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's not a well-enough-thought-out proposal to call "radical"; it assumes that making advertising illegal would make advertising go away and that there would be no drawbacks to this. Even if we all agree that it's bad for people to say things they're paid to say instead of what they really believe, there are many possible approaches to writing specific laws to diminish that practice. Those approaches represent different tradeoffs. You can't say anything nontrivial about the whole broad set of possible policy proposals.

To me it sounds a lot like "What if we made drugs illegal?"

>>kragen+Ls
There are no drawbacks to making advertising illegal as long as the laws are written conservatively. Point out one. Notably "it won't actually prevent all advertising" isn't a downside--preventing, say, 80% of advertising is a heck of an improvement.

And FFS let's skip past the childish "how will people find out about products???" nonsense. You're an adult, use your brain. Consumer Reports exists, and in the absence of advertising that sort of content would flourish.

>>kerkes+WE1
I note that you, too, have failed to make a policy proposal that is concrete enough to discuss usefully.

If only 80% of advertising were illegal, probably Consumer Reports could continue to exist, although they would be exposed to some legal risk of being ruled to be illegal advertising, probably prompted by a letter to the Attorney General from a company whose products they reviewed poorly or neglected to review at all. Stricter regimes like most of those being proposed here would make it difficult for CR to discover the existence of products to review.

But possibly you are thinking of a different structure of regulation than I am, rather than just failing to think through its unintended consequences. It's impossible to tell if your proposal stays so vague.

>>kragen+AL1
> I note that you, too, have failed to make a policy proposal that is concrete enough to discuss usefully.

I never complained that you didn't make a policy proposal, so you can't say I'm a hypocrite here. In fact, I've been pretty clear in other comments that it's foolish to hold HN comments to the level of legislation.

> If only 80% of advertising were illegal, probably Consumer Reports could continue to exist, although they would be exposed to some legal risk of being ruled to be illegal advertising, probably prompted by a letter to the Attorney General from a company whose products they reviewed poorly or neglected to review at all. Stricter regimes like most of those being proposed here would make it difficult for CR to discover the existence of products to review.

Straw man argument extraordinaire. Nobody is calling Consumer Reports advertising. On the contrary, I'm saying that independent review isn't advertising.

> But possibly you are thinking of a different structure of regulation than I am, rather than just failing to think through its unintended consequences. It's impossible to tell if your proposal stays so vague.

So maybe ask a question instead of assuming what I'm envisioning. Believe it or not, you're not obligated to guess what I'm thinking!

Legislation could pretty explicitly allow for independent reviewers: that's explicitly the solution I'm proposing to the lack of information.

> Stricter regimes like most of those being proposed here would make it difficult for CR to discover the existence of products to review.

Sorry, which commenter is proposing that independent reviewers can't be in contact with companies whose products they review?

In my thinking, companies would be explicitly allowed to submit their products for review, although I think I'd want the reviewers to still pay for the products (i.e. not receive them for free or at a discount).