Your Head as a Battleground, Dueling Memes
jacquesmattheij.com
jacquesmattheij.com
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>For quite some time I've felt that advertising/marketing, at least the sort we've had for the past century or so, is inherently immoral. The fact that it's a necessary evil in our economic system doesn't stop it from being an evil.
>Modern advertising is not merely informing people about products and what they do. It's brain-hacking, where advertisers have figured out over decades of experience, and research into human cognitive biases and failure modes, ways of presenting the same product, the same information, but getting a desired response out of the target.
>We accept this as a society because we tell ourselves that, as rational human beings, we have the choice to listen to or reject these messages. But modern understandings of cognitive biases show how advertising works on deeper levels, and even works despite us knowing about the tricks that are being used on us.
>The problem is that there's a severe imbalance. Advertisers are getting better and better at attacking -- at figuring out precisely what makes us tick, down to the level of pixels on an A/B-tested website. Are people getting any better at defending themselves? Are people being trained in dealing with their cognitive biases to make themselves resistant? Overall, I don't think so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Generally_more_st...
There has been only one brand that I can recall to have bought because of "hidden" advertising. Budweiser. I used to see the characters from my favorite series drinking it while eating pizza or other delicious food, and whenever I passed by it in the market I had this feeling that it seemed to taste real good. It's piss. I have never bought it again, and I was fully conscious that I thought it was good because I established a relation between it and people I like eating food I like while drinking it. Even if I had not seen this relation, I would not mind. I for one do not want to see the day when trying to sell your fish the best you can - without deceive - becomes immoral or illegal. Before someone says I'm being "tricked in a deeper level" and buying other stuff without noticing, I don't pick brands. I pick whatever is cheaper at the moment since I'm both frugal and unemployed.
"My, my, that's a spicy meatball"
It was an alka seltzer commercial, didn't help with their sales, but sales of spaghetti supposedly increased at the time. Just because the advertising didn't work for its intended purpose doesn't mean the advertising didn't work on you. The manufacture selling the ad wants you to go to the store and think about fish because there is a good chance you will buy their product. The manufacture buying expensive ads also tends to have the bright colored boxes in the store, they are placed at eye level, there are likely other ad campaigns in the store to direct you to their product. In the end there is a higher probability of 'an average person' buying their product over the other brands. The other fish brands get sales benefit at their competitors expense.
If you recall it, then they did not do a very good job at hiding it, right?
But before you do, I'll explain why I disagree.
Advertising is selling ideas. You are selling an idea right now. Just because your idea doesn't make you any money doesn't make it any more inherently moral or immoral.
The old cliche, time is money, is basically true. People are trying to maximize their time and more specifically, the value they get from their time.
That's why a cheeseburger commercial works! People like cheeseburgers and they consider the value of their time to be maximized while eating one (versus not eating or eating something else).
If there was no food advertising at all, do you really think people would eat so much differently? I'm sure they would care less about the brand. But are some cheeseburgers more evil than other cheeseburgers?
Also, do you not think people get better and worse at self-control? The advertisers are adjusting their "attacks" (quite a harsh word) because the same marketing doesn't work forever. People adjust their defenses. They develop new weaknesses and strengths.
When I was young and broke, advertising NEVER worked on me. Now it works on me all the time because I have money to spend. I hear McDonald's commercials all the time but I hate their food (except the fries), so I don't go there.
The companies who produce advertisements and the share holders who pressure those companies are made up of regular people. Those people are trying to maximize the value of their time just like you are. Their advertising messages serve to do just that.
That's not "inherently immoral" in my view.
People are trying to maximize their time and more specifically, the value they get from their time. You're treating this as not having moral weight/impact. This isn't a neutral statement to encourage.
But are some cheeseburgers more evil than other cheeseburgers? Yes.
The advertisers are adjusting their "attacks" (quite a harsh word) because the same marketing doesn't work forever. People adjust their defenses. They develop new weaknesses and strengths. This behavior is most notably seen elsewhere in biology. It's not as positive of a comparison as I think you intend to make.
The companies who produce advertisements and the share holders who pressure those companies are made up of regular people. System effects are pretty uncontroversially a thing. What one person does in isolation can be very different in impact from an aggregate of people able to bring vast resources to bear is able to do. One person with a gun and a goal is a robbery. One nation with guns and a goal is an invasion.
Advertising would have a better claim at moral neutrality if it were explicitly opt-in. Not You're on this site, so you implicitly give permission to be bombarded with ads, but "Would you like to see an ad about X? Here you go, a one-time ad about X."
