- puts flashing colored boxes in front of our faces at any possible opportunity
- requires us to click through multiple popups to access almost any for-profit website
- has normalized the act of wasting human life at a mass scale by injecting multi-minute time-wasting sessions in activities
"How hustle culture took over"? It's a hustle by default. I'd call it a swindle.
A programmer programs, but one who programs isn't always a programmer...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZbwTCrnktY - Cassidy - I'm a hustler
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv6CbP4kVno - Lil Wayne - Hustler Muzic
Technically I believe it often meant any odd job to make money whether legal, illegal or a grey area. So selling weed, shoveling a driveway, and busking where you could get kicked out at worst all count.
If you spend the majority of your time working to abuse your fellow man, I don't respect that, and see no reason why I should.
That is not, and should not be accepted as, a "normal life".
Advertising companies are a disease.
https://www.guffo.in/lifting-corporate-veil-circumstances-ca... )
The difficulty here is holding CEOs responsible for crimes with "piercing the corporate veil" is holding a high level, powerful decision-maker, with options, responsible... rather than a person who might be trying to support 5 kids and some elderly parents, and couldn't just choose to sweep the street instead of working at the Ministry of Information for 6 figures.
Oh, please. Someone setting up a targeted Facebook or Google Ads campaign is not 'abusing their fellow man'.
If you're a summer intern, sure, you can go home and feel good about getting extra credit. If you're the CEO who pushes dark patterns and chooses to sacrifice security for profit, you should toss-and-turn at night. But at which point can we say, "you, the person who knowingly implemented this piece of shit pattern that enables malware to be delivered straight into my machine, did a bad thing, and are personally culpable"?
Unless the summer intern didn't accomplish a single thing, maybe not. I would say that you are guilty if you ordered something bad to be done, or carried out a bad order, and an accomplice to the guilty if you supported the actions of someone who was ordering or carrying out something bad.
I don't think anyone should have force used against them (e.g. prison time, fines).
However, it's not only completely fair, but inevitable, that someone's actions influence how they're seen by others.
If your job involves being an asshole, then it's completely unsurprising that people will see you as an asshole. Because you are one. The fact someone pays you to do it is immaterial. You're not an actor at work, your actions have consequences in the world we all live in.
The advertising industry isn't the way it is because it has a will of its own. It ended up like this because a bunch of people shaped it to be like this, and even more people agreed that this is how things should be.
I can understand people who are just starting out in this activity getting a free pass -- they don't really know how things are going in this field, so it makes sense to be a little lax on accountability.
But after that? Why avoid responsibility after that? Or is "making a difference" something we're only allowed to say if you're making a good difference in the world?
> People who work in advertising have many career choices at their disposal
This is a rhetorical trap. If someone has no options left but to abuse their fellow man in order to survive - that doesn't make it respectable.
Inevitable - sure. Something we should tolerate? No, we should call it out, and work to eliminate the circumstances that lead to that sort of thing happening.
Respectable as an activity, no, but understandable -- yes. From the comfort of your own home after a light lunch, it's easy to say that you should refuse to participate in the advertising industry, even if that means starving on the streets. The people who choose advertising over seeing their kids grow up without a childhood certainly don't deserve the kind of wrath and disrespect that we (justly!) show to those who engage in this dubious kind of activity so that they can get a bigger yacht.
I don't think this sort of ad hominem attack is productive; it instantly puts people on guard and stifles debate.
I may be mistaken, but as far as I'm aware, you know nothing about me or my background.
That out of the way; I think the idea that people work in advertising because otherwise they'd be homeless and starve is a falsehood. It might be true in some cases, but there are literally millions of counterexamples.
Edit: other than that, I obviously agree that's an extreme (and rare) case. I just want to emphasize that it's worth keeping the exceptions in mind. The advertising industry is what it is, and everyone who chooses to work in it is responsible for what they do -- but that's true of every mentally-able adult, that doesn't mean everyone is also truly free to make a choice.
On the latter point - I strongly disagree that people don't have a choice, but I think this is outside of the scope of the comment thread.
It's the sort of thing I wouldn't mind discussing over a pint rather than in front of a screen. :P
1. Have less annoying ads that respect the user.
2. Charge money.
3. Some novel funding model that's unexplored because obnoxious ads dominate everything and suck all the air out of the room.
