Likewise, advertising on its own at its core is useful: there might be something that adds value to your life that someone else is trying to provide and the only missing link is that you don't know about it.
In both cases, it seems totally fine to have strict guardrails about what kinds of practices we deem not okay (e.g. banning advertising to children, or banning physical ads larger than some size or in some locations), but the extreme take of the article felt like it intentionally left no room for nuance.
No I don’t think so. I would genuinely guess that 97% of the ads I see are irrelevant garbage or, more commonly, bids by products I know to raise awareness to increase the probability of their sale. I discover the vast majority of what I care about through word of mouth and I suspect I’d be fine without ads. There are so many negative externalities that it’s actually ridiculous.
People who come across the product in a shop or in/on a market.
Reading (unpaid) reviews.
There are vastly many ways that unbiased, factual information about a new product can be disseminated to those who are looking for it that are not advertising.
They’re paid to work on and like the product.
> People who come across the product in a shop or in/on a market.
The salespeople at the shop and market are paid to like and sell the product.
Even getting your product into a store shelf is a marketing activity, and chain stores charge a lot of money for the privilege.
> Reading (unpaid) reviews.
This can be a hobby, but most people need to make money from the work they do. This is why this area is covered by companies that employ and pay people to use and review products.
Also, this is recursive - where did this unpaid reviewer hear about the product?
> unbiased, factual information
What is an unbiased fact? Is vim better or emacs? How do you decide between the two? First you “hear” about them, and hopefully they didn’t “bias” you on way or another, and then because they’re (luckily) free, you can try both and decide for yourself what the “facts” are. But what about vscode and jetbrains and etc? They’re backed by corporations, and have marketing behind them, but they’re great products too!
You see where this is going once you generalize across industries? People pay for ads so that they can tell people what they think is an unbiased fact about their product. If they’re lucky, they also get word of mouth. But in a massively populated world with millions of products, this obviously creates a market for said “word of mouth”. And in turn, attracts bad actors, who lie about their product or manipulate you for politics etc. Some cases are clear cut, but others are not. It’s up to the viewer to decide at the end of the day.