Against Advertising · 12:56pm Dec 31st, 2020
This blog is also hosted at Offprint, which is a pretty great new platform that I'm hoping takes off. This is some of my standard stuff. I'll probably write something more sentimental for the new year soon.
This started at a train station.
I was watching ads play on a gigantic TV built into the walls of the train line. I didn’t think about it at first, but then I realized what I wasn’t thinking about. It felt like I’d been put to sleep.
When I started thinking about that, I realized it was a deliberate decision someone else had made, that I was supposed to feel like that. Which got me thinking, and the more I thought about how deliberate that feeling was, the angrier I got. First I was disgusted about what was being done to me. Then I was horrified when I realized the scale of the problem.
It wasn’t what was being advertised - I don’t even remember. It was the realization of what it meant that I was being advertised to.
Someone had figured out that people get bored waiting for trains, and they had a blank wall there. So thousands of dollars were spent on electrifying it, commissioning huge television screens and surround sound speakers for it, because I was a captive audience.
And because of that, they’re never going to put anything more meaningful there. No artwork. No music being played on the speakers. No cartoons or music videos on those big screens. Because any alternative would make the advertising less effective.
It was important that my life was made worse, because all the alternatives were less profitable.
Advertising is an aberration, and one of the greatest cumulative atrocities of the 20th century. That is not hyperbole: It has started wars, been one of the most enthusiastic agents of neocolonialism, and accomplished censorship at such a scale that it makes Orwell look naive.
Advertising is making our world worse in more ways than I could count, but I’m damned well going to try anyway.
It might seem weird to get this angry about something that’s probably just a bit annoying most of the time. We’re born into a world already filled with advertising, so it’s hard to imagine what the world would look like without it - if you can imagine that at all.
Trying to think of a world without advertising is like trying to think of what your city would look like without roads. You probably do what I do, and just imagine the empty space where roads would be. It’s too hard to imagine what could fill that space instead – almost impossible to imagine how much would need to change to make your city work without them.
Think about what advertising actually is, though, and it’s impossible not to realize the tragedy it represents, in time, in treasure, and in human costs. That it shapes our culture like roads shape our cities.
Listen – billions of dollars every year are spent on advertising. The standard ratio of television airtime is 8 minutes of advertising for every 22 minutes of feature, with the ads often more expensive to produce than the shows. That is a truly absurd amount of money.
In dollar terms, the amount of money spent on advertising every year would be enough to end world hunger. Instead of being used to feed the hungry, shelter the unsheltered, that money is being used to pressure you to buy things you didn’t want.
It’s waste in the service of waste.
I know that not everything can be reduced to a utilitarian equation like that – how many people could I have fed with the money I used to buy the laptop I’m writing this on? How many vaccinations and mosquito nets? That’s not the point I’m trying to make here, though.
Instead, I want you to think of that number as a sense of how much human effort is wasted by the advertising industry in that direct cost. People that could be doing anything else, but instead having to try to sell you something. Think of those dollars spent in terms of wages and working hours.
I know incredibly driven, talented and creative people who work in advertising. All of them would prefer to be doing other things, but it can’t pay the bills. Some of them take a heavy psychological toll from what they do, because they feel uncomfortable about the implications of their work.
It’s one thing to say that advertising creates an unrealistic standard of beauty, one that causes a lot of harm. It’s another thing to be the Photoshop artist who airbrushes the smiles, tightens the waistlines, smooths the skin – they do amazing work, but they can’t be proud of it. It’s hard to be proud of work that hurts people. There’s no paid alternative, and they can’t survive doing the kind of work that they would be proud of.
Advertising, then, is something made by people who’d rather make something else, for people who don’t want it.
I mean, you don’t enjoy being advertised to, right? You’d never pay to be advertised to. Hell, I’m guessing you’ve probably paid for a subscription that took ads out of another service, or installed an adblocker, or risked piracy to avoid it.
This is because advertising is unique: it’s a product made for consumers who do not want to consume it, and would actually pay to avoid it. What advertisers get paid to do is figure out ways to make you see advertising anyway.
In this way, advertising tries to justify its existence by funding the arts – not just in the artists who make the ads, but also most television, radio and journalism. These are things people want to pay attention to, and advertising can subsidize the costs of making art by purchasing the attention it generates.
This is a parasitic relationship, and the disease that the parasite brings to its host is catastrophic.
When advertising brings money, it doesn’t mean artists are paid more. Instead it means that the end product can be made cheaper, since sales stop being the only way to make a profit.
Advertisers push this, too: a cheaper product means more people getting it, and what advertisers are buying is attention. Google and Facebook have become two of the richest companies in the world by offering free services.
New business models have been optimized around selling services to advertisers, rather than the end users. This is the idea behind services like Reddit and Tumblr, etc, whose business model is to cultivate a large userbase, and then advertise to it. Their business model is to generate attention – your attention.
Listen: if you aren’t paying for something, then you are the product being sold.
The effects this has are disastrous, because what an advertiser wants, and what the end user wants, are at odds. Most obviously, the end user doesn’t want to be advertised to. But there are less obvious levels too.
