws are passed and how they apply to them, and governments depend on these companies both financially, and practically for their services. Nowhere is this clearer than in the US, where actual CEOs are now running the country.
- The general public doesn't really care about these issues. For most people their data and privacy isn't a concern, and even when it is, it's not a large enough of a concern that they would be willing to stop using these services, or use alternatives. Since advertising/propaganda works on a subconscious level, they're literally brainwashed to not see a problem at all.
So I realistically don't see a way out of this. It would require changes in deeply rooted sociopolitical systems just to get on the right path, and then years of effort to keep us there. And without unanimous public support for all of this, it will never come to pass.
As for alternative business models, that's the least of our problems. Technical solutions for this exist today, and wouldn't be difficult to expand and build upon, but the actual challenge is changing the public perception of what "free" means. The solution likely wouldn't be as profitable for companies as advertising currently is, which is why we would need regulations to force it. When weighing the success of another billion-dollar corporation against our society's mental health and stability, the choice is obvious to me.
> Note that lots of people won't (or mostly can't) pay, so how does a social network work in this case?
If there's not enough consumer demand for a service, and it's not a public utility that's worth funding through taxpayer money to maintain equal access for everyone, the logical, supply-and-demand-based, hundred year-old solution is to just admit it's not a good business idea and move on.
If their leadership teams can't come up with an offering worth paying for, well, tough luck, the list of neat ideas that just didn't atract enough customers is perpetually open.
If (under our current economic system) it is impossible to run generally useful services like that without subjecting their users to advertisements, then clearly, there's something wrong with the economic system itself and we should start investigating alternatives.
The current situation incentives advertising as the only way to monetize something so it's no wonder you want advertising to exist. The fundamental way is always going to be a peer-to-peer network, where you can contribute in so many different ways apart from paying. The majority of the web is filled with people who has no idea on what the original web stood for and frankly, they couldn't care less which is why we are in such a bloated mess
Forcing people to fork out money for any product or service they used also made many companies very rich. See Microsoft, Oracle... A very long list. But you're so hyperbolic and hysterical I don't even know where to begin.
There's a world of difference between broadcasting true capabilities of a product or service, and embedding subconscious thoughts into the minds of people to associate a brand with a feeling, in the form of "lifestyle brands", "torches of freedom", etc. The former is informing people about something that exists, while the latter is psychological manipulation straight from propaganda playbooks. Please read about the life and work of Edward Bernays, and this distinction will be clear.
Actual "honest" advertising doesn't exist. Companies that attempt to do that are outcompeted by the vastly superior revenues of companies that don't. The story that marketers tell themselves that they're simply informing the public about a product or service they might not know about is absolute BS. If it were true, large companies like Coca-Cola and McDonald's wouldn't need to advertise at all. The truth is that it's all about constantly molding the public perception of a company in a way that makes them associate it with a positive feeling, so that they will subconsciously choose to give them their money. These are the same tactics used in propaganda, but instead of making people part ways with their money, it makes them think or act in any way that's beneficial to a specific cause.
The language I use is not hyperbolic, analogies aside. It's the only way of describing the insanity of the world we live in, which now resembles in many ways the fictional world novel authors have been writing about for decades. If you want to engage in the discussion, you can start by refuting anything I've said.
> Actual "honest" advertising doesn't exist. Companies that attempt to do that are outcompeted by the vastly superior revenues of companies that don't.
Same with political parties that don't take corporate money (except in sane countries, where this is recognized and forcefully limited).
> you're so hyperbolic and hysterical I don't even know where to begin.
No they aren't.
The situation is just so absurd and extreme, yet normalized, that accurately describing it makes people sound weird. That's why Chomsky speaks in that extreme monotone, to counterbalance the very real horror and extreme nature of the things he is saying.
How does the belief that advertising drives major behaviour change square with 50+ years of psychological research showing that behaviour change is really difficult?
Long term behaviour change is difficult. Short term behaviour change; not so much.
To take a classic example from the "sociopathic" mind of Bernays himself:
> The targeting of women in tobacco advertising led to higher rates of smoking among women. In 1923 women only purchased 5% of cigarettes sold; in 1929 that percentage increased to 12%, in 1935 to 18.1%, peaking in 1965 at 33.3%, and remained at this level until 1977
And there's far, far more to it all. Sometimes you don't need people to change their behaviour, you just need them to be confused (say, about climate change, or who to vote for), and sometimes you just need media corporations to go soft on you because they like your money.
Sometimes you're advertising to kids, because childrens brains are more malleable. They form habits early.
Advertising made smoking cool; it made diamonds valuable; it greenwashed fossil fuel companies that sold our species future for short term profit. If you don't call that behaviour change, what do you call it?
> Advertising made smoking cool
Nicotine is incredibly addictive, so one would suspect that that addiction made the change stick better.