1. That's fair, but it takes time and talent to create these.
2. Clearly that isn't working; see almost any news site in existence
3. This is a hope, and a nice one. https://scroll.com/
My local bus stop has adverts (London).
My local metro station does too (London).
They're all over the roads (UK).
They're in pubs (UK).
They're on paid television services (Sky).
They're on paid programs (Windows 10).
They're shown before movies (cinema, UK).
Advertising is _everywhere_, in paid services, unpaid services, whatever.
Unless I'm in my own, or a friend's private home I could probably find an advert by spinning my head around.
Ask yourself - why haven't you included an advert on your comment? You could, and it'd allow you to comment on HN more, right?
Now, if you made an argument that the entire structure is screwed up and the people at the top deserve to make less and therefore not needing as much cash flow and therefore we should be able to cut the ads, THEN I might agree...
I don't believe that my train or bus would cost substantially more without the advertising.
And even if it did, it's just an internalization of costs.
The advertising (if it works) pulls money in through a side channel (someone sees an ad and later buys a thing).
It makes far more sense to just pay for the bus.
Other examples, like ads at the side of the road, don't even pay for anything. Driving along the road, I see an ad in a farmer's field. I'm not using that field in any meaningful sense.
edit: I actually looked up the transport example.
Transport for London had approximately a 1:20 ratio of advertising to fare revenue last year.
So, I'd have to pay approximately 5% more, or 7 pence per bus fare, to not have adverts plastered on the inside and outside of buses, tubes, station platforms, corridors within stations, and probably various roads under TfL authority as well.
I think the world in which we pay 7 pence more for bus fare and have nice artwork on the bus or something instead of hair loss adverts that call us ugly balds is better.
Even bought the Kindle with special offers. Preferred it to the one I have without.
I reckon if we ever get to that point, by then the pint alone might be 12 quid though. Soz.
Berlin just has... clean empty walls on the metro. I mean yeah there's advertising and particularly crappy screens on the actual trains but it's so much better.
It seems like the future is getting a free refridgerator that you pay for by watching an ad before you can take out the milk. (Oops, did I just spoil someone's startup?)
This advertising model hasn't been around for very long. It's baffling how suddenly nobody can even conceive of how the world would work without malicious advertising and culture-wide psyops digging into everyone's brains. The advertising model is one of the worst inventions in history.
The problem is that the perception of the advertising industry at a larger scale is that it's a blood sucking industry with no thought for anything other than taking the attention of everyone away from what they were looking for and towards what the industry has been paid to help sell.
It's ironic, I think, that the advertising industry is perceived so badly.
How could the advertising industry market itself? "Our knowledge of psychologically attacking the human mind is second-only to the CIA, but we're catching up!"
If you were to say working in advertising Girl Scout Cookies in Cannabis Advocate magazines you would get fired so very quickly even if it boosted their sales substantially because of the controversy.
It is part of how Google got their good reputation in the first place - they gave the people what they wanted and were loved for it. Obviously it has greyed over time since.
I find this comment fascinating, in that:
1. If more of the 'ad targets' (ie. consumers) knew this, then it wouldn't work so well.
2. The advertising industry, by keeping their clients happy, are treating the customers of their clients as a resource to be squeezed wherever and whenever possible, and the clients are obviously fine with this.
3. Point #2 results in the advertising industry being a lightning rod for angry anti-consumer sentiment, allowing the ad industry clients to remain relatively clean.
4. It would be 'good / right' if the ad-industry clients that sell the various products being shoved in our faces on most of the flat-surfaces to be found on the Internet could be held to account just as much as the ad industry itself, then the ad industry would have more reason to drag itself out of the sewer. See point #1.
Edited to add: @Nasrudith, just to clarify, your comment is a great point, and succinct. Well said.
Advertising is much worse on the internet because it's a lot easier to propagate, not being constrained by time slots in a broadcast. That means that an overwhelming amount of trash is allowed to survive, drowning out a lot of the things that are worthwhile and building up an audience that is low-value and perhaps even dangerous to society in some regards; I would argue such for the amount of "viral" tripe that sways how people view politics, science, religion, etc.
The guy who thought of that deserves "Advertiser of the Year" award and a "Crime against Humanity" charge.