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Comment by jackpirate | Hacker News Reader

Or is the ad informing him he can buy access to a spirit that will accompany him on his self selected journey and help his own desires and achieve his goals?

The anti-ad argument is that he shouldn't have to buy this spirit. If Nike ads were replaced by a non-commercial alternative, then the boy could have that spirit without needing to spend the extra money on fancy shoes.

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Can you do that?

Elvis Presley's guitar/clothes are worth more than the sum of their parts because he imbued it with that meaningful connection to whatever was higher than him.

Can you have a spirit without it being imbued in an object? The only other way of distributing connection to this stuff I can see is via people and you end up with a socially mediated distribution system.

If not, you're stuck with capitalism distributing spirits like it does everything else.

You can get 'spirit' through art in the form of books, pictures and music. It's a lot more potent and designed for the purpose rather than just having that purpose tacked on to sell a product.

That’s not really the same thing. The US military doesn’t read books at people about how their plane should look fearsome when they are flying a hunk of junk. You have to occupy it to some degree, though I will give you playing the radio in the car can create an enjoyable synthesis of mediums.

And how do you find these books, pictures, and music? Someone has to deliver book X in front of your eyes and song Y close to your ears so you select these instead of millions of other books, pictures, and music.

Since we don't want the advertising industry to just evaporate over-night when we regulate it out of existence we can fund it collectively to solve this problem.

Wall to wall advertising to help everyone live a better life as cheaply & with as little environmental damage as possible.

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