Advertising Shits in Your Head

My main issue with ads is the power disparity that can result. Those in charge of advertising and marketing have powerful tools at their disposal -- a wealth of data about how people respond, real-time analytics and A/B testing down to the pixel level to optimize that last percentage point of audience capture, and training in the nature of cognitive biases and how to exploit them. It's a hacking war in people's minds, and against such attackers, what defenses does the average person have? To what degree are untrained people able to resist these influences but by adblocking?

Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.

As we spend more time buried in mobile phones and other screens, our eyes and hands in intimate connection with these devices, I wonder how the artists would examine "private" spaces like those. Could advertisements – which demand attention and energy, even without active mental application – more damaging in this smaller sphere than in the public one?

I like the idea of and motivation behind reclaiming of public space. The artists nod toward property ownership and the "rights" of advertisers, following it with, "no, thank you."

Advertising is a society virus. It's designed to infect and spread, enabling the growth of the infection at the expense of the human hosts. It piggybacks off receptors we use for rational thought and perception and uses them against us.

Never is this more clear than on the myriad of clickbait viral media sites where the virus is so clear and obvious and doesn't even try to hide itself. It's clear that the purpose of the site is to force itself upon your mental pathways in an attempt to spread by sheer statistics.

Such a strange symbiosis: our collectives simultaneously nourishing us in our search for sustainable life and meaningful work, and at the same time discovering any and all pathways to sap value from us in any way it can be done; some genuine, others malignant. This is the new evolution. Society is the organism.

So even when I occasionally read it from a browser w/o an ad-blocker installed, I still enjoy the content in peace.

I'm not knocking their idealism for a minute (frankly, our culture need less cynicism these days), but let's not kid ourselves about these ideas being even remotely progressive.

Some advertising (e.g. Coke, McDonald's) is an attempt to remind us and make us feel good about a product that we already know about, and that's the kind of advertising that "shits in your head" and doesn't seem to provide any value to the world.

But there's other stuff that gets advertised, and we shouldn't vilify all advertising just because some of it is bad.