The concept of privacy extending to bodily autonomy isn't super-controversial. There shouldn't be an exclusion of the mind from the body either. Minimizing external 'mental subroutines' is a virtuous goal.
Amazon's "Recommended for you" page is pretty good, and it's shown me some products I'm glad to own. If we imagine that model on steroids - a carefully cultivated webpage of products I want - I would check it regularly. Just a list of products with text and (optional) video explaining their features and why they're valuable to me.
If buying product X for Y dollars will improve my life, tell me and I'll do it consciously. The evil of advertising, then, is that every appeal to emotion, urgency, or social pressure is an implication that buying product X <i>isn't</i> going to improve my life, or at least that I should be prevented from deciding that rationally.
Modern advertising is a horrible combination of poor targeting and a race to the bottom.
Do you feel your mind is being controlled by advertisements? Because mine is not.
Maybe I'm some weird exception and maybe you think I'm naive. That's fine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--LIrN-5PQo
>Advertising is selling ideas.
More often it's advertising products and in a way that's manipulative.
>The companies who produce advertisements and the share holders who pressure those companies are made up of regular people. Those people are trying to maximize the value of their time just like you are.
That doesn't make their actions moral. A person robbing me to maximize the value of their time doesn't justify their action.
How long should they hear that you are selling fish tacos before deciding to avoid you? Should they ever have to hear you advertising your fish tacos?
Note that I said "avoid you" and not "prevent you from advertising your fish tacos". You're free to advertise to other people - but people who have decided they want nothing to do with fish tacos should be free to avoid you.
You provide no compelling reason for why people not interested in fish tacos shouldn't be able to avoid you and your fish taco advertisements.
[0] For the sake of argument I'll consider that selling fish tacos to people who desire fish tacos to be a morally just decision and entertain the thought that other people want fish tacos who may not have heard you are selling fish tacos, and thus benefit from your advertisement is also moral. Morals are relative and so nothing is "inherently moral" though I don't want to confuse you by disagreeing with you on this point.
I can tell you where anti-capitalistic thinking ends up and its not with everyone having more control over what propaganda they are bombarded with--just fewer sources.
We have the means to make advertisers shut up without actually silencing them. They're free to advertise to other people still.
Radio, TV, and web advertising, by contrast, all share the assumption that most people won't actually benefit from what's being presented (at least, won't benefit more than they would from some equivalent good). As such, the task is to ensure that we're preferentially aware of one brand or product, regardless of its merits.
Your last point is the scary one. Most people have no training of any sort in defending against cognitive failures. Most people's "can't trick me" tools amount to checking unit prices and serving sizes - hardly a strong defense against the combined wisdom of advertisers.
There's a real argument that modern advertising is basically an information hazard. Just hearing a product name a dozen times biases us regardless of our conscious efforts.
Religion is a coherent, tenacious, communal meme with unbelievably virulent reproductive mechanisms. A school is a selective breeding program. And advertisements are memetic WMDs, colossal infectious vectors with powerful memetic payloads. Your goal is to infect minds with your idea and to keep them infected long enough for them to take the actions dictated by your meme. Your meme has to be able to reproduce. Your meme has to be transmitted without variation. Your meme has to be selected.
Unfortunately for my budget, in all but the rarest circumstances advertising is quite a weak vector, seldom infectious, and requires constant reinforcement to have even a small effect.
> The prominent business analyst Roger Babson remarked in 1921 that "the war taught us the power of propaganda. Now when we have anything to sell the American people, we know how to sell it." Edward Bernays, too, noted that the "astounding success of propaganda during the war opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind." [1]
Corporate PR got into US schools in the '30s:
> Aware that the adult population was cynical about the corporate claims to "service", they aimed specifically at schools, where Young America, their weekly children's magazine that portrayed capitalism as dedicated to looking after them and their communities, was sent to thousands of teachers, who used them in classroom assignments. You and Industry, a series of booklets written in simple language, linked individual prosperity to unregulated industry, and was distributed to public libraries everywhere. One million booklets were distributed every two weeks by the US Chamber of Commerce, which, along with the giant industrial corporations, was also involved in the campaign. [1]
Get 'em while they're young, before they have the mental tools to defend themselves.
[1] Kerryn Higgs - "Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet"
Explains why socialism is so popular round these parts. (trollgrin)
Thank you!
No, it's like those informational commercials raising awareness for muscular dystrophy. Just because you now know it exists doesn't mean you've cured it or even treated it. This stuff works whether you know about it or not.
