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I'm with Bill Hicks when it comes to advertising and marketing. I adblock. I pirate. I don't use Facebook or other social networking sites. I don't want adver
by razakel 10y ago
I'm with Bill Hicks when it comes to advertising and marketing.
I adblock. I pirate. I don't use Facebook or other social networking sites.
I don't want advertising in my life. It's propaganda. It shits in your head.
If there's anybody reading this who works in those industries: you thought Generation X was cynical?
- mozumder 10y agoBill Hicks never figured out the meaning of life. The entire purpose of life is to market. You get up in the morning and brush your teeth so that you're more marketable than the slob that doesn't. Everything you do can be traced back to marketing. The more people understand that, the better off they will be at handling life.
- razakel 10y ago>The entire purpose of life is to market. Maybe my target market isn't slavish devotees of a vapid consumerist culture who assert their identity with commercial brands?
- mozumder 10y agoYou know your marketing yourself right now with your statements to the audience here, right? An audience built around silicon valley's capitalist culture...
- razakel 10y ago>You know your marketing yourself right now with your statements to the audience here, right? I understand your sentiment, but I believe that's a toxic worldview. >An audience built around silicon valley's capitalist culture... I am criticising consumerism, not capitalism.
- sooheon 10y agoInteresting, what do you think is the distinction? The greatest contributor to flourishing capitalism is strong consumerism. And the biggest driver of the consumerist mind is capitalist manipulation. They feed off of each other, and are so intertwined that it's hardly useful to refer to one without acknowledging that it comes with the other.
- cmdrfred 10y ago>The greatest contributor to flourishing capitalism is strong consumerism. Not if you ask a businessman or a politician. Boosting the supply side is how you get to a robust economy according to them.
- sooheon 10y agoThe businesses that lobby politicians to hold these positions are simply using the most powerful marketing tools at their disposal allowed under capitalism: money.
- adrianN 10y agoThat depends on your definition of "flourishing".
- razakel 10y ago>Interesting, what do you think is the distinction? The greatest contributor to flourishing capitalism is strong consumerism. And the biggest driver of the consumerist mind is capitalist manipulation. They feed off of each other, and are so intertwined that it's hardly useful to refer to one without acknowledging that it comes with the other. It would be disingenuous to pretend the two aren't highly interrelated, but we are still discussing two separate phenomena. The distinction, I think, can be summarised by "build a better mousetrap". I'll try the new product and mention it to my friends. Soon everyone is buying the new mousetrap. That's competition at work. You don't need a multi-million ad campaign carrying an implicit, or perhaps explicit, message of "if you don't buy <new mousetrap> your wife will leave you/women won't find you attractive/<insert any other insecurity>". Consumerism is the encouragement of consumption by encouraging vanity and appealing to emotional insecurities. Fundamentally I object to the application of psychological science to the manipulation of society in order to extract profit by causing psychological distress.
- shiz 10y agoSince you have obviously figured this whole life-marketing thing out, what am I marketing when I am taking a shit or picking my nose?
- walterstucco 10y agoI don't brush my teeth every morning. And I still manage to have a life that is more than enjoyable
- celticninja 10y agoI brush my teeth so that they last longer and I can chew food longer and thus stay alive longer, marketing only comes into it for people in marketing.
- Angostura 10y agoWhich toothpaste do you use? And how did you come to choose that brand?
- rndstr 10y agoI use the most inexpensive whose taste I like
- ruffel 10y agoThe one that was on offer in the supermarket.
- realusername 10y agoI check the Fluor ppm and pick the most inexpensive one with the highest ppm personally
- vincnetas 10y agoMy wife chooses for me :)
- bardworx 10y agoYou are getting downvoted because people feel like it's not adding to the conversation, however, I disagree. I also use toothpaste, and other products,that my wife chose and came to the realization that even though I might not be directly marketed to, I am still reached by a so-called influencer, who has way more power then some random instagram person or ad. I wouldn't be surprised to find more Marketing dollars are spent on advertising to women (probably, no proof, just an assumption). Since if they can target the person who purchases for the family, the company adds multiple consumers, regardless if they realize it or not. To me, that's an interesting introspective and your comment did contribute. Thanks.
- celticninja 10y agoI brush my teeth so that they last longer and I can chew food longer and thus stay alive longer, marketing only comes into it for people in marketing.
- Inconel 10y agoI brush my teeth several times a day mostly because I had a cavity once when I was a kid and didn't particularly like the sound the drill at the dentist's office made. That and I enjoy various types of jerky and hope to continue enjoying it for the foreseeable future.