Let’s look at a newspaper. When you buy a newspaper, you’re trying to buy informative news. What an advertiser wants is your attention, and it wants that attention to be positive. Again, there’s an obvious effect here, in that the newspaper isn’t going to report negatively on companies that purchase advertising – that’s the more obvious level of influence.
But then we go more subtle, too. When advertisers become the dominant source of income – where a newspaper gets most of their money – then their interests get more priority. The quality of the news changes – it’s more important that your attention is held. What you want from your news becomes less important. You have become the product, not the consumer.
It turns out that substantial investigative journalism is a very cost inefficient way of keeping your attention. The incentive models have changed.
What’s so important about this is that other newspapers can’t compete with advertiser-supported ones. The Sun used to be a brilliant newspaper, its circulation beat out The Economist and The Guardian combined. It was the most trusted newspaper in the UK, it was reliable, it did fantastic reporting, it went bankrupt.
The vast majority of the Sun’s readers were poor. As a result, the Sun was bought by Murdoch press, and made into the Herald Sun, Britain’s worst tabloid.
This is very effective censorship of non-advertising newspapers. But once corporate influence becomes normal, we see – or, rather, we don’t see – deeper kinds of censorship become normal and accepted alongside it.
The Washington Post’s byline is “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. Do you think it’s unaffected by the fact that it’s owned by Jeff Bezos? Do you see the conflicts of interest that happen when Bezos also wants to accept deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars from the CIA?
Again, when advertisers get involved, they create situations where not advertising isn’t an option. They try to become the only viable business model. The issue isn’t with any one newspaper’s biases, but that you can’t avoid this influence in any mainstream publication.
It’s not just journalism, either; television and radio are also heavily affected by this. Kids shows popular with all genders get cancelled for being too difficult to sell ad space, which has done a lot of damage – boy stuff has to be only liked by boys, to sell boy toys. Girl stuff has to be only liked by girls, to sell girl stuff. In this way, ‘correct’ gender norms are both created and reinforced at the youngest ages.
This is why shows with strong mixed-gender casts like Teen Titans have been cancelled, and why, to this day, it is hard to find any kids’ Avengers merchandise with Black Widow in it. We don’t know how many amazing shows are lost every year because they can’t support merchandising.
Advertisers support the arts like a noose supports a neck.
Advertising is making your life worse. Not only do you not want to deal with it, it poisons a lot of the things that make your life enjoyable in order to force you to deal with it. And alternatives that refuse to advertise get choked out.
I accused it of some pretty extreme stuff though. None of that covers wars or colonialism.
This is where we get to Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays was a student of Freud’s who asked:, how can we bring psychology into the field of marketing? Eventually, this would lead to the creation of the cyberpunk genre, but it really helps to walk through the middle steps.
See, there’s two ways to interpret ‘makes you want something you wouldn’t otherwise’. The first is a bit more innocuous – it puts an idea in your head. But ‘wouldn’t want’ can also be read more intensely – changing your associations of something you’d dislike.
Bernays really pushed this hard by telling advertisers to associate cigarettes with feminism to exploit a new market. This included paying protesters to smoke cigarettes while marching in New York. This worked, and ever since, advertising has become more than just ad spots on TV and radio. It’s been an engine to try and get ahead of public opinion.
It’s likely it would have happened anyway, but Bernays can really be credited for marketing going down avenues like think tanks and public policy institutes to really push cultural phenomena. He can also be credited with the invention of product placement and celebrity endorsements – that is, tying Hollywood to pushing brands, making sure celebrities were photographed with certain products and not others.
This goes out in two insidious directions, both of which are basically how colonialism gets accomplished these days.
On the public policy end, this includes buying off doctors to say that cigarettes don’t actually cause cancer, or energy firms suppressing global warming data coming out before it makes headlines. Advertisers understand that they’re working against your interests when they decide what your interests should be.
Marketing has also been one of the biggest forces for war in the last hundred years.
You’ve probably heard the term ‘banana republic’ – ever wondered where that comes from? In the early 20th century, United Fruit Company – a US conglomerate – was following a blueprint in Central America left for it by the East India trading companies of the previous century.
Let’s look at Guatemala. The company built railroad networks and elaborate company towns, choking out other infrastructure projects and leaving land undeveloped and uncultivated. It blocked the government from building highways, which would weaken its railroad monopolies, and even destroyed a railroad after the company pulled its influence out of the area.
The government said enough is enough. Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán is elected, with the support of labor unions. He had fought in the 1944 revolution, and was appointed as defense minister to a government that had won 85% of the vote in fair elections.
The objective of the new government was land and labour reform, reforms that not only hurt United Fruit, but would threaten its role in Central America entirely. These reforms were massively popular.
So United Fruit decided to bring marketers onto the payroll to deal with problems in their chain of supply caused by, uh, local land reforms and revolutions, since a lot of their product was grown on plantations. So United Fruit hired this guy named Edward Bernays–
Seriously, same guy.
