7 ms·

I'm reposting this comment because I would like to open the discussion up beyond facebook and social media and into the reality that technology has provided mar

I'm reposting this comment because I would like to open the discussion up beyond facebook and social media and into the reality that technology has provided marketing with some pretty ridiculous tools. : I feel like you used to be able to avoid getting swindled by ignoring the swindler, ex. close the door to the saleman, or ignore the gypsy pear salesmen at the market. Today, marketing is engineered at such a level that it is difficult to acknowledge it's influence. That, and you are constantly bombarded by ads, either explicitly or implicitly. I don't think I am saying anything novel. I guess I am curious what this means about society and our political systems. People with power and wealth could still be toppled when you exposed them to the truth. How in the fuck does that even come close to happening today? How do you overcome marketing that is engineered to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities you are not even aware of? How do we patch our society and governing systems from being pwned? This isn't meant as a rant. I am curious, because to the best i can tell we don't live in a society where voting matters and we have a say in our governance.

Freak_NL 9y ago
> gypsy pear salesmen Did you mean pearl?
- oldsklgdfth 9y ago
  Nope, I meant pear - like the fruit. Maybe I got a little carried away and painted a silly picture. My point is that you can ignore a salesmen and he can't possibly be THAT good that he can swindle everyone. But modern ads, IMO, are designed for high levels of success. Much more difficult to deal with that on a personal level.
nopreserveroot 9y ago
I do not understand how anyone in 2018 finds the internet remotely usable without some form of ad blocker. This is how you ignore the modern salesman.
- kerng 9y ago
  Given the sophistication that we just now start to fully realize, adblockers probably dont help that much - i mean they get the obvious stuff out of the way, which is great. But there other forms of tracking (like super cookies), and others we might not even be aware of. The entire combination of what information some companies gather and exchange behind the scene is not that well understood at scale.
  - nopreserveroot 9y ago
    They can collect all they like, but if you never see any advertisements, it has little influence over you. I was not commenting on the violation of privacy these bad actors commit through the collection.
    - oldsklgdfth 9y ago
      It's easy to ignore the ads if you know they are ads. What about sponsered content in movies, music, tv, news, etc? We have seen all of these used. The drive to promote a message to someone goes waay beyond advertising.
      - nopreserveroot 9y ago
        This discussion is veering off course. Well made adblocking removes 'native' ads as well. Product placement is irrelevant to my point, as it does not utilize my stolen demographic info to drive marketing decisions. And though you delude yourself into thinking that you are successfully ignoring ads they are still influencing you in subtle ways.
      - dhimes 9y ago
        Exactly. Or that innocuous Medium post that just seems like some guy talking, when in fact it is a carefully crafted piece of psychological manipulation.
        oldsklgdfth 9y ago
disease 9y ago
>How do you overcome marketing that is engineered to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities you are not even aware of? I don't know that you can. I think we live in a great period of time to be a con man.
- baq 9y ago
  > I don't know that you can. I think we live in a great period of time to be a con man. yeah look at just about any elections in the past few years, not only the usual suspects like the post-soviet bloc...
fancyfacebook 9y ago
Gypsy is considered a slur by some nowadays, probably shouldn't drop that casually anymore. Sorry, I hate language police too, I'm not actually offended just letting you know in case you drop it in a meeting someday. I'd argue it's still possible to ignore it all, but you need three browser extensions and two mobile apps, a vpn, and probably a few other measures in place to pull it off. I feel like I'm sailing out to war with a well equipped battleship every time I launch my browser. This is dumb. How did we let technology get so bad? How did we let the web become completely subverted?
- oldsklgdfth 9y ago
  Technology is not bad. There are bad people that use it. Generic i know, but these technologies had the potential to provide solutions to some problems we as a world we face. Nuclear energy could have been proliferated to move to different energy source, instead it is was weaponized and used as a tool of politics. Cool for those guys i guess. The same goes for big data. We could have collected data on everyone and mined that shit to gain more insight into all sort of things from medical to societal information that you just can't see in studies. We could have learned so much. But instead some smart guys figured out how to use it to convince you that you need a wi-fi crockpot and gerrymander districts in their favor. Guns made killing people easier, ok. But you can't kill everyone in the world with one gun. Marketing used to be billboards, now it's in your life. The issue I have is that scale of the whole thing.
knodi 9y ago
When the truth is exposed we the people stop using that service. Lets face it US congress in this current form isn't going to do anything about it or pass laws to protect us (the users). So we have to hurt these corps where it hurts, their ad revenue. I have already deleted my FB account and am encouraging others to do the same.
gooseus 9y ago
> People with power and wealth could still be toppled when you exposed them to the truth. How in the fuck does that even come close to happening today? I have doubts that this happened regularly in the past, usually wealthy/powerful were allowed to be toppled by their enemies. I don't know the details of how Weinstein got toppled after so many years of being protected, but my gut says that the people who were protecting him no longer felt like it was worth it to continue. In revolutions, it's not the people that overthrow the dictator, it's the court/army which allow the people to overthrow the dictator, in order for them to install a new dictator[0]. > How do you overcome marketing that is engineered to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities you are not even aware of? Become more aware of your vulnerabilities so as to be aware of when you're being exploited. I recommend mindfulness and then making note of when you're being triggered in either a positive or negative way. If you know the enemy and yourself, you need not fear the result of a thousand battles[1]. > How do we patch our society and governing systems from being pwned? As these systems become more complex it requires more energy and complexity to maintain the systems, this additional complexity creates a larger attack surface and more internal fragility. Solving these problems requires more energy and complexity, exacerbating the problem and delivering diminishing returns on additional complexity. Systems should to be designed to collapse in a way that minimizes losses of knowledge (especially of why they collapsed) and with mechanisms to recover quickly using the accumulated knowledge to build more robustness into the new system, this would be an anti-fragile system. Centralized, too big to fail, institutions (Facebook, et al) are a major component of fragility in our current systems[2][3][4]. I think you can avoid the marketers and advertisers by learning how they operate, nobody gives away shit for free, so anybody that claims that is either a marketer/advertiser trying to lure you into a bait/switch or is using you as the product (TANSTAAFL). Be flexible and avoid lock-in to any single service/company, always be ready to drop a service when they start acting against your interests or the interests of society as a whole. [0] CGP Grey, Rules for Rulers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs [1] Sun Tzu, Art of War - https://sites.ualberta.ca/~enoch/Readings/The_Art_Of_War.pdf https://sites.ualberta.ca/~enoch/Readings/The_Art_Of_War.pdf [2] Joseph Tainter, Collapse of Complex Societies - http://wtf.tw/ref/tainter.pdf http://wtf.tw/ref/tainter.pdf [3] Nassim Taleb, Antifragile - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile [4] JP Crutchfield, The Hidden Fragility of Complex Systems - http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/FOCS.pdf http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/FOCS.pdf

