What have we got to lose? (1998)
douglasadams.com
douglasadams.com
Furthermore, the [online] advertiser gets astonishingly
precise feedback. They will know exactly how many people
have chosen to look at their ad and for how long, with
the result that an unwelcome ad for something no one's
interested in will quickly wither away, whereas one which
catches people's attention will thrive.
In a literal sense, that is indeed how it turned out. "Interesting" won.
Unfortunately the version of "interesting" that many people chose was simply toxic dreck: conspiracy theories, social media feeds literally designed to make us feel negative emotions, scammy ads that have been engineered to trick the maximum number of people, and so on.
So yeah, "interesting" won, but I'm not sure this is the future Adams was excited about.
Like here in advertising. I'm coming to the conclusion that there is no good form of advertising. It is a fundamentally bad thing. There are just different degrees of badness.
And since it's a fundamentally bad thing, perfecting it makes it worse.
After thinking it through, I thoroughly agree. I'm not convinced of a proper course of action to correct it, but I do definitely think it's a problem as a whole.
A world where we just seek out and buy the things we need and that will actually enrich or lives sounds like a great improvement over the current system.
The problem is tracking and dependence on ad networks. Corporations doggedly chasing the bottom line don't want to spend the time or the money to pick and choose specific forums and sites to advertise. They want to pretend to automate that process. Their laziness not only killed the old networks and communities around various product segments, but helped start the "listicle" de-evolution that has decreased content quality across the entire internet.
I used to be able to type in "product_name review" and get some useful, well-known sites. Now I get recycled garbage content, and I have to check all of those sites individually or restrict the domain in the search. It's ridiculous.
Personally, this is the model I long for again. If I’m looking at articles about bike maintenance, I’m getting ads for bike tools and supplies. Instead, I’m getting ads for USB power cords because I just purchased a new one to replace the one my dog chewed.
It’s quite hard to imagine.
It also sounds quite inefficient. Like everybody running their own wood stove vs using centrally generated electricity. But I don’t know.
Anyone aware of books that talk of life in these times? For the early 1900s, I enjoyed “The World of Yesterday”. It would be great to get the same glimpses into the world of the 1800s.
The conclusion I came to was that when there's few people and they're all manually whacking at wood with axes you're (as a group) okay. When the wood collection is essentially strip mining a forest for millions of customers it just isn't the same thing. Not really comparable.
Manual labor and using an axe is an efficient system in the sense that it ultimately limits use and production of wood per person.
At the turn of the century, Canada was >70% rural or some such. Now, it's reversed. >70% urban.
When you live on a farm, in the county, and own 100 acres, a few extra acres for wood provides a long supply of wood, with time for more to grow.
Every farm tended to have rocky, unusable bits, but still ok for trees. Back then, before everyone had backhoes, removing large rocks, even small rocks, was work.
So some fields were best left for trees.
And one of your neighbours would likely own 1000 acres or more of bush land, ok for trees, but too rocky or swampy for farming. Or local crown land would be used for harvesting trees.
Back when people went in with sleighs in the winter, felled trees by hand with axe and hand saw, no one strip cut. Why would they?
(It is easier with horses to pull logs out on sleigh, in winter, than over uneven, soft ground. Especially in frozen swampy land. Even today, people will use snowmobiles and sleigh to get trees out for personal use.)
Anyhow back then, it was only people living in higher density locations, away from nature, which exceeded easy supply.
Of course, population growth happens, and wood burning can be dirty, so now we warm homes with other methods typically.
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death[2] is also on-topic, he discusses how advertising has changed since the foundation of the United States.
[1]https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691147727/th...
Much of the supplies for day to day life came from your own work, money was spent on certain tools and other necessities- and sometimes on fancy foodstuffs.
one of the foundational problems with this sort of analysis is that "corporation" isn't really very well defined for this context.
If I live in some imaginary small town 1800's western America, and the owner of the general store convinces me to stock up on something that they happen to have an excess of, is this "corporations influencing our behavior" ?
If I live in some imaginary mid-size town in 1950's USA, and the local Ford dealer is on the radio telling me all about how their latest cars are just the absolute best, and this persuades me to get a Ford for my next car, is that "corporations influencing our behavior" ?
If anyone says anything to me that changes the behavioral trajectory I might otherwise have been on, how do I know if that's corporations influencing my behavior, or "just what people do" ?