Anyway. Bernays works out he can tie fruit to freedom, and pitch that idea to the public. An intervention in Guatemala meant defending against communism at home.
The US government can then take the support of these private interests – because let’s remember, this is all about the supply chain of a fruit company – and use it as a justification for war to overthrow these countries. Then they can simply replace foreign elected representatives with new governments, chosen by the US, who will be more friendly to both American foreign policy objectives, and to the private interests of a fruit company.
In 1954, Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán is overthrown by forces armed, trained and organized by the CIA, after Bernays had lobbied that Guatemala was trying to join the Soviets. There was no proof of this and there didn’t need to be.
The new CIA-installed dictatorship dealt with trade unionists with incredible violence. Of course, the worst of this violence was saved for activists at United Fruits plantations.
Guatemala wasn’t the only country. United Fruit was also heavily invested in the sugar industry of Cuba, benefiting heavily from the slave-labour and the fascist government of Batista, which led Castro to declare “We will not become another Guatemala”, shortly before United Fruit financially supported the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Hence, ‘banana republics.’ That’s where the name comes from.
The names of the companies have changed, but this is still happening. Right now, the biggest think tanks and lobbyists pushing for heavier sanctions on Iran – on pushing for war with Iran – are from the Wonderful Company, and their main goal is to try to maintain a global monopoly on pistachios.
Likewise, Afghanistan soil is perfect for harvesting cotton; one of the only profitable crops that can grow in Afghanistan’s soil. However, the US has used its occupation of the region to suppress their cotton industry because it’d be serious competition, and they want to maintain their monopoly. As a result, many farmers in Afghanistan have been forced to turn to producing opium for terrorists.
This is more broadly a problem of corporate interests rather than advertising specifically. It’s true that marketing agencies often write more detailed drafts for military action than the generals these days, but advertising plays a large role in how you’re made to feel about these wars, and how much you get to know about them.
I cannot stress this enough, news media is shackled to advertiser interests both directly and indirectly. The organizations that should be informing us about this have been recruited to be the biggest cheerleaders for these wars, because the companies that profit from these wars are the ones that purchase the advertising that pays for the reporting.
The entire journalistic landscape already changed in the last few years when Facebook lied about statistics about video engagement, because videos were easier to monetize. The industry broadly adapted to this, which meant a massive cut in quality and a massive downsizing of personnel. Journalists simply do not have the ability to resist this kind of influence, as an industry, even when their livelihoods depend on it.
But, okay, I mentioned another avenue of colonialism too, and that’s cultural domination. See, advertising – especially since Edward Bernays entered the game – wants to create and reinforce the cultural values that lead to buying more product. Ads themselves are cultural products, too. Heavily pushed ones, with their main objective to be seen, and a lot of money being spent to make sure that they are.
This is both active and reactive. Products like to tie themselves to positive ideas, associate themselves with lifestyles and mindsets. We can see this taken to offensive levels with that Pepsi ad from a few years ago, but it also means that brands have immense power and influence over how new trends emerge, and what cultural values are pushed as desirable.
Which is to say, domestically, a brand that wants to associate itself with an idea of manliness often creates the idea of manliness to tie itself to. Cultural values increasingly get shaped not by any serious introspection on our parts about what values are virtuous or good, but which are the most exploitable.
This isn’t just domestic, though. Advertising is very effective at pushing Western values globally, and in countries that don’t ensure a rich dubbing industry, Western culture itself. Think about KFC leading a marketing campaign so successful that KFC is now the Christmas food of Japan.
Australia’s also a great example for this, because you can actually monitor the weakness of the Australian accent – the Americanization of it – over the last thirty years, since a law that mandated US ads had to be redubbed with Australian actors was changed. Slowly, it’s eroded a lot of unique mannerisms, and made American expressions a lot more dominant.
But it can be a lot more aggressive too, as we see in things like the Gorbachev Pizza Hut commercial.
This is largely a case for American colonialism, since it has so much global industry to push and because it has such a dominant media empire in the form of Hollywood. But because of how supply chains work – poorer countries produce raw materials which are sent to more developed countries to turn into finished goods, which are then sold back to poorer countries at much higher prices – this means that most of the products being advertised are from wealthier nations, which bring their values with them.
The reason that the cyberpunk genre is so quaintly racist towards Asia is because of this observation and this fear. Before the missing decade – a period of thirty years of economic stagnation – Japan was set to dominate the world economy. The fear was that the West would become more Asiatic as a result of this.
To me, this fear largely reads as severe projection, but that projection comes from a very true place of what has been done to the rest of the world by these levers of power.
What we have today isn’t much better. Today I stare at a line of custom-built TVs, filled with coltan mined by child labour, powered by burning coal, all in the service of showing me an ad for an SUV I can’t afford. In a space designed to leave me as bored as possible otherwise.
Advertising’s a blight, yes, but it’s also a symptom of the way we’ve organized the world. The truth is that if we just kept giving the creators of ads their existing salaries and told them not to make ads with that money, the world would be a much better place for it.
