We're constantly getting better at it; who knows what path this will lead us down. I suspect it might not be the one we had wished for.
There's a lot of talk about what impact mass automation will have on our society, and what kind of work people will have once they're replaced by machines. This is always framed in such a way as if it's a problem we're about to face, but it looks like it's actually a trend that's been going on for decades (at least). And the answer is that, unless there is an effort to direct these people towards productive ends, many will continue to flow to these parasitic sectors.
Citizens decide where to spend their money -- at least the part that the government doesn't tax and spend for them -- and all of these industries you name exist and pay well because people value them and choose to spend their money on them.
The people running government are (in most places) elected by the people but that is affected by political manipulation, gerrymandering and politicians often represent the moneyed interests that got them into power.
And there's nothing to stop people buying diet soda.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-diet-farm-subsidie...
Why do we need the govt making cheap unhealthy stuff even cheaper?
For credit cards, maybe he meant that in some countries, where individuals cannot default, banks are comfortable taking too much risk and advertise credits aggressively. I have personally witnessed several victims of this (yes, people can be dumb).
Wrt "car dealerships and (most) sales people", it is probably not affecting the individual so much, but if you look closer at "enterprise sales" and government spending, you will certainly notice some "interesting" practices. However, I think that this is a lot harder to solve than the other case above, because it is not so directly aimed at the masses.
I also don't like what they choose, and I don't disagree with any of your suggestions; I think these would all be good ideas. But you're asking for less freedom, not more.
That's off the top of my head. Taxation is control. And the wealthy & powerful have undue influence over who chooses what gets taxed - using the above methods I referenced.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
[2] https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/small-business-taxes/bu...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/cafe-lo...
Governments have similar competition problems as individuals and companies. If taxes are raised too much, the people with money will take it to other countries with more lenient tax systems.
And unpopular policies will cause other political parties to seize the power from their promoters. Money and advertisement also plays a part in campaigns.
Finally, if you try to extract competition from politics, you get a tyranny.
People on HN likes very much to write comments with the "we as a society" or "we as a species" or "we should do that", but there is really no such we.
It's almost criminal the way we propagate the narrative that advertising is ineffectual. Of course, if it were, there wouldn't be so much money in it.
So it's very hard for me to take seriously people who believe in consumer choice.
No one would argue that businesses spend a lot of money on targeted advertising, and targeting is something that marketers are constantly trying to refine.
What is targeting? Showing things to the people who are most likely to buy them.
In the world you're describing, targeting wouldn't exist, because the mind control techniques of advertising have made free will a thing of the past, and people will just buy whatever the all powerful advertising agencies tell them to buy.
I think his point is, these industries are not valuable to people; they are just aggressive at extract wealth from other people. In net, they have a negative value (from his perspective) and thus society will be better without them.
When you characterise them as 'not valuable to people', you're making a prescriptive moral judgement (and not one I necessarily disagree with), as opposed to a descriptive observation of where free agents choose to spend their money.
I don't drink soda or eat highly processed food, I don't have a credit card, and I didn't buy my car from a dealership. But the fact that many people choose to spend their money on all these things tells me that those people do see value in them, and I don't think my preferences are right and theirs are wrong.
You're giving them way too much credit. Do you notice how the world is full of failed advertising campaigns? How the world is full of failed companies and failed products that the evil geniuses in advertising weren't able to make people buy?
There's a world of difference between 'we can use some principles from psychology to try to exploit people's fears and make them more interested in our product' and 'our unlimited powers of persuasion make free will an illusion'. And despite the hype, most big-data, machine learning, 'downloading your thoughts from Facebook before you've even had them'-style targeted advertising amounts to showing you ads for the thing that you just bought.
That's the problem, to a large extent we don't because of the pervasive manipulation the advertising industry does to us, the industries reason for existence is literally undermine our free will.
Ah, a clearly well-rationed article is at foot. Here’s a hint, if someone isn’t able to model free things in their understanding of capitalist systems, they don’t understand them enough to critique them.
Anyway, the rest of that “critique” isn’t actually a critique. It’s just goal post shifting to the point where it assumes socialist systems by nature have perfect demand discovery mechanisms (none of which are alluded to) and can never produce a surplus. Conveniently, it follows that clearly socialist systems are perfectly efficient and do not allow surpluses because they have this neat built in mechanism of perfect demand discovery.