Although this definition, like all definitions, brings to light uncomfortable corner cases…
Like, is Facebook a corporation, or a Sole Proprietorship?
(I know legally it’s a Corp, but spiritually, is it just Mark Zuckerberg, since he has the controlling stake?)
At what point along the path from where I am now to being the next FAANG do I become "a corporation" in the sense of the comment under discussion? If I have an LLC and 1 employee, legally I'm certainly a corporation, but this seems to not be what the comment was describing?
I don’t know, I don’t think there’s anything inherently bad in a person or business wanting to facilitate the discovery of something they’ve created.
(Which isn’t to say that, in a world where everybody does this, actual listening and radical honesty couldn’t be a much more profitable strategy.)
No, it is not the same thing. The scale matters. Much of what is wrong with the world comes from allowing huge corporations to do stuff because a single person is allowed to do "same" stuff and we see no bad effects.
Do you think glossy ads in niche magazines are a problem?
Do you think glossy ads in niche magazines are a problem?
This isn't a critique of capitalism, or at least not only. I happen to live in a country where the government is abusing its power to spam the public with its propaganda.
What you're talking about it a whole other thing, I'd say, though still an interesting topic.
In other words, advertising is tolerable when the whole chain is thoroughly competitive.
In social media, for example, there is currently competition. Yes FB is big, but new players are entering the market and causing them to shrink precisely by making the web even more toxic and unpleasant. Perfecting this process and introducing more competition (read desperation among product managers in the losing firms) isn't something I want to witness.
Edit: Also, any advertisement for the advertising platform itself would be self-referential and thus violate your “generated by something else” clause.
Edit2: You could also take ads out to convince someone not to take an action even if there is no alternative. Still manipulation, but not to get someone to purchase a particular product.
Other than the modern RTB ecosystem I don't think any other form of advertising is inherently flawed.
Edit: Also consider that some definitions of advertisement might arguably include exit signs on the highway.
> to try to manipulate people into purchasing your product.
We should really have a beer. I started in advertising when I was 15. (My dad said "sell shoes or find another job"). I was in and out of agencies through my twenties. Advertising is a fundamentally bad thing. But if your clients trust you, you can sometimes use it for good. You just have to actually twist the hell out of their message to do that, use their money in ways they didn't anticipate, and always have a really concrete idea of what you want to accomplish. All while making it seem like you're just having fun.
One thing it taught me is that there's no "system" in capitalist america. Not the way people talk about it. "The system" / "the man". The system is us. Just people in offices deciding how to frame something that will reach 100 million people. I was hated by teachers in art school for arguing my case in fine art crits. But arguing for showing something they don't like is the same skill that lets me argue the minority case for putting out controversial, socially meaningful ads that might get us in trouble, instead of inoffensive corporate pap.
You can always do good in advertising, simply because you have more power than almost anyone else. The temptation, and the easy thing, and the thing that pays, is to perpetuate little evils. But it's surprisingly easy to do good. It ain't "art". It's arguably more important, though. You're in the trenches where the battle for minds takes place.
We can shape things in limited ways. With some effort, we could see interesting results.
Do you have any examples of advertising that does good?
Right; it exists, it's just emergent rather than planned. Our intuition and education are still poorly-adapted to recognize this kind of phenomenon.
I’m not quite sure what the solution is, but I suspect it involves taking our foot off the gas of the “marketise everything” bandwagon and pluralising our approach, but without throwing the baby out with the bath water and removing these market mechanisms entirely.
"How would that even work?" and in response. "Why (the hell) would anybody do that?". Those two questions are what make entreprise work, period. If a solution fails to address those two questions it is a guaranteed pipe dream or scam.
"Someone will repair my roof." "How would that even work?" "They show up with tools, climb onto the roof and inspect for damage before patching or replacing it." "Why (the hell) would they do that?" "Because it will get them paid a hefty bill."
Simple but there is still ample space pie in the sky thinking and outright lunacy in the heuristic. An example below to show what a thoroughly unconvincing answer would look like.
"Aliens will come out of the sky and fix my flat tire!" "How the hell would that even work?" "The electromagnetic emissions of our brain echo out into space of other dimensions unless retroreflected with a tinfoil hat. Then they'll ride space unicorns and laser fix my tire." "Why the hell would do that?" "For clicks on their alien equivalent of youtube."
This, and also the modern era of mass-consumption of cheap goods.
It might be...
And arguably this form of marketing is necessary under consumer capitalism since you need people to use a lot of their income on consumption in order to keep the economy going.