There are a lot of ways to hurt people that are profitable, and there are a lot of ways to help people that nobody is paying for. Right now, the money can only come from employers, and employers pay based on how much they think you’ll help them profit – not on how socially necessary the work is. Not on how good for other people it is.
Advertising highlights that: all ads that exist, exist at the expense of something else. Every ad you see should make you sad for what could have been, instead – every radio ad is at the expense of music, every television ad takes from a show, and every billboard is at the expense of a mural.
Something is deeply broken that allows advertising, as it exists, to be such an important keystone and gatekeeper to all the things that we really should value in our lives: art, information, expression… not profiting from genocide.
The damned thing is, we have the resources. Individually, we feel like we can’t afford to spend that much on art – games, movies – but we feel like it would be good if they got that money anyway. We want good journalism, but because it’s so important for us to be informed, we feel wrong about being made to pay for it.
Something like a universal basic income would probably do a lot to help with this – for one, artists being guaranteed a living income would mean that a lot less of them would feel like they need to take jobs that they feel are unethical. It means more journalists who don’t need corporate sponsorship, and the success of groups like bellingcat.com show the amazing work journalists can do with just time and dedication – as long as their food and rent is covered, somehow.
It means we could live more beautifully, more freely.
It just makes me sad to see so much public space monetized. Every bus and billboard. So much of the colour in my life when I go out reduces me to my wallet. And when it’s already so hard to find somewhere I can meet people and just hang out that isn’t monetized as well… it’s bleak.
It means that wherever I go, my basic humanity is constantly being reduced to my ability to consume and purchase. And as someone living with a disability that severely affects my ability to earn money, it constantly makes me feel like I don’t have value.
As it stands, of course I don’t. They’d only give me my bloody mural instead if they could find a way to make it pay out.
First thing I thought about:
i.imgur.com/ZWhmnZx.jpg
I'm scarcely being ironic here. Adverts are the most obnoxious things I have to contend with on a daily basis, because they're such manipulative trash. And they're fucking everywhere.
A major reason I will never, ever like the infantilizing influence of corporate culture: everything actually worthwhile and serious is treated as a mere tool to enable someone's delusional money fetish.
As for that Guatemala business: I'm half-not-surprised, because the forces that marketing represent are toxic trash anyway (go-to example: the sleazy, lying shit tobacco companies pulled to ensure more people got lung cancer for someone else's profit), but that is a new low. As if I needed more reasons to hate marketing.
I've studied Marketing -- only a couple classes; it was part of my business degree -- and it was interesting to see the angle they took with it. It was legitimately like -- I don't wanna say eye-opening? But it definitely explained a couple things.
When you're studying Marketing, at no point are you told that your role is to sell things. That's what I kept expecting, and that's what I was never told. It was always framed as, when you do marketing, you need to help your client. You need to serve them and find out ways to let them know you can fulfill their needs, you need to make their lives better.
This was the philosophy I had to take when studying how to sell fucking gimmicky headphones to people, for example. It's using marketing itself to teach marketing, it's the ad equivalent of the police telling you the phonecalls from the murderer are coming from inside the house. This was all a load of bullshit; at no point do we want to help the client, we want to sell them shit. If they can then throw away what we just sold 'em, and then we force them to buy a second one, that's even better. Producing waste is not a consequence, it's the intended result. Consumerism relies on obsolescence, it's the diametrical opposite to quality.
But by wrapping it all in positive messaging, by making it feel like what we're doing is to make society actively better every time we compose a jingle to tell people to buy a Toyota, you sorta like... You get that kinda hivemind feel? You accept it as truth. It stops gnawing at you, what you're doing, because of course you can't pay an artist to paint a mural on that wall! If you tell people to buy Air Jordans instead, you're helping them! You're letting them know they might need to buy Air Jordans!
It's cult-like, it's what it is. You know, consciously, that your work is just to sell shit to people, and that you're trying to fool them into giving you their money. But the positive framing is less for the clients and more for you. This shit is so wretched it had to design a way to make people stop hating themselves for participating in it, because otherwise the immorality of it would be too much. Ain't that the fucking signature of something that shouldn't exist.
5425440
I did that in my film degree from the other side - propaganda was one of my favourite topics, I talk about that a lot - and the worst side of that is what journalist Jay Rosen called "Cult of Savvy" true believers. Which is to say, the people who saw through the bullshit and liked that, enjoyed it for what it was.
There's a power high to being able to manipulate people, and advertising lets you use money as a scoreboard. A lot of the artists behind these things are more mercenary, but the executives and the designers I've seen are antipathic. "People are stupid, people are gullible, people are manipulable, and I want to be paid to prove it."
For every cult, a cult-leader.
5425440
ya know, I took the same kinda courses, and had that same sorta "what bullshit" reaction, but I never really put that extra bit of thought into why they had to sugarcoat it so hard those Ed, Edd n Eddy jawbreakers seem sane
and
stars above but it's a fuckin cycle of shit no?
