> There is no "right" or "better" yet you keep saying advertising is worse somehow. Yes. Advertising is worse. It is a net loss to society, necessary for struc

> There is no "right" or "better" yet you keep saying advertising is worse somehow. Yes. Advertising is worse. It is a net loss to society, necessary for structural reasons of competition between companies but otherwise nearly valueless in comparison to the human energy and time devoted to it, and with significant negative externalities for all of society. There are many industries that are better than advertising. This is why it isn't rated as one of most people's favorite feel-good industries, even though you claim to think that's irrelevant. Take the money out of the equation and ask yourself how many people would still be working in advertising if we lived in some sort of Star Trek world where people decided what to do based on their abilities and what is best for society. > Every industry makes progress that is felt everywhere else. That is the point. Advertising has moved the entire internet into the commercial age and allowed the absolutely vast amount of content today, not to mention the success of every major business that you rely on and work for. You're arguing in defense of advertising, but I think you've painted yourself into a corner here. Yes, in some butterfly effect way, every industry affects everything else, but the scale is not always the same, and not every effect is positive. What would have happened to the Internet without advertising? We would still have e-commerce because it is tremendously efficient, but we wouldn't have banner ads, or spam. We would still have content, because people like to create and share, but we wouldn't have fake news sites (the ones that were built by teenagers for the ad revenue) or Buzzfeed, Outbrain, and all of the rest of the shit content that exists only to game advertising. Would we have Google? Youtube? Facebook? Maybe with different business models. If you look at the actual impact of advertising on society, it's not easy to argue that it is one of the better industries. So I can understand why you took the approach of trying to say that all industries are really the same, and anyway it's all just beliefs which you say don't matter. But that argument doesn't hold up. I'm curious where you would draw the line beyond which people in an industry become responsible for what their industry does, or if you draw that line at all.