This form of marketing and advertisement has been around for over a century and there is no going back.
The media that is most "interesting" by web metrics is the least worth learning, and in many cases has negative informative value. Social media today is a million Zaphod Beeblebroxes saturating our senses.
Everyone back then had a fundamental belief that the internet would make things better just like the printing press had made things better. E.g. the nets elevating political discourse in Enders Game.
Businesses were the last to take it up, and the first to destroy it. But no one saw that coming.
I heard this kind of pitch made a dozens times by 1999, to hundreds of businessmen who are now probably dead. No one thought for a moment that getting more metrics on people would mean the death of privacy. Everyone was worried about the government spying on us, and no one had an idea it would be through scrolling and click tracking. At the time this was written, I had a palm pilot and mobile web; but I never would have predicted what a combination of smart phones and social media would do to scramble the average American consumers' brains.
This was a time where advertising companies had to contact the owners of popular webpages, and then try to sell the idea of putting their advertisements on the webpage. Where in the modern world, it’s mostly the other way around, or at least easy because influential people on the internet typically leave their contact information. It was a time where “computer-clusters” were considered a revolutionary idea that might just topple mainframes. It was long before Linus stepped up and fixed version control because he was still working to make Linux great. It was at a time where the absolutely top anti-virus software couldn’t detect a cult-of-the-dead-cow Trojan in an image file.
I know this might not have been the case in California or other tech centrals but it sure was the reality of the CS department at the university of Aalborg in Denmark.
I remember these things because some of the first really interesting projects I got to hack at was creating spam-filters. Because most importantly of all, this was a time where Google had only just emerged, and years before g-mail became a thing.
Given how hard it was to sell advertisements, just think about how hard it is to find the Danish teenager who runs some popular website. Then how hard it is to get the business contract with a minor going, if you mange to convince him/her to put a huge ugly banner on their site. Coca Cola would obviously do it, but for a lot of smaller companies it was only natural to go for much easier (and cheaper) solutions, such as spamming e-mails.
So it was actually a time where an alternative to the most common advertisement practices was something everyone almost everyone wanted to help create. Most of us never even thought about the downsides, unlike the author.
What won was videos of cats, your aunt being able to get video instructions of how to replace a car tire, open-source software, and an explosion of tools that are getting more sophisticated by the minute, to the point that during a global pandemic, a lot of office jobs almost seamlessly moved fully remote, even if for a while.
Yes, someone needs to tackle those issues you've mentioned, but by and large your description of the internet is not accurate to global use we get from it.
What won wasn't conspiracy theories and scammy ads.
What won was videos of cats
There were always multiple things that were going to "win," right? The web/internet was always going to be some mixture of entertainment (cat GIFs, etc), commerce, communication, and information. They do not compete with each other in meaningful ways.
As you say, yes, there is a lot of great utility out there. I can look up how to fix anything in my house on YouTube. That's super cool, and it has made my life tangibly better.
But as for advertisements and other sorts of information, the outcome is a lot darker. From the article:
Now I regard magazine advertising as a big problem.
I really hate it. It overwhelms the copy text,
which is usually reduced to a dull, grey little
stream trickling its way through enormous glaring
billboard-like pages all of which are clamoring to
draw your attention to stuff you don't want; and the
first thing you have to do when you buy a new magazine
is shake it over a bin in order to shed all the
coupons, sachets, packets, CDs and free labrador puppies
which make them as fat an unwieldy as a grandmother's
scrapbook.
Disturbingly look at netherlands in the 1971-1987 child pornography was outright legal and had Lolita magazine openly existing. Look up Joop Wilhelmus, the infamous proprietor of it. Somehow it remained legal for 55 magazine issues.
We should also not forget everything that's happening on 4chan (/b/, /x/, /pol/), and the like. Countless trolling that resulted in suicides with zero repercussions, doxxing, incidents like the one that lead us to "we did it reddit", QAnon, and so on.
To ignore the scale and claim that it was happening then so nothing changes is dishonest.
It technically happened of course in the form of various companies trying to build systems that do this (using e.g. crypto currencies) and put themselves in the middle to try to "own" and control the lucrative revenue streams. But that's the reason it never happens because as soon as you do that, you end up with a fragmented mess of different companies all failing to get a critical mass of actual micropayments happening. So, the money exchanged adds up to not much at all. Most artists keep on dealing with agents and big media corporations. And most consumers keep on handing over chunks of their income to those same corporations.
