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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

It's corporate behaviour modification and social engineering. Perhaps not a surprise to anyone familiar with Bernays and his Propaganda.

I don't see it as information asymmetry, so much as mostly mediocre products and services designed to a budget trying to look more exciting and life-changing than they could ever hope to be.

The weird thing is we take it for granted instead of being repelled by it.

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>The weird thing is we take it for granted instead of being repelled by it. Yes, exactly this right here. It was straight up bizarre to grow up with near 0 advertising in commie Eastern Europe and get hit with a shockwave of fairly disgusting ad bullshit when we moved to the US. I was shocked at people putting up with it as if it is something to be tolerated instead of burned to ashes. I continue to be shocked.

I don't think is socially acceptable in the West to mention the good parts of the other side of the Iron Curtain. You must always mention the Stasi.

Even though the Berlin wall came down 30 years ago, the End of History ethos remains.

I mean, the Stasi was pretty bad. Soviet political prisons were pretty bad. I'll take advertising as the cost of doing business if that's the alternative.

But is it? Was the Stasi responsible for the lack of advertisements?

I would argue it's completely orthogonal. You can selective adopt other cultural practices. Resistance to advertising does not imply mass surveillance, it's actually the opposite.

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