I generally agree here, and I appreciate how you've tied it into the broader interconnected systems and incentives of capitalism, but what about what might be the "intended" purpose of advertisements: bringing to your awareness products that you wouldn't have known about otherwise? It's one thing to invent something in your garage that can save millions of lives/hours/dollars, and another to get people to realize that it is what they need or want. Who would have bought an iPhone if you just told them it was a portable phone+calculator+camera+browser, and it wasn't talked up to be this aspirational, revolutionary, wonder device? Obviously, most ads aren't concerned with the actual merits of their product in proportion to how much they want to sell them, but I think even in a system where we could all get what we needed, maybe ads should still exist for that reason.
The real twisted and dystopian thing about this is that the marketing mentality and its effects have permeated pretty much every aspect of western culture, American culture in particular. Our political campaigns no longer focus entirely on issues; but uses those same marketing techniques. Conspiracy theories are spread using similar techniques; and marketers pick up on that and adapt it back into product promotion; so now we have self-aware "viral marketing". Even our entertainment programs are often structured to make use of the same psychological effects that advertisers use to keep you engaged in their garbage. It's an endless feedback loop.
And the worst part of it all, is "cause marketing"; where corporations pretend to care about socio-political causes in order to target marginalized groups, aka "woke-washing". Appropriating the symbolism and language of marginalized peoples in order to make it seem that the marketers actually care about them; playing on the desperation of the oppressed to be seen and heard, and creating brand loyalty, while still engaging in policies and practices that continue to cause serious harm to the same people they have convinced to view the corporations as "supportive". It's really frightening how many groups actually buy into this stuff, with a "I don't care how bad they are otherwise, I'll take whatever support I can get" attitude; dismissing the falsity of it all just because they have this artificially-induced feeling of being a tiny bit less outcast, and ignoring the fact that these same corporations they think are supporting them are still exploiting and harming them.
Woke-washing: how brands are cashing in on the culture wars
Brilliant text!
- yeah, as someone who was reading a lot of soviet-era magazines amount of ADS in this dominant culture still jaw-dropping for me ..... Those ads interesting from historical perspective - I especially think about computer-related magazines, where you can see a lot of lost tech on display you never heard about - but otherwise ... I'm afraid your analysis is correct and this kind of feedback loop where we re-shaped again and again in most exploitable ways actually big problem.
Thanks for writing down all of this.
You are making a much bigger deal out of this than it is in reality. I absolutely agree with your points in regards to false advertisement and guerilla marketing - both types should be eliminated or at least tightly controlled. But in the general sense, advertisement connects producers offering products or services with potential buyers. It moves the economy forwards. And the money invested into advertisements usually provides a positive return on increase of sales (otherwise no one would use them - capitalism tends to sort that out), so that is not wasted money at all. Its a good investment.
My friend runs a small company offering engineering solutions. They were struggling with customers until they started advertising their services in Google Ads and Facebook. Now they are a successful team with many customers. When my girlfriend was organizing a dance ball last year we were putting up flyers and posters all around the city to make sure enough people were informed about who actually were interested. So are all of us monsters trying to reduce people to robots, trying to manipulate them into something they dont want? I'm sure a lot of people has seen those ads without any need to come dancing or purchase an engineering service.
People advertise because it works and allows them to broaden their target audience. On your point of manipulation: if you've ever been to a market, have you heard all the sellers loudly declaring their produce to be the sweetest/most healthiest/cheapest? Should we arrest them for false advertising? All products cannot be the best at the same time, so some of them are "manipulating" customers. TV adverts stating their products are the best are the same (of course if they mislead the customers with false data that's a different issue and should be heavily punished). It is a free market for competition - the ones who put up the best arguments for their products gain the customers' trust. Of course they will embellish. Whether people believe that buying chocolate scented candles are a sure way to avoid family arguments over Christmas is entirely up to their own feelings and personalities (and in some cases, intelligence). For some of them it might work as a placebo and actually succeed.
I get that some adverts are really irritating (I myself cannot use YouTube until AdBlocker is installed), and some of those are even morally questionable and should be pursued by the law. But calling the full advertisement industry thrash and inhuman just because of a small margin is just radical generalization. I dare say that maybe this very website would die off without ads revenue as well. So lets try not antagonizing people where it is not warranted (there have been enough of that in 2020) and move on.
5425461
5425490
I can't think of a single "good" thing ads are supposed to do - including "let people know something exists" - that wouldn't be better done by some publicly consultable neutral, impartial notification system or catalogue. Excusing adverts by saying "Of course they're going to bullshit" is a big part of the problem.
Loudly intruding on people with self-interested spurious claims is not - and never has been - a virtue worth defending.
5425493
What I'm saying is that not ALL of them are doing it with malicious intent and do not deserve the above rant. See my two examples in my previous comment.
5425494
You'd be amazed what people can do without a shred of malicious intent.
And for the record, I read your full comment before replying, thanks. The fact that street sellers also bullshit does not excuse even half the self-interested sleaze being discussed here, to say nothing of the false equivalency of comparing that to any old notification process.
