zlacker

>>smnrg+(OP)
I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry.

The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings painfully true. The mechanical difference between getting someone to buy sneakers versus vote for a candidate is surprisingly small.

What's frustrating is how the tech community keeps treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease. We debate content moderation policies and algorithmic transparency, but rarely question the underlying attention marketplace that makes manipulation profitable in the first place.

The uncomfortable truth: most of us in tech understand that today's advertising systems are fundamentally parasitic. We've built something that converts human attention into money with increasingly terrifying efficiency, but we're all trapped in a prisoner's dilemma where nobody can unilaterally disarm.

Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making.

Is this proposal radical? Absolutely. But sometimes the Overton window needs a sledgehammer.

P.S. If you are curious about the relationship between Sigmund Freud, propaganda, and the origins of the ad industry, check out the documentary “Century of the Self”.

>>gcp123+Cj
It is a tricky and uncomfortable truth that human minds are hackable.

On the flip side, we've had many thousands of years of adversarial training, so it's not as if protections don't exist—at least for a very classical modes of attack.

>>Terr_+ol
There are manipulation techniques we really can't protect ourselves against. It's like the optical illusions where even when you're fully aware what the trick is, you know the horizontal lines on the café wall are actually straight, you still see it incorrectly. Awareness of our weaknesses isn't enough to correct them.

Even when we can use that awareness to notice the times that we're being manipulated and try to remind ourselves to reject the idea that was forced into our brain surveillance capitalism means that advertisers can use the data they have to hit us when they know we're most susceptible and our defenses will be less effective. They can engineer our experiences and environments to make us more susceptible and our defenses are less effective. They're spending massive amounts of time and money year after year on refining their techniques to be more and more effective in general, and more effective against you individually. I wouldn't put much faith in our ability to immunize ourselves against advertising.