- zeroer 10y ago> You get up in the morning and brush your teeth so that you're more marketable than the slob that doesn't. Speak for yourself.
- padolsey 10y agoJust because we are biologically tuned to "market" ourselves, for leverage in survival/gene-spreading, I don't think it's correct to state that the "entire purpose" of life is to market oneself. Nor does it make sense to say all actions are rooted in this need. In-fact, it seems _most_ actions are in service of other basic or secondary needs. Where is the marketability in taking a piss? Or reading a novel? Or taking the dog for a walk?
- hmmwell 10y ago> The entire purpose of life is to market. The sun doesn't give off free energy to market itself to anyone, and even the the most succesful whore will end up dead. The main difference will be having been a whore.
- iaskwhy 10y agoThe purpose is not being marketed, is having sex. You market yourself so you can have better sex. At least that's what some people say, like when they claim Zuckerberg started The Facebook so people could get easily laid. I've also had interesting conversations saying the purpose is not sex but power. We do stuff the way we do because that might get us more power. Sociology is really interesting.
- JonnieCache 10y agoLife has many disparate potential sources of meaning, and the urge to systematize everything along one dimension represents ideology at work and should be avoided. Those who go around proclaiming everything to be only about sex or only about money or only about power wish to make it so. Of course natural selection is true, and we ultimately strive to pass on our genes but the mechanisms we've developed that motivate/enable us to do so are absurdly complex and admit much more than mere power games and peacock strutting.
- mlrtime 10y ago“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” ― Oscar Wilde
- at612 10y ago> Zuckerberg started The Facebook so people could get easily laid. Off to create a Facebook account, back in a moment. [ I wish this had been explained to me back in 2008 when it first came out and I couldn't see any use for it. ]
- apatters 10y agoAnd yet the most creative and inspiring marketing is paradoxically that which is not done for marketing's sake: in other words, the authentic. You can be a marketer or you can be yourself and I know which one I want to be.
- ThomPete 10y agoIt's inspiring and creative because it's different, right until it isn't anymore. You can't escape the marketing. Or as a famous Danish artist once said "I paint to get pussy"
- brbrodude 10y agoAs Nassim Taleb says, "the map is not the territory", just because you can say a lot of things are "kind of like a market", it does not, in any way, means that everything is a market, for example, higiene exists before market, nature exists before market, just because you can draw parallels it doesn't mean you've figured everything out. In the age of machines people wanted to think as if everything was like a machine, then in the age of systems they think everything is "just a system", then "everything is market".. This is faulty cognition, IMHO, in other words: fallacy.
- applecore 10y agoTaleb may have repeated it, but the expression "the map is not the territory"[1] first appeared decades earlier in a paper by Alfred Korzybski[2], developer of the self-improvement movement known as general semantics[3]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics
- Angostura 10y agoYou should check out the 'Ultimate Bill Hicks' DVD available. Amazon have got it at reduced price at the moment and it is excellent. I laughed and laughed.
- carrot 10y agoIronic that you literally threw an ad right in the parent's face through this simple comment.
- j1vms 10y agoHe doesn't want advertising in his life, but guy goes and immediately "shits in his head" using Bill Hicks of all people!
- brbrodude 10y agoThat's not an ad, that's genuine interaction. The poster is not an actor(or someone trying to act a role), not an algorythm, not a corporation, not a marketer or salesperson. We must learn to discern between stuff if we want to consider ourselves "real-worlders" or whatever. If you get the concepts mixed up in your mind then your discernment gets distorted and you start conflating what's authentic and what's artificial. That's why it shits in your head.
- brainfire 10y agoSeemingly-genuine comments like that could be a plausible future step for escalation of advertising. I'd guess there are people who would "rent" access to their active social media accounts to a company operating a bot capable of writing subtle "recommendation"-style comments. Sort of a merger of blog-comment-spam-bots and paid "influencer" posts.
- brbrodude 10y agoIt's certainly possible, although repulsive.
- 10y ago
- ikeyany 10y agoOoh, he's playing the cynicism angle--that's a hot market right now. Very huge potential for profit.
- ladytron 10y agoI love Hacker News.
- mememachine 10y agoshouldnt be afraid of information friend, cant hurt you. closing yourself off is bad for you
- tvanantwerp 10y agoSeparating signal from noise is work. Dealing with new information is not costless, and there comes a point when closing yourself off is probably the best option.