5425440
Oh, yeah, positive thinking! I for example feels like all my language for expressing ...anything important was stolen and also turned 180 away from meaning I wish to put into it - because nearly all expressions already found and used for something less than noble :/
For example, when I hear word 'creator' as used today for labeling youtube stars .. :/ Unfortunately there is also peer-for-peer transmission of some values - people eagerly create something 'in advertizment format' because this gives them attention ...at cost of losing important message, or at cost of spreading less-than-above-neutral fastfood for the mind ....
because whole effect is tied to how (modern) humans work in general ..it leaves very little room for anything else :/
And also whole , um, 'kid's programming' (I always thought this term a bit more sinister than its everyday use ..). In attempt at make kids feel safe a lot of complexity stripped from shows ... I mean, yeah, may be at 8 years old we definitely not prepared for whole depth of problems without obvious solutions - but not even saying a word about negative effects of human civilization TODAY sounds like serious step back (based on grand total of one series I heard at friend's home).
Also, people being so sure something like theater actually contributing to more kind humans ..it may happen, but sadly not at scale it currently needed :/
People today (at least in big cities like Saint-Petersburg?) like to think they are 'good enough' and really not looking forward for examining this belief with possibility of less than amazing discovery ..:/
We all knew that advertising was a special kind of awful, but most of us still underestimate it in this regard. I'm not even disappointed by the number of people murdered over bananas, because anybody who expects better of corporations is delusional.
Some days I feel that self-aware viral marketing is more cynical and insidious than 9/10 doctors proclaiming that it’s Kool™2smoke. The latter is a straightforward lie and can be dealt with through some combination of false advertising laws and pulling the medical licenses of doctors who promote junk science. There often is no discernable lie with the viral stunts: rather than pay a billboard to pollute the city, you create a trainwreck and let the populace gawk on their own free will.
For other English-speaking countries that have/had laws requiring dubbing of American/British exports, how popular was buying or pirating the original because the audience wanted the real thing instead of the shitty home team? It gives me echoes of the #1 propaganda keeping the working class from supporting unions: the idea that union rules require you to stand about for half an hour while you wait for someone from the electrician’s union to arrive.
If you want yet another example of advertising being as supportive of good storytelling as a noose, look no farther than the show that all users of this website are ostensibly fans of.
5425440
Selling advertising services to a client is exactly the same as being a consultancy: your entire business model is based on selling more consultancy services. Who cares if your ads actually work on the public so long as you can fleece the C-suite for a renewal of your contract. Society is better with ineffectual ads, after all.
5425490
Instilling a general paranoia among the populace that all ads are fake would do far more benefit than attempting to quantify and a crackdown on exactly what counts as “false advertising”.
RE: this site wouldn’t exist without ads, the pollution of the internet is the result of a lack of suitable micropayment options. Money transfer companies charge fees that remove all the value for purchases under $5. I support the idea of UBI to return the online world back to being a gift economy: you put your work out to the world because you want others to enjoy (or be horrified at) it, not for cash rewards.
5425440
Speaking as a marketing major in college... yeah. All of that is true. And the fun side effect is that, for four years of college and three years specifically focusing on my major path, I gained absolutely no practical skills whatsoever. I learned how to network, how to influence people into taking a point of view that benefitted me, how to "manage" people who were supposed to do the actual work--and sure, those are useful skills, depending on what you intend to do with them. But then I graduated with absolutely nothing that would make me attractive to companies hiring for entry-level roles, because I guess the assumption was that if my family was well-off enough to send me to this college and this program in particular, surely I had connections good enough to walk into some basic job that would get me started (and technically I did, just in the wrong industry and for a company that was swirling the drain before I got there).
I got my first dependable "marketing" job almost entirely because of the writing and editing skills I developed completely separately from college, and now writing and editing is all I do to bring money in. That's what making the "practical" choice to major in "Getting A Job After College Doing Something I'll Probably Hate" got me, and boy does it irk me to this day.
I both agree and disagree with your statement. First a simple point. Before Capatlism, before Mercantlism, before the Roman Empire, since products have existed there has been advertisements for it. There was a ad on, I think, pypirus dated, I don't know when, in Ancient Egyptian history that promises the sellers product would bring back the buyers hair said to work "every time."
The issue with today is that it has become alot more effective, you can do more than just pay people to talk to their neighbors or write pamphlets(expensive before the printing press) to the small amount of literate population. It is far more effective now but it has existed for a very long time.
But the second disagreement is art has rarely been just for arts sake. See all those great sculptures in the MET from Antiquity? Some wealthy person or the state paid money to the artist to send a message.
There may have been a few creative liberties the artist could take and of course just like today independently wealthy artists or artists whose work would always sell could make whatever they wanted. But these people are few, and many of the works were mass produced.
The modern day is not a destruction of art. In fact more than any other time it is an opportunity for art. Note I am not saying you are wrong about the effect of advertising on art, but never in human history, not even in the Renesaince, has art been independent. Now is the only time you can say it is, with patreon, and even the ability to have your art be seen through Twitter as you are working at McDonald's. (While I have been talking about visual arts except for a few exceptions this also is true of literary arts as well)
5425490
I agree that advertising isn't inherently evil: In many ways it's quite useful, it certainly helps pay for my radio listening experience in my car and sometimes helps me find products I'm looking for.
