Many of the most talented artists of our time don’t do any art — they work in advertising.
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click adswhich is very close to article’s paraphrase
I believe this has been true throughout human history. The greatest artists and thinkers throughout history have earned their keep by providing services to the wealthy or teaching paying students (also often wealthy).
There are upsides, the artists get to eat but they also have all the benefits of being connected to their employer/patron including time spent practicing their craft. If they were to quit and focus on pure art then they would likely earn far, far less and possibly spend less time making any kind of art commercial or not.
It reminds me of this survey that made the front page not long ago about author's that contained this illuminating paragraph:
> While 80% of respondents considered themselves to be professional authors, only 35% said they were full-time authors while 53% said they were part-time authors (with the balance being one-book authors or undecided). The primary writing occupation of part-time authors outside of publishing books was professor/academic (8.5%), followed by book illustrator/author (4.2%), editor (2.9%), poet (2.4%), journalist (2%), teacher (2%), and entrepreneur (1.5%).
So even people who consider themselves professional authors are unable to work at it full time. It makes sense, there's only so much one person can produce and it's quite difficult to find an audience willing to pay for what you make. This likely holds true across all professions i.e. you have to do the work that they want done and not the work that you want to do.
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...
no, the work that pays is the unglamorous stuff that someone wants to get done to make a profit. the stuff that actually needs doing is the stuff that would be a benefit for our society.
In advertising's case, it's such a huge industry because it works. It moves the needle on purchasers' decisions. You can make it work a little less well on yourself with a few mental habits: never buy on impulse, don't save your credit cards, put time and distance between yourself and the purchase decision, have a rigorous self-directed research process before you open your wallet, learn to skip or tune out ads, go for paid media instead of ad-supported media, etc. And you can make it work for you by taking the other side of trade and getting paid when other people click on ads. But there are 8B+ humans who you don't control, and they will do what they want to do.
So... that's not blame? Is "businesses only do this because you tell them to, with money, so stop telling them to if you don't like it" not the intended reading of that?
My point is that the modern advertising industry is better classed as a result of large-scale structures and societal-scale rules, the same way bread lines were, than as something explained by consumer choice. I mean, FFS, the point of it is to influence consumer choice. This is like saying if the gas pedal doesn't want the car to go faster, it should stop getting pushed so much.
"My point is that the modern advertising industry is better classed as a result of large-scale structures and societal-scale rules"
Does this model result in useful predictions that you can act upon? A model that "advertising works because in the aggregate, it alters buying decisions and leads to more spending being directed to the advertiser" is very actionable: it tells you exactly where the money is, why it is being spent, and then gives you leads to areas you might want to study (eg. human psychology and perception, owning a channel, producing content at scale) to make you better at influencing those money flows. A model that "the modern advertising industry is better classed as a result of large-scale structures and societal-scale rules" may be true, but it's pretty useless. It doesn't have enough detail to make specific predictions, and its area of focus is on phenomena that you don't have any agency over anyway.
My physics professors were always very clear that the true value of a theory is "Can you make testable predictions with it?" My English & sociology professors were always very clear that "Society doesn't actually exist. It's just a collection of individual actors." This was pretty eye-opening when I got to college, because it got me to understand the value of thinking in terms of specifics rather grand theories that sound expansive as a soundbite but can't actually be used.
but i struggle with that other side. i'd love to earn some money on sidebusinesses like that, but i feel like making them ad supported would be close to unethical. i want people to stop paying attention to ads, not take advantage of them.
i probably can't even control what ads will be running, so how would i know if those ads are something i would approve of or not?
[EDIT] And that's the optimistic take. In fact a great deal of it is harmful, not just wasteful.
You're thinking of picking up the trash, driving trucks, fixing toilets, and assembling wheelbarrows. That pays shit: the things that "need doing" are mostly just not done, and what is done pays nothing. Advertising has never "needed doing", it's always been an exploit that psychopaths use to enrich themselves at the expense of all of humanity. And the advertising industry is nothing if not glamorous.
Granted, advertising has been taken to the extreme and there wouldn't be harm in cutting back on it to a certain degree, you just can't get rid of all of it so it is in fact one of those jobs that need doing.
The point of my comment is that you can say the same thing about every pair of thing someone wants to do and thing someone needs done and the essential part is that it doesn't matter what the second thing is, people would still complain that all this talent for A was being wasted because they were working on B instead but it's not a waste for a variety of reasons one of which is that there is not enough demand for A. You could easily say someone is a psycopath or antisocial if they choose to spend all their time doing something that isn't needed or not wanted instead of doing the things that other people need done. You would at the very least say they are selfish.
Thats a problem with art today, IMHO.
> I think the original quote is:
> The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads
No, it's a paraphrase of a quote attributed to Banksy and it's specifically about graphic arts, not CS or psychology.
> The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people. - Banksy
First time I heard it was in a conversation about how the best students from directing/film making (or was it 3d artists ?) ended up making ads for cars rather than video installations and I am pretty sure it was before 2010.
The sentiment is the same though but I cannot ever let pass an occasion to throw in my favourite quote: "when all you have is a hammer...".
