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
> imagine a world without advertising

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.

>>Ferret+lt
One would never reach zero. And it would be challenging both to define and police laws against advertising. But to get to a world with drastically less advertisements than today seems doable.

>>jonono+7v
So we want the government to decide what is advertising and propaganda? Is telling people about the wrongs of government propaganda? Is going door to door about have you made Jesus the head of your life propaganda?

>>scarfa+5w
The point is that advertising and propaganda are indistinguishable. Going door-to-door to talk about Jesus is the same as going door-to-door to talk about vacuums, but neither is anything like roadside billboards or programmatic advertising. We can ditch the billboards and the programmatic advertising and get a better world, even if some advertisers and propagandists still go door-to-door. At least when it’s door-to-door the advertiser/propagandist has to really work for it, and you have the option of just not opening the door.

>>apprec+dy
So it’s just “programmatic advertising” that should be banned and not self hosted advertising by an internal sales team?

>>scarfa+iz
If I have to seek it out, say a product catalog or a website, it really isn't marketing or advertising.

The "problem" is that everything is vying for our attention because the internet made it vastly cheaper for any random joe blow to force a set of pixels in front of our faces.

That's the distinction. If I can't ignore it, then it shouldn't be legal. Companies should have no right to my attention.