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For all it’s follies, religion is evidence-based as an evolved meta-structure which motivates moral commitments to one’s community. We have taken such a superficial approach to religion that it’s worth has eluded us and we are paying the price.

Rest assured, I am not arguing for religion. But I will argue we cannot rinse ourselves of it in such a frivolous manner. Of course, advertising applies all the perceptual tools of the Roman-Catholic empire to unending profit and shameless hedonism.

Of course, the reasons to believe (2) and (3) were enacted as a means to a different end are bottomless. They were accomplished by undermining our cultural, emotional, existential perceptions of the world we live in and depleting our capacity to make intelligent decisions.

How was this accomplished? By advertising; the same things motivating Facebook’s entire business model. (and Google’s)

Our campaign financing norms are absurd, and have unruprisingly ruining our whole political complex.

It’s easy to overlook how much advertising works. We each have a limited supply of bandwidth for perceiving the world we live in. The result is a high demand for undermining that perception and using it to manipulative ends.

Authoritarian dystopias from books and films usually illustrate force because force is more immediately graphic. It also reflects the dismal state of a dystopian existence. Manipulation would look a lot different. Fear of manipulation is a fear of knowing someone else is trying to manipulate you.

We don’t regularly notice evidence of brands and companies trying to manipulate us, but most of us understand they are incentivized to.

I have worked in advertising for almost a decade and the truth is much worse. Although individuals who work at companies may be on your side, they get paid to spend their days doin what the company tells them to. Even managers and CEOS may be great people but when they go work, they are an employee. They have a duty to the company. And, the more efficient and skilled we get at manipulating members of society into behaviors which direct money our way, the employees will remain working for the company.

Are the employees immoral? Not from the perspective of the family they support. And whose opinion is more important? The family’s. It’s pretty simple that we cannot expect individual decisions to compete with those of the profit-motivated companies they work for.

Companies have adopted the attention, aesthetic principles, devotion and trust that people once reserved only for the church.

Private interests incentivize individuals to undermine our democratic mechanisms. If we let them, we are fools to expect anything else.

The only reason many other companies don’t have to have to explain themselves to governments is they are legally allowed to incentivize the opposite with capital. It’s called lobbying.

1. Rope in beginners with network effect, asset store, popular fear of C++.

2. Promote as many new features as possible, with only the most minimal discretion of whether the features actually work or help, anybody because once their demographic notices the ploy, they are too invested to leave. Ideally, they will build a few products for the asset store to make up for the dismal investment.

3. Throw enough dirt and some of it will stick. Mass promotion to beginners gives them enough sign-ups to keep going. Interesting how the pricing model means beginners can’t view the unpredictable performance issues until they start paying.

They consistently fail to prioritize the problems with memory management, lightmapping, and material standards that plague serious Unity devs. I have switched to using Unreal and it’s like night and day. I am super interested in Godot.

“Information” is a poor term for this discussion. “Data” draws the more useful distinction. I should have said “Advertising is not only information”. It would just be stubborn to insist that advertising is merely data sharing. I’ve been working in advertising most of my life and we do more data distortion than data sharing. We make a living on dishonesty and manipulation.

Advertising is not information. If it were merely data being exchanged, we wouldn't call it advertising. Advertising is the part that changes one's mind. See: https://www.etymonline.com/word/advert

>I mean, what exactly would you do, ban all communications?

Start by acknowledging the problem. Dodging it hasn't worked. Then we can learn more about it, how it works, the complications of it's side effects (like directly incentivizing privacy abuse) and come up with hopefully a sufficient and efficient solution. In short, we would do Problem Solving, very different from the other option of Not Trying.

Advertising is a strange beast. An emphasis on taking media theory seriously would do us a lot of good. I actually think the internet has led to more awareness of the issue but the decades prior gave us a dismal trajectory. Whether advertising itself is inherently bad for us is one thing. It's abstract side effects as a are another, and that is what we are concerned with here, but we have to first accept the the realities of the course we have been on in order to correct it.

Media, interface of advertising, is often thought of as frivolous. This is the same interface through which religion has enraptured it's audience for all the centuries. We can approach the issues in a rational way. Branding and advertising uses the same concepts in a different context and form. How branding and advertising affect us is a messier discussion than whether it does or not. We have accepted a life experience (emotions, desires, meanings) overwhelmingly defined by advertising. As such, our livelihoods are entangled with it and almost all of us depend on advertising to make a living. Maybe we should consider whether we are incentivized to be complacent about this core problem in the same way an individual living in an extremist religious society is incentivized to conform. I'm not sure.

Google is just more self-aware, which can change at any time. This is separate from their potential, and the potential is what matters here. We know Facebook had the potential to do damage for years, but we don't know how much damage they have done. As for what a company "seems", that is a sum of marketing and PR.

Why do I trust this article’s claims? I don’t necessarily. But, it reflects what I observe and my understandings of how humans live with one another.

America is a society optimized for individualism, but humans are social beings. This is basic stuff, but it’s undermined through propaganda and shame.

The end of collective bargaining is the end of the free market.

It's very easy to understand the negative realities of unions, but nobody starts a union for fun. It's risky business. Industries are classically given plenty of chances to adjust. Sometimes they even do. That's why it's called bargaining. Small businesses, products, brands, they all work on this same principle. Go complain to Consumer Reports!

You have explained why the game industry is able to take advantage of people, but nobody asked. It's well obvious. The question is whether you find the behavior acceptable. I cannot relate to punishing people for wanting a career in an $18.4 Billion industry. Maybe it is a privilege. Some would call it the American dream. Many colleges promote these degrees. Maybe that is where you should direct your anger, because the result of corporations exploiting labor is no mystery to history.

I might be wrong about some of this. It’s been a difficult subject to learn about.

So, how do you reconcile with the apparent correlation between a lack of faith in philosophical ideals and dishonesty, neoliberalism, lack of nuance, late capitalist culture, etc.? Do you reconcile this with simple unfettered individualism? It seems to me that this sort of cartooning of Socrates is more than unnecessary; of course it isn’t provable and would undermine the already limited value it could otherwise have, and which it seems our society would do best to use make use of.

I did not like reading this and won’t defend it on a general basis. It suffers from the same problem that undermines all identity related political efforts: a failure to acknowledge the integral role of capital disparities in every area of our lives.

It’s tough, and somewhat pointless, to debate the effects of affirmative action unless it can be isolated from the circumstances it seeks to defeat. We have by and large failed to accomplish that.

Isolating the maps of our societal relations (culture, tradition, economy, geography) is incredibly difficult, until we can offer equal opportunities in life, we will be fools to expect equal outcomes in particular segments.

Let us be humble and consider that Democrats are equally challenged in these considerations.

The tech was really interesting to photographers and I absolutely think it could be adopted if built into a reasonable camera design. It’s very normal for photographers to carry many cameras and I knew people to carry Lyros some but I think some of it was that the company had two different users if was designing for, which isn’t usually a problem with cameras but this was so different and novelty that it mattered. I really think if they just made super nerdy products without trying to satisfy the cell phone crowd, they could have built a niche following in photographers.