Nope, the most famous form is Ginsberg; I don't know if he lifted it from somewhere too.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked
- Howl
(EDIT: the grandparent link actually points that out)
No, they appeared in very different contexts and Ginsberg goes in a different direction (1955, drugs, jazz, etc.):
> I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, [..]
while Banksy deals with the then current state of arts and marketing (~2000/2010?).
Also, it's not explained in the article how Ginsberg and Hammerbacher ideas relate except for an "en-pasasnt" quote from the person originally inquiring the quote investigator opinion, so the grandparent link doesn't actually point anything out.
edit: to summarize: that quote is taken out of context even if it seems to fit
Artists at ad agencies probably never broke even top twenty jobs by salary.
Now, to be clear, I don't consider GMail "ad tech", even though it is ad supported. I don't see anything wrong with someone like Google want to drive traffic through services that are monetized through advertising. Nor Facebook for that matter.
I will complain about lock in, dark patterns, and other nefarious things. But you can have good ad supported services without necessarily having all of the bad things. Those just bump your margin and revenue.
So, if you feel that the "good" programmers are working on ad tech and analysis, while the "less good" are working on, say, GMail proper, I'd be curious in how that conclusion was drawn.
How many people here work on ad tech directly? (vs, some dual use technology that can be used for ad tech.)
I know a lot of people, tangentially, indirectly, "6 degrees of separation" kind of thing, and I don't know any of them being directly involved in ad tech. None of the "lead geeks" I'm familiar with are in the field.
The closest it got was a friend of mine who worked on Farmville in its heyday, and that's more a dark pattern addiction game than ad tech.
Not really. Advertising is pretty new, modern advertising with targeting market segments didn't exist until around the start of the 20th century[1]. The first ad supported media was in 1838[2].
Behavioral ads targeting individual user's are super new, though I'd argue TikTok and gacha games are orders of magnitude better at using behavioral manipulation than advertisers are.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Barratt [2]https://qprintgroup.com.au/history-of-print-advertising/
The one about making people click ads grew out of that after the GFC when software salaries started to boom like finance had earlier in the decade.
I'm sure there was something else earlier that diverted intelligent, talented people into socially unproductive pursuits because it paid better. I recall when I was in college there being huge dilemmas among all the students studying geology whether they should sell out and go work in oil and gas exploration.
The problem is in my experience (for quite some smart people) not "which job pays so much better (and thus facing a potential dilemma about selling out)", but rather about actually finding a job.
The job market does not like very smart people, but rather self-promoters and sycophant: I know quite some really smart people (with a focus on people having degrees in mathematics and physics (often comparable to PhD or post doctoral experience)) who had quite some difficulties actually finding a job in industry, and thus rather had to take the job positions that they could get.
Maybe there's something similar in the job market where smart people are more self aware that they may take someone elses spot and more respectful and less good self promoters. Because the other set of people don't even think about that they end up getting the spots.
Talent isn't in the execution in art, it's in the ideas, and tapestry of the artist's life.
> The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads
This is also not true, because those minds aren't intelligent enough to see the folly of their attention. The best minds see past this and do the work they are driven to do, similar to artists.
> It’s not a moral failing to have a need to make a living, especially if others are relying on you.
Exactly. People make choices in what they do, it has nothing to do with talent being taken out of the market, it's always been this way. There have always been more profitable things to do than making art.
You have a hyper-idealized version of what is and is not art.
And execution definitely forms part of the talent. We should know that just as well. We all know "the idea guy", the guy who has all the "right" ideas, but just can't seem to actually do the thing required to bring the idea to life.
And that's because most ideas are just half-formed thoughts. I'm almost on the other end of the spectrum. It's mostly about execution and the idea actually means very little. The idea of "what if you couldn't make new memories" is the central struggle in two very different movies. In Memento, it's used to tell a detective noir story where we're told who the killer is in the first scene. In 50 First Dates, it's used to give Adam Sandler a hurdle to plowing Drew Barrymore.
And you can find joy in the doing itself. You can make good commercial art. It is possible. There is craft there. And where there is craft, there is art.
No, I made an assertion that the most talented artists make art.
> And execution definitely forms part of the talent.
Seeing that many, many top, full time, talented artists have technicians that execute, I don't think it's the defining quality of a top artist. Execution can be offloaded, ideas cannot.
> And that's because most ideas are just half-formed thoughts.
Talented artists have fully formed thoughts. That's their talent.
> And that's because most ideas are just half-formed thoughts.
Well, I'd suggest your job is at risk. Execution can be automated, ideas not so much. Who is gonna tell the GPT what to do?
> And you can find joy in the doing itself. You can make good commercial art.
Yeah, those people failed to be the top talent in art and did something else. They are still highly talented but not in the realms of top talented artists.
The ability to realize an idea is way more important than "having ideas".
And I say that "most ideas are just half-formed thoughts" because they are. Most people think an idea like "the Uber of X" is worthwhile. It's not. It's hardly a thought, much less an actual idea.
Everything else you said was basically "nuh-uh, I feel differently and assert that my opinionated feelings are facts". And examples won't matter to you because you'll "no true Scotsman" your way through that saying they are "real" artists or "top talented" artists. As if your opinion on these matters were a subjective criteria.