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”.
They're not the same mechanism, they're the same thing. Propaganda is advertising one doesn't approve of, and advertising is propaganda that one does approve of. The fine-slicing is the result of people who want to make money doing propaganda attempting to justify themselves.
> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow.
Through what mechanism? Wishes?
I'm getting annoyed with people who made a bunch of money in advertising talking about banning advertising (or in general people who made a bunch of money in X trying to create careers as X-bashing pundits or gurus.) Advertising has a purpose; it's how I find out what products and services are available, and at what cost. People working in advertising who don't realize that have clearly never given the only honest aspect of their occupation a moment's thought. They thought the job was to distract people while robbing them. From that perspective, I can understand why they now think that they themselves should have been banned.
If you want to ban advertising, you have to replace advertising. We have a highway system, there's no reason why we can't have a state products and services that are available system, or in the same vein a matchmaking system between employees and employers. We don't, though. Banning advertising without one would be like banning Human Resources departments without any other hiring process.
What we should do is regulate advertising, since is is commercial speech and we can, but we don't do that either. Talking about banning advertising when we can't even ban direct to customer drug advertisements (which can be easily done, as it was done, by creating standards for the information that has to be included with a drug advertisement, and the format that it has to be done in.) We can't even get the basics; banning advertising, in addition to being a bad idea, is a pipe dream.
When I am unable to avoid it (which I’m relatively successful at), it’s how I explicitly decide what to avoid. See an ad, penalise the company.
But yet I have no trouble finding and evaluating products when I actually need something.
Search engines, real and virtual marketplaces, word of mouth, reviews all exist already, and all can work without paid shenanigans.
There’s no need to replace advertising, we can just ban it.