Mindblowing book if you haven't read it.
I'm starting to see a meme emerge here.
We had a choice at FastMail a few years ago now, when we were still providing free accounts and trying to use advertising - both to the user of the account and in the signature of outgoing email - to cover the operational costs.
In the end we decided to ditch the free accounts entirely, remove all advertising, and focus on providing the best possible experience we can to our paying customers.
Which is great, but we still need at least the second order advertising so that new people become aware that our product exists. We know we could grow a lot faster by throwing away our morals - instead we're experimenting very cautiously with placing advertisements while we continue to rely on word of mouth from happy customers as our main way to find new subscribers.
Now I know that FastMail is:
1. A paid service
2. A service that cares about their customers
3. A service that doesn't use advertisements to subsidize free accounts
>Advertisements are sometimes consensual too, as when people tune in to watch the superbowl ads. But ads often constitute a theft of attention, a non-consensual transmission of ideas. TV advertisements, email spam, billboards, flashing banner ads…they’re all there to steal a little of your attention. The chances of successful replication are lower of course, but the advertiser only needs a few successes to make it worth their while. Not to stretch the analogy too far, but this non-consensual transmission of ideas could aptly be described as a sort of “memetic assault”.
Tl;tr Ideas replicate only through attention, thus the battle for our attention.
After all, if all the parties in a war are pushing you to ‘join their side’ then they are trying very hard to make you forget that there is another side: your side, non-participation in the war, the ability to opt-out and to refuse to become an unpaid foot-soldier for any one party.
I think this is very difficult. E.g. we are all using technology and most of the tech that we can buy or get for 'free' are stakeholders in a war. I try to make my technology choices on technical merits, but often the perceived merits are influenced by what is said on the internet, simply because we can't try before we buy.
Also, I noticed the social pressure set up by such wars. E.g. I used to use MacBooks and iPhones, basically because the iPhone was so far ahead that it wan't even funny. Later, I switched from iPhone to Android, mostly because of the price/spec ratio. I noticed an immediate effect in some of my social circles: Apple users spoke as if I betrayed Apple, Android users shrugged with a comment like 'oh, I thought you were an Apple fanboy'. It's really surprising that it doesn't occur to people that you can switch due to technical or budget reasons.
In many countries this is not true and a 'right to return' within a certain period of time is proscribed by law unless the item is custom made for you or in auctions.
http://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/shopping/shopping-abroa...
Which is short for a product which will take some time to evaluate (e.g. another phone/computer with a different OS).
What really bothers me is that people feel the need to defend their choice, their investment and so they end up believing things and adopting an apologetic attitude just for the sake of thinking about their favorite company as being the good guys. And this is much more than the effects of marketing.
That's because branding contains all kinds of self-identification hooks.
"""If you read this far you should probably follow me on twitter""" with a Twitter icon and follower count.
Personal brands are brands, too and I'd count this as advertising as well.
But reading this page you weren't reading any other and if you tweet the link or pass it on then you've been successfully enlisted in my army ;)
See also:
I'm still playing code-golf on the stylesheet to make it smaller. 14 Kilo bytes transferred data on that page in total, load time start-to-end 150 ms or so depending on the speed of your connection.
I don't like bloat and I like my website to load fast. I also think that's more considerate of visitors on mobile who usually have to pay for their bandwidth and have less of it as well as third world countries. On top of that I don't like external resources controlled by others for tracking or other purposes beyond my control so no trackers, analytics or other bull-shit. It's finished when there is nothing left to remove while still keeping the look exactly like it is right now.
You don't need 'page transitions' when the pages load instantaneously :)
A bit of an aggrevating question but if you look at the site, why should it be more than 1 request? It's just styled text without any obvious images.
You're correct.
> The two data requests are actually references to images embedded in the HTML.
Yep.
> A bit of an aggrevating question but if you look at the site, why should it be more than 1 request?
100% agree with that. The problem is that most pages that are just 'text without any obvious images' clock in tens of requests and easily a megabyte+.
Before I finally found the time to switch blogging platforms this one was no different and it aggravated me no end that something that simple should require 600K of data and 18 requests. The new one (which was quite a bit of work to put together, it took more work to send less data) is much better in that sense.
There are two types of advertising, those that make you aware of a brand you were previously aware of, and those that try to burn one into your head. The first is ok, the more aware of competition we are the better the market is. It is the second one, the one that big brands participate in, that drives me crazy. I want my mind to be clear, not to have a jingle playing in it. I don't want a brand to pop into my head because I see it on a bottle in my peripheral vision.