> it made diamonds valuable
This one is interesting, in that diamonds are valuable for a one off high value purchase (i.e. wedding rings). I'd need to think about this a bit more, but on the face of it is a good counter-argument.
> Long term behaviour change is difficult. Short term behaviour change; not so much.
Can you provide some evidence for this?
Context: I have a PhD in psychology, and have read so many behaviour change meta-analyses that show really, really small effects so my prior is pretty strongly against this.
Additionally, I worked at a big tech on ads, and while one could definitely see changes in conversion rates due to ads, the incremental changes (i.e. measured by experiments) were much, much lower such that a good model of Google/Facebook etc is that they show ads preferentially to people who were probably going to convert anyway (it seems to work well in situations where there is no awareness of the business, but for larger businesses it's all about taking your competitors customers).
So my thesis is more that advertising re-allocates the dollars spend between (mostly) interchangeable products, which is consistent with the psychological research.
I think you might be too focused on advertising’s role in nudging individual purchasing decisions, while underestimating how advertising shapes cultural norms and values over time.
The diamond industry’s marketing campaign didn’t just convince people to buy a diamond - it redefined what engagement meant in the Western world. That’s a fundamental shift in social behavior.
Yes, nicotine is addictive - but 'clever' marketing redefined who could smoke, and why, for decades. This lead to billions in profits - and millions of deaths.
The tobacco industries playbook is still being used; by climate companies, by big tech, by polluters, sugary drink co's etc. These aren't areas where things are "mostly interchangeable" - I want a climate, and clean soil, and drinkable water; not a choice in who destroys every common good.
And think on this - of the ads you saw in your days working for big tech, how many of those ads were based on making someone feel insufficient in some way? How many exploited insecurity or fear? How many manufactured fake urgency? ... How many were straight up deceptive? Etc.
Tbph, I don't get how someone with a PhD in psychology doesn't just defend this industry, but actively works for it. You must know some of the damage being done, after all those years in school.
> Tbph, I don't get how someone with a PhD in psychology doesn't just defend this industry, but actively works for it. You must know some of the damage being done, after all those years in school.
Honestly man, I went and got my PhD because of the GFC (no jobs), and aimed to be able to provide myself (and potential family) a stable income.
My options were
1. pharma (my PhD was on the placebo effect so this would have been easiest). Super evil though
2. Finance (also super evil, and responsible for the GFC)
3. Tech (which back then wasn't perceived as evil).
So I picked tech, and honestly given the options above, I'd do the same today (although I now work for a fintech so fml).
And like, I (with a PhD in psychology and many years in advertising) don't understand why so many tech people hate advertising. Like, our society is messed up for a bunch of reasons, of which advertising is one of the least dodgy.
I think that people find it easy to blame societal problems on external influences, and advertising is a good scapegoat for why people behave in ways that one finds inexplicable.
Like, if you work for a fossil fuel company, are you equally unethical? What about finance? I'm sure that basically everyone in those industries can tell you a story about how their company or industry makes the world better, and most of those stories have some truth.
Honestly, if I could give us all (including myself) one piece of advice is to stop looking for single explanations. Basically everything interesting is caused and driven by lots of complicated stuff, and nothing is purely good or purely bad. We all just make different tradeoffs, and out of those tradeoffs we build a culture and a society.
(Note: back when I was an undergrad I would probably have agreed with everything you say about advertising, but it just doesn't rate as that impactful to me anymore, given the weak evidence that it does much).
It sounds like you rationalize that work a lot... But there's a whole lot of self-contradiction and logic abuse going on.
* "Pharma is super evil. Finance is super evil." But also, "nothing is purely good or bad, we all just make different tradeoffs." You see it, right? No?
* Tech "wasn't perceived as evil" when you made your career choice? After 2008? Buddy. And what happened to it all just being tradeoffs?
* "If you work for a fossil fuel company, are you equally unethical?" - this is what's known in the field as the false equivalence fallacy, if you remember that one. Also, yes, if you work for one of the companies which have used advertising to spread climate change FUD for 50 years, then I personally consider you ethically sus.
* "Basically everything interesting is caused and driven by lots of complicated stuff" - appeal to complexity.
* "our society is messed up for a bunch of reasons, of which advertising is one of the least dodgy" So you acknowledge it's one of the reasons... Until, at least, you again claim there's "weak evidence that it does much".
* "people find it easy to blame societal problems on external influences" - Oh, the critics are oversimplifying? Are there no sophisticated critiques out there based on psychological research that might identify specific harmful mechanisms? You studied this shit, so I know you must have at least heard of them.
* "I, with a PhD in psychology... don't understand why so many tech people hate advertising" - Idk man, feels like someone with a PhD in psych should be able to understand that just fine. Really dunno what you're missing there.
