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Just because advertising existed before, doesn't mean it has to continue to exist. Advertising is not a law of nature, it is a human invention and should be re

Just because advertising existed before, doesn't mean it has to continue to exist. Advertising is not a law of nature, it is a human invention and should be replaced by a new invention. Advertising is a very bad thing. It's a form of brainwashing in which people are manipulated or provoked to consume way beyond their needs. Its goal is to plant ideas into your head, without you even being aware of it. Curiously, the law of supply and demand in economics doesn't even mention the concept of advertising, yet it plays a huge role in demand creation. This 'inflated' demand provokes inflated supply, which creates even more demand (because everyone wants a popular thing), the feedback loop being limited by the speed of extraction of the natural resources and the capacity of the human body, but that can be augmented by increasing human population. There's too much shit produced in the world, too much waste created, too much useless information on the web and too many shitty websites and ecosystems, which exist solely due to advertising. I don't mind at all if they disappear or reduce in numbers. Good content and good products will find ways to survive. Bill Hicks https://vimeo.com/36651896 https://vimeo.com/36651896 George Carlin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtK_YsVInw8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtK_YsVInw8

dahdum 10y ago
Honestly that sounds like a pretty terrible world to me. New products, services, and experiences would come in at a trickle. Competition would take a nosedive, and incumbents could begin to price at whatever they please as the barriers to entry grow ever taller.
- cromwellian 10y ago
  Not only that, but advertising is a way for the few to subsidize the many. For every person who responds to an ad, 100 do not. That means people of little means get access to free content paid for by companies betting they can find other people to pay for it. I grew up poor. We didn't have cable TV, or any kind of subscription service, because we couldn't afford it. My parents would never had justified micro-paying for online content. But through advertising, a world of content beyond what was available in public libraries was made available to me. Advertising will never go away anymore than money or prices will go away, because even in post-scarcity goods world, people's attention span is still scarce, and anyone seeking to scale any business or organization in this world will need to reach people, and with so many people vying for attention, undoubtedly, differential time-preference and privacy-preferences between people will mean some people will trade one for the other, human diversity practically guarantees it.

dahdum 10y ago

Honestly that sounds like a pretty terrible world to me. New products, services, and experiences would come in at a trickle. Competition would take a nosedive, and incumbents could begin to price at whatever they please as the barriers to entry grow ever taller.

cromwellian 10y ago
Not only that, but advertising is a way for the few to subsidize the many. For every person who responds to an ad, 100 do not. That means people of little means get access to free content paid for by companies betting they can find other people to pay for it. I grew up poor. We didn't have cable TV, or any kind of subscription service, because we couldn't afford it. My parents would never had justified micro-paying for online content. But through advertising, a world of content beyond what was available in public libraries was made available to me. Advertising will never go away anymore than money or prices will go away, because even in post-scarcity goods world, people's attention span is still scarce, and anyone seeking to scale any business or organization in this world will need to reach people, and with so many people vying for attention, undoubtedly, differential time-preference and privacy-preferences between people will mean some people will trade one for the other, human diversity practically guarantees it.