So it’s “not true socialism” if there are any inefficiencies in food production, energy production, etc because “true socialism” has a mechanism by which everyone gets exactly what they need.
Did someone inform the author of this that such a mechanism has never existed and the most efficient mechanism we have discovered so far is markets?
This thread originated in a discussion of the detriments of advertising, I would remind you. The "markets" we're currently employing to "discover demand" find greater profit in engendering it.
Another way would be to say that effective government ensures that the rule of law is maintained, that contracts are enforced, that the environment is protected, that trade is conducted efficiently etc ..
Granted, none of the above are absolute, some governments will do better than others and some will abuse their power.
What is the alternative? Somalia in the late nineties? All government functions handled by corporations? something else?
The truth is the government is a social contract designed to actually protect people from violence. Yeah, it taxes people. But it also protects them from mobsters and racketeers and is at least supposed to offer a chance to poor people. A libertarian paradise dooms the poor to never be able to afford education and basic necessities unless they sacrifice through slave wages. In a libertarian paradise, the rich run amok, and children of rich people start with an insane advantage that no amount of smartness or slaving away will ever erase. And no, by and large, people are not Howard Roarks in hiding. Most people are within 2 sigma of the mean--i.e. not geniuses. In a situation with no social contract, the 5 sigmas both in terms of intelligence and aggressiveness prey on and suppress the rest. Inequality skyrockets. It ultimate results in violent revolutions, like France. In short, libertarianism is madness.
In general it'd be great to have a discussion about these things, but since this comment is just some non-thinking spouting of absurdity, I'll just leave it here. I already said too much.
But your example of the French Revolution detracts from your argument, because that occurred in the context of a strong monarchist government, not a libertarian dystopia.
Seriously, this is total nonsense and it frustrates me to even read such a wild comparison.
Did you see this? -
> Crossfit, Inc. Suspends Use Of Facebook And Associated Properties - May 23, 2019
https://www.crossfit.com/battles/crossfit-suspends-facebook-...
You claim sales and advertising are parasitic, but what is the alternative? A central planning committee that decides what products we can buy?
The value of soda for example is that some people like the taste and sensation. It brings them a little bit of joy. Not everything has to be coldly utilitarian.
Remove the sugar from soda and you have awful-tasting water.
Sugary drinks are no better than cigarettes, and the people pushing them know exactly what they are doing and what they are exploiting.
And anyway, value is determined by the buyer. You can't say as an individual that something has no value to society.
I disagree. You can make anything seem valuable by defining value in the most cynically narrow terms possible like that.
By that same logic, heroin has great value in society, and hitmen and we shouldn't be trying to stop these things. However we do, because the popularity of the product is no measure of its contribution to society.
Continue on with that logic and literally everything is valuable, making it a meaningless distinction.
> You can't say as an individual that something has no value to society.
I can and did. It's an opinion not an assertion.
If you are creating a need that didn't already exist, like targeting people's predisposition to addictions to substances like sugar, or nicotine, or heroin, then I posit that you have created no real value whatsoever.
You just don't enjoy soda. There's nothing wrong with other people enjoying it. Either in moderation, or irresponsibly in our opinion, which is their own business. Other people don't enjoy music and art and should probably think they should be done away with you like you with soda.
So no, that's not my logic at all. There was already a need for art and music. There wasn't already a need for Coca Cola and Lucky Strikes.
Soda manufacturers include this information because they are required to by law. It is in their interests to hide this information from you.
Lobbysists for junk food manufacturers are always hard at work fighting against these kinds of regulations, because you knowing what is in their product is harmful to their bottom line, because they are selling you what amounts to a mild poison.
People fought to get this labelling required by law. These companies aren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
> They are optimised to be as delicious as possible I'm sure, but singers also optimise their songs to be as pleasing as possible so you'll buy their next album.
The difference being my health isn't harmed by a pop singer trying to improve their voice. Nor are they creating a need or addiction to music that didn't already exist. There has always been a need for music among humans. Even tribal war drums count as music.
I'll concede that most pop music is lowest-common denominator crap manufactured and marketed to as as wide a demographic as possible for no other reason than profit, but really, pop music is such a small part of the entire musical landscape.
Even if it were, what damage to people is pop music causing? What addictions is it fostering?