However, pursuing advertising too far, like the over-pursuit of anything else, can quickly become harmful. Lack of restraint and operation on too large a scale can change something from beneficial to toxic, whether you're talking about anything from medicine to industry. And there are definitely cases where advertising is allowed to run too rampant.
Propaganda has always been powerful, and advertising is just propaganda in service of greed. I believe it is greed that underlies the real evil of advertising, colonialism, wealth inequality, and so many of the other ills that afflict the modern world. Advertising is comorbidity, not the inciting illness.
With that said, I will admit to working for marketing departments of small companies by producing video, web, and print ads. As someone mentioned above, I did approach the job as a way to make potential customers aware of the goods being offered, and helping to establish "brand recognition" rather than a method to deceive or encourage the customers to buy something they didn't need. I think the (admittedly small) companies I worked for were honestly running their marketing in this way. They produced specialized medical products that weren't on the same level as beer or uselessly bloated vehicles.
Then my major client was bought by a big multinational. I was offered a job in that corporation's marketing department. After a dozen or so zoom meeting with them, I backed away in horror. Everything you said about advertising is true when it's implemented as designed.
Fortunately, I'm in a situation where I can afford to be unemployed.
5425685
It's true that advertising has always been a part of human civilization, but that's a bit like someone saying, "People have always murdered each other," while grinning maniacally and holding an atomic bomb. It's become a matter of effectiveness. The modern, massive scale of advertising has empowered it beyond belief.
5426032
Thats true, but my main point was about the art. That art has never been independent with the possible exception of the modern day. Advertisment didn't destroy art because there was nothing to destroy. For the vast majority of what we call art(that is visual art) it has been created not from the heart and soul of the artists but from what the person paying for wanted. Even literary arts that are cheaper to produce were often created by the orders of a patreon. Hamlet was payed for by the British Crown, The Aneied was payed for by Augustus, true The Divine Comedy was probably from Dante's ideas (I'm not sure thats true but because of how self-insert it is I think it is true), but thats because it is much cheaper to write a epic than it is to sculpt a statue, or even paint a beautiful painting. While art supplies have become cheaper it is only with Patreon artists can now go to the larger public which before could only pay them with their taxes. Even without Patreon, Instagram has art being able to be seen by everyone. This is a radical change for the world of visual arts, in the same way I am sure(though I havn't reserched) the printing press was a radical change in the world of Literary Arts.
5426081
Yes, that is a good point about art. It has always been driven and funded by wealthy people. Only modern tech allows independent artists to sell the volume needed to make a living. (And they usually have "day jobs!")
5425563
- isn't it called 'critical thinking'? Every bit of info you can get can be ..not very accurate, outdated, not applicable, with some unintended (or intended) side effects .....
Problem is (as far as i understand it) - if you basically try to live by this standard it will be mentally uneasy (thinking, esp. critical thinking takes quite a lot of time and energy) and still you will be forced to make some ...educated guess at what might be not so bad. I think modern humans face same dilemma - they learn quite fast ads are overly-optimistic, but by how much they overoptimistic is usually unknown, until someone tries this ... But then user-reported rating also said to be not very useful today because humans not very serious about all this or also because whole rating system often tweaked by provider ...
In general - it seems main problem today not existence of this phenomenon as something unique novel to our era - but just how unstoppable it become. How fast those changes come today
On arts in general ... I tend to be very afraid of hyperreality - on general grounds of 'reality vs unaccurate reality', no amount of fine-tuned art can compensate for lack of social support or other, more material things .... Reality ALWAYS win, even if after some time ...
5426577
RE: critical thinking
I can remember where I first encountered this idea, but the hypothesis is that one of the driving factors behind the popularity of fake news is half-taught media criticism. No one is so persuasive as the first person to convince you that you’ve been lied to. As you say, later on, taking “trust no one” as the literal truth of all aspects of life is untenable. You either take an educated guess or simply pick the lie you enjoy most.
RE: reviews
I’m about halfway through the article I linked. Each online rewiew is totally useless for at least one of the following reasons
"Their business model is to generate attention – your attention."
Douglas Adams commented on that once, I believe... let's see if I can find a quote...
Ah:
https://archive.gyford.com/1997/wired-uk/1.01/adams.html
Looking back at that article, some of its predictions seem pretty accurate, others, ah... a bit optimistic. Still, I do believe I recall finding the insight quoted above interesting when I first heard it, many years ago in The Salmon of Doubt.
"In this way, ‘correct’ gender norms are both created and reinforced at the youngest ages."
I'm not sure I'd even use "'correct'" there. The advertising companies, the machines made of people and designed to maximize profit, have no moral opinions or beliefs on gender roles. If the target market separated gender completely from sex and based it on the color of shirt one was wearing, the machine wouldn't care even if the cogs' views didn't change (and if the individual cogs object, but not enough of them do to stop the machine, the machine replaces them). The gender norms aren't "correct" or "incorrect, there just what happened to be there already in that particular market area, and the machine decided it was slightly more profitable to reinforce them than change them.