This absolutely influences my choices too. No cable subscription. Adblock. I try to avoid services that are ad supported. Paying to remove ads in apps (I do not want to be served a brand when my alarm goes off).
As well, my decisions in building applications. I'm making a paid application with no ads hoping that users will be willing to pay a small price to protect their data from that system.
Thanks for writing about this. I feel it's a very important issue and that not having this bombardment should be a human right.
You will never be able to completely avoid advertising without taking yourself out of mainstream society, but you can avoid the most insidious parts, and you can try very hard to condition yourself against the rest of it.
The "second-order" advertising (e.g. critic recommendations, word of mouth) is much harder to deal with, especially if you believe that some people have good, unbiased, not-unduly-influenced opinions that you will benefit from listening to. My only recommendation is to curate the people whose opinions you listen to very carefully, and think hard about who they might be (possibly unwittingly) influenced by.
I am sympathetic to the argument that advertising pays for many of the things I like, particularly on the web. But I don't think that argument is compelling enough for it to be worth handing over control of my head.
Of course, advertising is only one factor, though it is probably the most important factor. Other systems competing for a share of your mind include religions, political parties and/or systems of political thought, philosophical systems, programming languages and/or communities (eg functional vs. object oriented), sports teams, national identities, racial identities, and more.
You may want to allow some of these access to a share of your mind (e.g. many people enjoy supporting a sports team, even when the rational part of their brain knows that their sports team isn't inherently better than any other). But for the most part, I think it's better to avoid falling into these traps.
The best exposition I can recall is one of Paul Graham's earlier essays, "Keep Your Identity Small"[0]. I would probably argue a similar point, but phrase it differently - keep your identity broad. Instead of thinking of yourself as a "Ruby programmer" or a "functional programmer" it is better to think of yourself as a "programmer" (and even better not to think of yourself as a programmer at all!). Instead of thinking of yourself as American, or Chinese, or as black, or white, try to think of yourself as a human. The broader you can make your identity, the less chance you have of accidentally falling prey to any of the theories competing for a space in your head.
Also, it's quite possible to watch TV shows for free without advertisements.
And, how do you get around product placement?
I don't claim to be immune to advertising, or know how to avoid all of it! But knowing you are susceptible to advertising is the first step towards not letting it influence you (too much).
But we rely on other people's opinion precisely to avoid thinking hard about everything, which would be overkill at best, and could even kill you at worst.
What you say is idyllic, but in practice we just go with the flow. It's easy and safe, from an evolutionary point of view. Choosing requires energy, time and attention [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice], and it has a big opportunity cost [http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/11/27/the-psychology-of-se...]. Do I need to thoroughly bet every "expert" that I listen to? In practice, this is infeasible. You definitely should do it for important stuff, but advertising covers many other unimportant things (such as yoghurt brands) for which it's economically optimal to just assume everyone is an expert.
Also, you approach advertising and human bias such as social proof as only bad things, and I think one needs to also consider the good side of it.
Even for things not so trivial as yoghurt, perhaps if I spend 40 hours choosing for the best car I can make an optimal decision; or perhaps choosing the one that is advertised the most is sufficient; I get a suboptimal choice but psychologically it's less demanding; socially is more acceptable (as I have the same car as the rest); heuristically it might even hold some intelligence (advertising power carries some information about financial strength, financial strength about solid business, and solid business about good products). Typically, you will shortlist a couple of cars and try them. It's a matter of being a satisficer and not a maximizer [http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-you-make-decisions-says-a-lo...].
In my mind, the process within your brain is very similar to digestion in its most biological meaning. Your functioning, your physical and mental form depends on what you eat, what amounts of nutritients you get from food. And it's a matter of every individual's choice how to feed your organism and what to demand in return.
I've come to the conclusion that advertising and the general thrust of mass communication with commercial interests is a powerful force. As such, I would rather it's power lie in the hands of everyone, not just the state or a religion or strong man. Advertising in the hands of a small family business gives that family the ability to have economic autonomy, and ensures that both purchasing power and political voice is distributed across wide, diverse populations rather than a few powerful elite that control the voice of everything.
Advertising, in the hands of the many, breeds democracy. Think of the world-bending power of the printing press. It effectively created the middle class in Europe. It's not just the economic activity it generated. It is the voice it gave to everyone who reached for it.
We can't put the genie back in the bottle. I think the way forward is to actually get better at connecting with each other in a decentralized mesh network of demand and desire. If enough people can share what they want in a trusted manner, we can live without ads and live into becoming a real global community.