You could debate about the dumbing down of music that manufactured pop music encourages, but we are talking about actual harm caused by fostering addictions here, which things like sodsa and cigarettes do, as a result of their being addictive as well as damaging to health.
The pop music analogy isn't a very good one, because music doesn't damage your health by encouraging your addiction to substances harmful to your health.
Bah I think you're showing yourself to be a cynic and a snob with statements like this. You don't like that music so it's 'lowest-common denominator crap' and you can't see any purpose for it apart from profit, no matter if other people chose to enjoy it.
It's an actual thing that has happened.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/is-pop-mus...
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/jul/27/pop-music-soun...
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
You didn't address the point of my post though, the pop music analogy was just an example you used that I felt didn't work very well because music, even pop music, doesn't harm your health or exploit addictions in the ways many advertised products do.
I say that the caffeine is in there solely to keep people addicted to it even more.
Part of being an enjoyable experience - not literally part of being delicious but part of being a sensation people enjoy.
You aren't making any decisions when you enjoy soda: a large corporation paid some people to conduct studies and ensure that you can't not enjoy it on a basal level.
Of course it's not bliss - it's not good for you in anyway. In fact we know - completely - that it has massive long term deleterious effects on your overall happiness - because it's not optimized to actually "make you happy" - it's optimized to keep you drinking it.
Quite frankly, advertising is psychic violence, and you can't escape it. Exploiting people's psychology to consolidate their resources for yourself is tantamount to theft. When men do it to women to push them to sell sex, we call it "pimping", and judge it as a completely reprehensible, unredeemable act. Of course your general well-being is diminished by a barrage of messaging encouraging you in every conceivable way, that the only road to satiety is to act against your own self-interest. How could that not totally fuck with you?
Spending your time coming up with more devious mechanisms, and ways to decrease the escapablity of said mechanisms is a fucking unseemly way to behave, as an individual. As a species, it's absolutely tragic that all those brilliant people doing it, can't break from the comfort of those fat paychecks and find something better to do with their time on Earth... Myself included.
We all have to stop focusing on the short term quarterly profits and growth and zoom out and see the big picture. Not only is software eating the world, but it's appropriating it for a low kind of social programming--turning us all into zombies. Software wants to mediate all of our experiences as humans, and advertising is right there with it, trying to interpose to do, as you wrote, "psychic violence" in little drips throughout our daily lives.
It's amazing that we let our minds be run by the shit in computers. (including all of this! haha!)
... Which is tantamount to theft.
Money is your score at the game of life.
Maybe the answer is to stop treating life as a game..
That being said, I cannot really think of a better system than money at our current scale.
In the saddest and emptiest of lives, sure.
Living only to increase the number on your bank balance seems like a terrible waste of life to me.
Not always, even when it does, it's only up to a point.
I actually think a large number of societal issues today are stemming from people's inability to think rationally for themselves. Things like fake news, being vulnerable to advertising, taking bad deals like minimum wage etc. If someone were able to think rationally and into the future to figure out, "4 years from now if I choose this [politician, car, job]" I'll be as bad or worse off, then those things would die out for want of funding...
You might as well complain that water does not flow upwards.
Here's the thing...
I'd taken quite a lot of advertising courses during my education, and among the many truly scary things that I learned in them, one stood out above all others:
Knowing how advertising manipulates you, and even noticing it in the moment that it's happening, in no way makes it less effective. People who claim that they aren't affected by advertising are incorrect.
Nobody can just decide not to reward advertising, short of keeping a list of all the advertising you're exposed to (and are you sure you can spot it all?) and refusing to buy any product or service that appears on that list.
Is there any evidence for such a claim? I've heard people say this again and again, but I can't see how this is true based on myself. Sure, I've been guided to a product based on advertisement once in my life, but everything else I've ignored obvious advertisements. I can't say that I haven't been swayed by an advertisement that's masked as a review, but that's divorced from this I think.
>Nobody can just decide not to reward advertising, short of keeping a list of all the advertising you're exposed to (and are you sure you can spot it all?) and refusing to buy any product or service that appears on that list.
But buying something that's advertised doesn't mean you're rewarding the advertisement. If you would buy that product regardless, then even if the advertisement stopped (or never existed) you'd still buy it.