And I'm not sure whether that's better or worse than things like Henry Ford ruining his rubber business by trying to make the foreign workers from a foreign culture in a foreign land and climate live like Good Christian Americans, but it sure isn't good, I'd say.
(...Actually, quite possibly worse, at least than that particular example: after all, when Ford failed and abandoned the project, he left, as far as I recall, and let the former workers be. The advertising machines, on the other hand, are still profitable and thus still willing and able to purchase ample blood to oil their bearings.)
"Right now, the biggest think tanks and lobbyists pushing for heavier sanctions on Iran – on pushing for war with Iran – are from the Wonderful Company, and their main goal is to try to maintain a global monopoly on pistachios."
...
[facehoofs]
Oh, if only I could find that ridiculous.
"but advertising plays a large role in how you’re made to feel about these wars, and how much you get to know about them"
Yeah, even today, I think a problematically large portion of the American public might go "Wait a minute..." if we were openly declaring war with "Well, BigCo needs Countrystan taken care of to avoid a 0.5% loss next quarter, and Guns Inc. is charging the taxpayer exorbitantly for products that barely work but is giving all the right kickbacks, so we need to buy more of them. So we're going to go in, break some stuff, ruin the local economy, kill a bunch of lower-class American soldiers and a bunch of the natives, and maybe destabilize the whole region and really help a bunch of terrorist organizations' recruitment, but some upper-class Americans will get a bit richer from it so it's okay."
Much easier to sell "Countrystan is literally run by Darth Vader. Do you want to support Darth Vader? Er, when not buying super-cool and reasonably priced Darth Vader action figures? Anyway, point is, we have to go in and save the poor people of Countrystan from Darth Vader, no matter the cost! And if you're still not convinced, just remember that Darth Vader is eeeevil and expansionist and will be coming for your children and dog soon!!!".
...Why, yes, I am a bit cynical about the way my country's been using its military for decades now, why do you ask?
Not familiar with "that Pepsi ad" and, from the way you describe it, not eager to click that link either.
"and every billboard is at the expense of a mural"
Or even just a view of something already there, no extra time or expense to create it at all.
- Ogden Nash
"for one, artists being guaranteed a living income would mean that a lot less of them would feel like they need to take jobs that they feel are unethical"
But don't know know that, if they aren't threatened with homelessness and starvation, artists and writers will just sit around watching TV instead of creating? Er, no, I don't see any vast quantities of fanworks across multiple media filling the internet and made not only without expectation of payment but often in spare time left after paying jobs, what are you talking about? Nope. Artists only ever work at metaphorical or literal gunpoint, obvious economic fact.
"and the success of groups like bellingcat.com show the amazing work journalists can do with just time and dedication – as long as their food and rent is covered, somehow"
...Er. Well, I don't know either way and don't want to get into an argument about it, particularly given that lack of knowledge, but I'm not sure about using them as an example here given some of the doubts that have been raised about that "somehow" in their case.
Anyway, thanks for the blog post.
edit:
Er, sorry for the rant...s. As mentioned, biiit of cynicism on this and related topics. Kind of got going there, I think.
5425685
5426081
As a former art major (I dropped it and switch to comp sci so I could be employable); this is spot on. Art has always been commercialized, typically commission-based (something familiar to a whole lot of Brony artists); or it has served as propaganda -- political, religious, or both. L'art pour l'art is very much an invention of the modern world, starting with the advent of industrialism, and dependent on the expansion of middle-class wealth and the concept of "leisure time".
But even then, it has rarely ever met that standard; and continues to exist primarily for either commercial or propagandist utility.
I also read 'Against wages', but I can't comment there ("Internal server error" ???) , so i put my pony comment here
--
Well, biggest set of questions seems to be revolving around our current mass psychological state, too. Humans today hardly can keep some connections while swimming against the current. So more voluntary associations remain underpowered and not live as some example of different social atmosphere for long enough?
Poor people only can do some collective help (like, not asking friends who are already poor for money ‘market’ seems to dictate, share food/place to live ..), biggest problems remain around, and there is question of trust, and broken trust (if you trust your friend, yet he or she actually grab somewhat more than you can handle, and this process repeats itself or drags on for some time …. you become more and more reluctant to help others, as time go on.….)
It seems our ‘do as majority’ type of behavior combined with poor connectivity outside of forced contexts and poor ability to detect those psychological mines in everyday life (and also installed optimism, overconfidence, lack of critical thinking…) actually dooms us :( We can't overcome this by small ‘family’-sized groups, we hardly can do bigger associations without re-creating some of those problems associated with big unvoluntary orgs, we as majority hardly have power to steer in different direction, often can generate a lot of optimistic thinking like ‘this is not dangerous, we will overcome this problem’ - while reality tell us we not usually good enough yet for overcoming those kind of problems, where our psy comfort collides with our more long-term life as it given …..
Model where humans en masse just overcome their psychology obviously do not work. But how to change this?
And yet we all gathered here out of love for an advert, and from that flowed how much art that will never profit it's makers?