Taken together, these contradictions suggest to me that there's a lot of post-hoc rationalization going on. There are more consistent ethical frameworks out there than 'shit is complicated' and 'well, nothing is pure evil or pure good anyway'. They might not be super popular right now, especially in tech, finance, fossil fuels, advertising, pharma, etc - but they're out there.
A lot of psych research connects to that old quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". Cognitive dissonance? Moral disengagement? Motivated reasoning? The bias blind spot? ... Idk man, I'm not a psych PhD.
I agree with most of what you've said. The MO of the entire advertising industry is _based_ on influencing people's thoughts and behavior.
Two nitpicks:
> Long term behaviour change is difficult. Short term behaviour change; not so much.
As you've clearly pointed out, both short _and_ long-term behavior change is possible. The only difference is that long-term change, by definition, requires more time and resources. That's the only thing making it more "difficult".
> I don't get how someone with a PhD in psychology doesn't just defend this industry, but actively works for it. You must know some of the damage being done, after all those years in school.
Advertising is deeply rooted in psychology, and psych PhDs are highly valued in the industry. The person you're arguing with is perfectly aware of how the industry works, so any counterarguments are defense mechanisms. If they have any morals left, this is what helps them sleep at night.
> Advertising is deeply rooted in psychology, and psych PhDs are highly valued in the industry. The person you're arguing with is perfectly aware of how the industry works, so any counterarguments are defense mechanisms. If they have any morals left, this is what helps them sleep at night.
Wow, just wow. I haven't worked in the advertising industry for going on 7 years now and given that I have two small kids I sleep pretty well at night (modulo being woken up at 3-4 am by my toddler).
One of the things that makes me sad for our species is that we find it so easy to judge other people on small pieces of information, and create narratives that allow us to justify our own small evils while feeling morally superior.
> The person you're arguing with is perfectly aware of how the industry works,
I am perfectly aware of how the industry works, and can tell you that it mostly doesn't. The impacts of advertising typically have large impacts only for small businesses, large ones merely advertise to keep their competitors from being top of mind (a concept beloved of large brand advertisers that has little to no empirical support).
I would typically apologize for my admittedly rude tone, but I have zero sympathy for anyone in the advertising industry. It is arguably humanity's most evil invention, that has prioritized benefiting the rich and powerful by manipulating and actively harming an unquantifiable amount of people, all the while being normalized and celebrated. I'm unable to accurately put into words how despicable it all is.
Though I will congratulate you for getting out of it, so perhaps your soul can be cleansed over time after all, if you believe in that sort of thing.
> One of the things that makes me sad for our species is that we find it so easy to judge other people on small pieces of information, and create narratives that allow us to justify our own small evils while feeling morally superior.
I'm not trying to justify any of my "small evils". Talk about creating narratives...
I do, however, feel morally superior to anyone involved in advertising, because their behavior is morally rephrensible. I'm fine with this small sense of superiority, because my work doesn't involve deception, and I seek to put out truth into the world. I don't always succeed at this, but I don't go out of my way to do the opposite either.
> I am perfectly aware of how the industry works, and can tell you that it mostly doesn't.
Your perspective goes against the mountain of research around the effectiveness of propaganda, which advertising is a branch of. It goes against the existence and very real effects of information warfare and psyops. If you need convincing, here[1] is a summary of an analysis of 82 studies that researched influence operations. tldr; propaganda _works_. Not 100% of the time, but it's a messy subject that can't be easily studied.
I'm also aware of counter claims and studies showing the opposite[2]. I'm not particularly interested in the possibility that companies overspend on advertising and don't get a good ROI. That has nothing to do with the effectiveness of propaganda.
The reason for this discrepancy is because getting conclusive evidence either way is very difficult precisely _because_ of how psyops works. Does the person think a certain way because they were influenced by a specific campaign, by their social circle, because they always thought like that, or because they woke up one day and decided to think like that? I.e. tracing the thought or action to the original source is nigh impossible. This is what's so insidious about this, and why it's such a good weapon. The victim will be in a state of confusion, and won't be able to trace the attack back to the attacker, or even be aware that they were under attack.
To this day we're debating whether there was foreign election interference in the US, and if so, how effective it actually was. This is exactly the intended effect. Hell, we still don't know the origins of COVID-19, partly due to the coverup by the Chinese government, but the disinformation campaigns have been very effective at muddying this discussion even if we had shreds of truth to work with.
I don’t remember any tracking or adverts on computers when windows 95 came out (there were adverts for computers, I used to jay money to receive them in the way if computer shopper.
the first real annoyances were Spam and Punch the monkey, both parts of the advertising industry.
The average Windows 95 machine was loaded with bundled software all asking to pay for a full license. ISPs were advertised in connection wizards built-in to the OS.
