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”.
But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out.
The remaining YouTube channels would be concentrated around the ones that are of higher quality, rather than easy slop produced to push ads. Nobody would try to clone someone else's channel for money. They would only be produced by people who were passionate about that topic. There would be fewer channels by passionate people, but the percentage would be much higher, so it's not necessarily a worse situation overall.
TV has always cost money - you pay for satellite or cable, and the free-to-air programming available to you is overtly subsidized by your government - they shouldn't need to double-dip by showing ads.
We used to pay for newspaper subscriptions too. A lot of newspapers are trying to go back to that, but it's a market for lemons. Maybe if advertising was banned, we'd each subscribe to one or two online newspapers and discover which ones are decent and which ones are crap. Remember, it's harder to make someone who was paying $0.00 pay $0.01, than to make someone who was paying $10 pay $20. Would the market be more efficient at price discovery if there was no $0.00 at all?
I have some questions about your vision.
- How many content creators would no longer be able to make passion videos as their full-time job because they're no longer getting revenue-sharing from YouTube?
- Okay, some content creators also have Patreon etc. What's the incentive to post these videos publicly for free, as opposed to hoarding them behind their Patreon paywall?
- What's the incentive for YouTube to continue existing as a free-to-watch service? Or even at all? Take away the ad money, and I can't imagine that the remaining subscription revenue comes anywhere close to paying for the infrastructure.
Or at the very least regulate it as a utility and allow users the ability to bring in their own advertising.
I don't think that nationalizing such a service makes much sense either. What motivation does a government have to operate a service for global benefit (as opposed to just its citizens)? Surely we shouldn't want a US YouTube, a French YouTube, a Japanese YouTube, etc.
> Or at the very least regulate it as a utility and allow users the ability to bring in their own advertising.
Doesn't that run counter to the premise of banning advertising in the first place?
Why not? What's so special about having all content on the same website? You can generally only consume videos in your own language or others you can understand. There's generally only a handful of countries that speak a certain language, and aggregators would likely appear.
If each country had their own localised platform, local culture would have a much greater chance to flourish.
I know plenty of teenagers who know more about US politics than their own country's, who barely know local artists, who know certain expressions in English but have no resources to convey a similar message in their native languages.
I wouldn't mind going back to a world a little more diverse, a little less homogeneous.
Suppose that I really want to consume content from certain UK creators, but the UK YouTube-equivalent is region-locked, as much of BBC is today. That's a net loss compared to the status quo.
> There's generally only a handful of countries that speak a certain language
And there are plenty of people who speak languages other than their native one. English literacy / fluency is a de facto standard in tech, whether we like it or not. It's not a matter of suppressing other cultures, but rather providing a common language for discourse.
> and aggregators would likely appear.
I'm not so convinced. If these are services provided by governments for their residents, they're especially easy to region-lock.
> If each country had their own localised platform, local culture would have a much greater chance to flourish.
> I know plenty of teenagers who know more about US politics than their own country's, who barely know local artists, who know certain expressions in English but have no resources to convey a similar message in their native languages.
I sympathize with this concern, but I don't think that this approach is the answer.
The Internet was conceived as a network of independent nodes, all interconnected. What I said looks a lot more like what the Internet was intended to be than YouTube does.
> I would prefer to avoid fragmentation of the ecosystem, since it complicates discovery of content, reduces potential reach, limits cross-pollination of ideas, etc.
Aggregators, RSS feeds or similar, word of mouth, all those things help with relevant discovery. The YouTube recommendations algorithm seems to do less so.
> Suppose that I really want to consume content from certain UK creators, but the UK YouTube-equivalent is region-locked, as much of BBC is today. That's a net loss compared to the status quo.
Perhaps. You might also ask yourself why they are region-locked. I believe it will come down to advertisement, at least to a non-negligible amount.
In any case, I'm not saying multi-language or multi-country websites and services would be prohibited from existing, only that the likes of YouTube would probably not be as profitable and may cease to exist.
> And there are plenty of people who speak languages other than their native one. English literacy / fluency is a de facto standard in tech, whether we like it or not.
It is. And within a certain circle it's less of a problem, though sometimes it can also become one.
> It's not a matter of suppressing other cultures, but rather providing a common language for discourse.
I assume you're a native English speaker, most likely from the USA. What you call "a common language for discourse" is unfortunately exactly the suppression of other cultures. There's no way to have that common language without the language, the ideas and the very ways of thinking approaching more the one of the language that's becoming common.
The very premise of TFA shows that. Propaganda and advertisement are one and the same in some languages. And that has profound implications in how the speakers of those languages interpret the world in what pertains to these concepts. By "providing a common language" where there is an intrinsic difference between the words, that world view, the very premises of those other cultures are changed and moulded to be more similar to those of the dominant language.
The very existence of said common language makes the world less interesting, it slowly erases and erodes individualities of cultures and ultimately we as a species are poorer for it.