This is why there are a set of different approaches that have been shown to be effective (given names like "the bandwagon" -- which covers the group of people who can be swayed by convincing them that everyone else is into something). A comprehensive campaign will have different ads for the same thing, each using a different approach, to maximize the number of people they affect.
By the way, if you ever want a deep-dive into this stuff without actually taking college courses on it, my recommendation is to find a copy of guidelines provided to car dealerships. Those things are very comprehensive, unabashed, and to-the-point.
A similar story applies to other things that we consider so normal today that we don't even think about them, like deodorants, women shaving their legs and armpits, etc.
All of these things only became common because of advertising.
Example 1: Coca Cola adverts. I can't stand coke, it tastes like soap to me. No amount of viewing their adverts (which are everywhere) will make me want a coke.
Example 2: I find most adverts cringey and embarassing and they serve only to make me avoid the company responsible in the future. If I see an annoying ad, I react wityh an aversion to products by that company. It's not true of everything, but it happens enough that I notice it.
No amount of advertising will be able to convince you to like something that you dislike. Advertising is manipulative, but it's not mind control.
But advertising is not trying to (for example) make you like cola if you don't like cola. What it's trying to do is make you choose one brand of cola over another.
For certain types of advertising, such as soft drinks, they're aiming to influence a particular moment. As a Pepsi executive once explained, they're aiming for that half-second when you're reaching for a soft drink and are making a spur-of-the-moment decision about which one. That sort of advertising is about influencing that spur-of-the-moment decision so you're more likely to choose theirs. It's effective because, in the absence of thought, you're overwhelmingly likely to choose a brand that you recognize the most or have the most positive associations with.
That's what ads are for. To get everyone to know that they live in a reality where your product exists.
I find this quite easy and intuitive. I'm not against advertisement at all. I've seen and remembered several advertisements but they almost never offer a product compelling enough to buy. When an ad does offer me something I actually want, I'll buy it (this happens for far less than 1% of my spending).
and yes, i'm well aware of how advertisements influence our perception of brands. but how is it effective if I never buy anything that has a brand? and when I do buy, I usually never have a choice: Utilities, etc
I have a 15" macbook pro that may have been aggressively marketed by Apple. But once again, I had no choice. the reason I bought it is because I'm a developer who used to create IOS apps and I needed the development environment to build apps (no choice but to use apple machines for that).
I'm sure this has nothing to do with being bombarded with advertising from cradle to grave.
But at scale, at the level of a population, an expectation of individual rationality loses out to the realities of these manipulative techniques. On an individual level they might not work, but on a population level they tend to work.
If a population is being manipulated by political propaganda, then yes it's good advice to an individual to think critically / rationally. But that only affects change on the tiniest margin. The propagandists will still win overall.
Is this any different from the free market arguments about how regulation is bad, and the customer must inform themselves about literally everything and every consequence, with convenient disregard for the fact that it's impossible for a person to learn everything, and that it turns into a way to assign blame rather than to make the world a better place to live?
Why should "you must think for yourself" become a justification for you to be allowed to show advertising to me continually?
taking bad deals like minimum wage etc.
The only reason there are minimum wages, is because people fought for them, and refused to take even worse deals.
That's like saying stopping rape is easy, just don't reward it. It completely ignores the non-consensual nature of the interaction. Except advertising is even worse, because at least rape victims are aware they have been victimized, people that are manipulated by advertising don't even know it. In fact, if you ask, almost everyone will say "advertising doesn't work on me." If that were true, then why do companies spend billions on it?
I don't think they're making much money off me. They still keep advertising at me.
Stop categorizing it as a tax-deductible business "expense".
It's not a requirement for doing business, and it should not be treated as such.
Literally no one can do that for everything. The world is too complicated and, depending on the area, there are either too many or too few choices available.
Only government [regulations] can change that - but above resources are certainly partially directed to make sure this won't happen.
The human vulnerabilities that advertising leverages are coded deep in the genome; building antibodies instead of avoiding the virus entirely could be wise indeed.
If course, it doesn't excuse all the Apple fanatics (among others) who go through one every single year.
I am still using a cheapo Asus from 2012. It was relatively powerful when it was released, but its performance drives me nuts nowadays. Thankfully, my smartphone needs are pretty modest, but I can see why a more "advanced" user wouldn't want to use such old hardware.