It's also key in making us get into debt which then enslaves us.
Throw your TV out the window. Put adblock on.
I never help these people. Even on a site where I go via google and get their advert questions I do not read the question, I just look at the answers, try to find "I don't know" and click it.
Honestly that sounds impossible, practically dangerous.
Just go out in a park, people are walking billboards. Clothes, shoes, accessories they all seem to be plastered with logos. Along the road, billboards, many of them electronic flashing messages. Oh and logos over everything, everywhere. Big yellow arches. Communications companies love sticking their corporate image on every surface they can. Oh and a soda company that love putting red and white on everything they can.
I don't look at billboards. And anyway, looking at billboards while driving is dangerous.
But yes, it's often impossible to avoid seeing ads. But as I said, it's my practice to focus on deconstruction. I also tend to imagine how to revise them for humor ;)
Hell, look around you. How many items do you see that were NOT made by a corporation?
The brands I choose are a reflection of my personality. I shop at Wegmans instead of having groceries delivered because I like their quality and I can always run into people I know. I buy Apple products because they appear more integrated and polished than other consumer tech, and that is an important aspect of my personality. I'm not a shill (ok, I did work for Apple a few years ago), but rather I am so content with the brands I choose that I enjoy telling others about them.
I strongly disagree with that. Brands should not 'own people', brands should be at best an indicator of what you can expect from a product quality or service wise.
And what's being American (Ultra-American??) got to do with it?
> Hell, look around you. How many items do you see that were NOT made by a corporation?
That does not have anything to do with it. Having corporations produce goods is fine, having them try to hack our brains is not.
> The brands I choose are a reflection of my personality.
Please read 'The Space Merchants', one of my favorite books which is a frontal assault on that one sentence.
I've not read 'The Space Merchants' but I wonder how it assaults that sentence as I believe it is generally true. That's not to say that your chosen brands are a full representation of your personality, but they certainly cover a lot of it.
I shop at Albert Heijn, even though there's an Aldi, Lidle and Jumbo at roughly the same distance from my house. I'm sure that will tell you all sorts of things about my personality. Not that all people who go there are the same, but it'll still tell you something about me. Same goes for that my workstation runs Linux, and my laptop is a Mac (with dual boot linux).
I don't think now you know exactly what kind of person I am, but they are partial reflections of my personality. What I tolerate, and what I don't. What I prefer and what I disdain.
I'm definitely not saying that it is not true, I'm saying that it should not be true and that 'The Space Merchants' is an excellent book around the theme of why that should not be true and how the machinery behind the curtain works.
We're not exactly unable to influence how we think and act (within limits). Corporate brands are a fairly recent invention, there is no need to give them the amount of head-space that they are taking up.
No ads on youtube here so no mental gymnastics required. Probably one of ghostery, ublock or umatrix takes care of those for me.
The only way they can reliably serve those is when they splice them onto the actual video but that hasn't happened yet. On some sites pre-roll ads do cause the main video to be paused for as long as the ad would run otherwise.
Awareness of manipulation reduces its effectiveness.
Bringing in another meme, "I see the fnords!" ;)
Hofstadter's stuff has also been instructive.
Maybe it's better to start with I Am a Strange Loop.[0]
The paid content masquerading as journalism is particularly irritating. You can also see similar bias in the regular news stories. There are lots of tricks you can use to color the facts of a story to get the audience to respond in a particular way.
Lighting, framing, background, ambient sounds, subject placement--all these things can be employed for rhetorical effect. For instance, authority figures might be filmed at a slight upward angle from below the eye line, to make them appear slightly taller than anyone viewing the image. Fat people will be filmed from shoulders up if favored, from the waist up if unfavored, and from the neck down for vaguely defamatory stories. Pay attention to whose faces are shown with police mugshots, and whose faces are shown with license photos, military photos, school photos, or photos intended for other purposes. Watch out for different wording in captions and infobars. Listen for odd euphemisms that suddenly pop up in several places at once, or for different people who mysteriously say almost exactly the same things, as though they read from the same script.
It's almost harder to see anything that isn't a fnord.
It's the tricks that you describe that are the "fnords". And once you see them explicitly as tricks, they lose their power over you.
They constantly remind you that other people see you as an object to be manipulated, rather than as a person with its own individual motivations, thoughts, and opinions. And then you can also look at other people around you, and see that the same tricks still have power over them.
Good luck with that, but advertising knows you better than you know yourself.
Socrates knew the answer all that time ago. Who would have thought!