I've not actually bought a newspaper or a magazine in over ten years and very little in the ten before that. I regularly did this in the nineties though. There no longer is a need. I can read a lot online for free. And I do. But I do feel sort of bad for the hard working journalists producing all the content I read every day not really getting anything from me.
Authors struggle not in finding their audience but in monetizing it. Ads are not the way. I'd love to have a sane way to reward them without having to micromanage the expense. If somebody builds a way for me to fairly distribute 20$/month among the authors of all the content I enjoy every month, I'd be happy to. That doesn't exist. That's money I've not been spending for decades. I spent that on Spotify and Netflix though.
IMHO such a system should exist. Douglas Adams predicted it because it so obviously needs to exist. Instead we've got this endless amount of greed and stupidity preventing people from making a living from creating content because middle men peddling shitty ads for shitty products need to be payed off. The content creation is the bit I want to pay for. Everything else is redundant or can be payed for by authors as needed once they have revenue (e.g. editing is a useful service).
Maybe I read a few hundred articles per month. Lets call it 200 (nice round number). That's ten cents per article. Now imagine that a journalist produces something that is read by 1 million people and that 1 percent of those actually pay that 10 cent. That's a thousand dollar. It's not a lot. But if they write maybe a few articles per month, that's a nice income. And those articles stay online for a long time. It would actually stimulate the creation of content that has a long shelf life. Passive income basically. Exactly what I want as a reader: quality content.
The Stripe founders point to the fact that the HTTP protocol actually includes a status code for “payment required”. So the idea of micropayments actually belonged to the original conception of the internet.
It seems to me that is was is precisely because of the difficulty of receiving payment that we ended up with a few large players, and with advertising as the main vehicle for getting paid on the web - with all the consequences, including an unduly focus on short-term attention and clicks.
HTTP 402 "Payment Required" is "reserved for future use" and not that old[1][2].
[1] https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-hope-bailie-http-payments-00...
However, the friction is still too high for this to be a reasonable implementation of what you're asking for.
It is also harrowing to think about the roughly 25% reduction in income that we'd face if PayPal dropped this fee structure at any point.
It matches what I see on Patreon (web comics at least): None of the creators seem to have started with the assurance that they could generate a significant income, or even quit their full-time job. A few of them do now, but I'm pretty sure most of those comics would have happened anyway (given the time), because the artists really wanted to create them.
By the way, free alternative platforms like Liberapay do exist (still growing, too). But I cannot blame artists to use Patreon instead - most of their audience is there. Audience comes first, and paying 10% in fees doesn't matter when you expected no significant earnings anyway.
Another interesting point on Patreon is that I can see the artist's approximate income. I may decide to support new creators instead when I see that they have already 10k a month. Not the most common case on Patreon, of course, but it matches my goal to support the creation of new art better than helping some super-popular ones to get their next million.
I had never heard of Liberapay. But it definitely looks very interesting. And they seem to be handling some non trivial amounts of cash despite being relatively small.
I noticed Aurelien Pierre is on it apparently and I actually do enjoy his content and work (he works on and publishes about Darktable). Something like that with millions of users paying every month would sustain quite a few content creators; even if the individual payments are small. It's one of those things where a critical mass of content creators need to join for this to start working.
From the front page at liberapay.com:
> We currently support processing payments through Stripe and PayPal.
Not free, not alternative.
But yes, it isn't alternative as in "truly micro". In fact they got kicked from of their previous provider, probably for generating too many small transactions. They changed the system, so now you usually pay for a few months in advance.
Also, a dime here and there doesn't pay for a middle east bureau or a team of reporters to cover an election or a war. It's unrealistic to expect reporters to risk their necks on the possibility of keeping an audience and it just might lead to the kind of unanticipated negative results that online advertising did.
Me, for instance, I'm done sending any money to Matt Taibbi until he goes back to Russia, drinks at least four gallons of vodka, and gets an interview with Vlad. Should he do that for my $1? Fuck no! A world where we pay journalists directly is a world without editors, where you can't trust any information to be vetted at all. In all probability it's just some lies their personal subscribers want to hear. They may be hired whores, but at least if they work for a newspaper you know who hired them.
Check out Patreon and Kickstarter some time. Sure, that's way more than "a dime" for the basic individual contribution, but the dollar amounts are still very manageable. And it all adds up.
> A world where we pay journalists directly is a world without editors, where you can't trust any information to be vetted at all.
