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”.
I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable.
It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies.
And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
It's worth analyzing why a society wants that and who benefits from it.
The article almost explicitly states that this is precisely the goal. We all understand who those populists in 2016 are, who "bypass traditional media gatekeepers and deliver tailored messages to susceptible audiences".
So I think we are not talking about authoritarianism here, but full-fledged totalitarianism. Such a policy is a powerful lever of control, allowing government to obtain even more levers. And in the end people still vote "wrongly" (spoiler: they are voting "wrongly" not because of some Russian advertisement on facebook), but the government at that point will not care anymore how people vote because that will not affect anything.