You can pay people for editorial work, too. Ultimately, you're just choosing whom to trust.
The issue is that building something like this is something that needs funding. You need engineers, lawyers, financially savvy people, etc. The tech side is actually the easy part. This in turn often implies companies and central control and ownership. Investors get involved and from then on it's about them getting a return on investment rather than actually solving the problem. And of course these companies start competing with each other and start creating walled gardens. And then there are people inside the walls and outside the walls. And of course multiple walled gardens just makes it worse. That's basically the history to date of micropayments: it has not worked so far and IMHO it cannot work this way.
In my view, such a thing would instead have to be run and coordinated by non profit organizations (you'd probably need multiple legal entities in different countries) and be based on open standards. Getting that organized is not primarily a technical problem. In fact, it would probably be best for journalists themselves to get organized and jointly own such a thing instead of waiting for some entrepreneur to wave a magic wand to make it happen.
You could fund this from memberships. For example authors wishing to earn on the platform could pay a flat fee per year in exchange for a cut of the monthly revenue based on the performance of their content or some other rules. That way 100% of money payed to readers would go to content creators and the platform maintenance would be payed for by the receivers of that money. And you could simply withhold that from their monthly earnings. For example 10$ per author adds up quickly. It basically means that they'd only need 100 reads at 10 cents. Anything beyond that would be profit. A few tens of thousands of authors like that could manage to fund a pretty sizable organization + hosting and other cost.
It didn't even take 25 years to make 1984 look like an improvement in privacy and surveillance compared to what we have now.
Watching it taper off with the rise of "social media" was a sad thing indeed, but I don't think the old spirit is fully lost.
> I don't think the old spirit is fully lost.
And I'm already running my own self managed website on a VPS.
What I meant was the rise of "social media" to supplant what "the internet" means in the popular imagination. I've quite a collection of bookmarks that proves that Internet still lives.
That phrase was fun to read on my iPhone today ;-)
The privacy issues are talked about daily.
Getting ads for just things you're interested in means you don't get ads for anything you haven't seen before. And what's worse, the same goes on for content selection wherever you're being given a custom selection of content. You end up in a bubble plus some things sprinkled in to outrage you and make you stay.
"ifndef NOCATS" is much more powerful than "ifdef CATS" ..
And that was 1980! He was decades ahead.
Unfortunately, the notion "that advertising need be irritating and intrusive" didn't drop out, which is why browsing the web without uBlock is a horrible experience.
Here's the thing: I'm not against ads. I used to quite enjoy ads in newspapers and magazines.
I wonder who would still trust such 'clicks' metrics.
Wild guess, in the context of selling "something" and using ads on the web, the only reliable metric is the correlation between the sales amount and the ad campaign.
Isn't that the exact opposite of what they are doing? I.e. creating specialized cartridges which only work on one brand of machine, rather than a commodity that is interchangeable with other brands?
https://web.archive.org/web/19991005013034/douglasadams.com/...
No subscription to online magazines or content streaming services. When you notice something you like, you pay for it: one article, one TV-show at at time.
Artificially bundling stuff together is unnatural in the Internet.
I'm vaguely for the idea of micropayments, as long they're actually micro (10⁻⁶). Even 10 cents for a piece of content seems somehow too much, because it all adds up. If we do the napkin math, large newspapers like the NYT might not be able to sustain themselves in that new world:
> 4500 (staff size) * 50000 (average yearly salary) / ~10M (audience) = $23 (required revenue per subscriber)
And this doesn't even account for office rent, travel expenses etc.
This is how most people think about software too, since FOSS started.
Then I discovered Unix/Linux and so it was the last piece of software I bought.
The proliferation of the incredibly regressive practice of building and selling behavioral profiles of unsuspecting "consumers" may in part be due to the cannibalistic arms race of an exhausted economic paradigm.
Somehow we need to find sane digital ways to connect people who have to say, sell, announce something with people who want to hear, buy, be informed about something.
It doesn't sound that complicated if we lose our unsustainable ways of thinking and acting
> The thing which drops out of the problem is the notion that advertising need be irritating and intrusive.
Here goes nothing.
Doug Adams is funny even when he's not trying to be.
He ignored that the "river rules" no longer apply.
Under the harshest, most doctrinaire leadership, the outliers thrive most and gain an audience. Not to call out Biden or dems here, but to say that both of those power parties seem awfully authoritarian, so . . .