Freak_NL 9y ago

> gypsy pear salesmen Did you mean pearl?

oldsklgdfth 9y ago
Nope, I meant pear - like the fruit. Maybe I got a little carried away and painted a silly picture. My point is that you can ignore a salesmen and he can't possibly be THAT good that he can swindle everyone. But modern ads, IMO, are designed for high levels of success. Much more difficult to deal with that on a personal level.

nopreserveroot 9y ago

I do not understand how anyone in 2018 finds the internet remotely usable without some form of ad blocker. This is how you ignore the modern salesman.

kerng 9y ago
Given the sophistication that we just now start to fully realize, adblockers probably dont help that much - i mean they get the obvious stuff out of the way, which is great. But there other forms of tracking (like super cookies), and others we might not even be aware of. The entire combination of what information some companies gather and exchange behind the scene is not that well understood at scale.
- nopreserveroot 9y ago
  They can collect all they like, but if you never see any advertisements, it has little influence over you. I was not commenting on the violation of privacy these bad actors commit through the collection.
  - oldsklgdfth 9y ago
    It's easy to ignore the ads if you know they are ads. What about sponsered content in movies, music, tv, news, etc? We have seen all of these used. The drive to promote a message to someone goes waay beyond advertising.
    - nopreserveroot 9y ago
      This discussion is veering off course. Well made adblocking removes 'native' ads as well. Product placement is irrelevant to my point, as it does not utilize my stolen demographic info to drive marketing decisions. And though you delude yourself into thinking that you are successfully ignoring ads they are still influencing you in subtle ways.
    - dhimes 9y ago
      Exactly. Or that innocuous Medium post that just seems like some guy talking, when in fact it is a carefully crafted piece of psychological manipulation.
      - oldsklgdfth 9y ago

disease 9y ago

>How do you overcome marketing that is engineered to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities you are not even aware of? I don't know that you can. I think we live in a great period of time to be a con man.

baq 9y ago
> I don't know that you can. I think we live in a great period of time to be a con man. yeah look at just about any elections in the past few years, not only the usual suspects like the post-soviet bloc...

fancyfacebook 9y ago

Gypsy is considered a slur by some nowadays, probably shouldn't drop that casually anymore. Sorry, I hate language police too, I'm not actually offended just letting you know in case you drop it in a meeting someday. I'd argue it's still possible to ignore it all, but you need three browser extensions and two mobile apps, a vpn, and probably a few other measures in place to pull it off. I feel like I'm sailing out to war with a well equipped battleship every time I launch my browser. This is dumb. How did we let technology get so bad? How did we let the web become completely subverted?

oldsklgdfth 9y ago
Technology is not bad. There are bad people that use it. Generic i know, but these technologies had the potential to provide solutions to some problems we as a world we face. Nuclear energy could have been proliferated to move to different energy source, instead it is was weaponized and used as a tool of politics. Cool for those guys i guess. The same goes for big data. We could have collected data on everyone and mined that shit to gain more insight into all sort of things from medical to societal information that you just can't see in studies. We could have learned so much. But instead some smart guys figured out how to use it to convince you that you need a wi-fi crockpot and gerrymander districts in their favor. Guns made killing people easier, ok. But you can't kill everyone in the world with one gun. Marketing used to be billboards, now it's in your life. The issue I have is that scale of the whole thing.

knodi 9y ago

When the truth is exposed we the people stop using that service. Lets face it US congress in this current form isn't going to do anything about it or pass laws to protect us (the users). So we have to hurt these corps where it hurts, their ad revenue. I have already deleted my FB account and am encouraging others to do the same.

gooseus 9y ago

> People with power and wealth could still be toppled when you exposed them to the truth. How in the fuck does that even come close to happening today? I have doubts that this happened regularly in the past, usually wealthy/powerful were allowed to be toppled by their enemies. I don't know the details of how Weinstein got toppled after so many years of being protected, but my gut says that the people who were protecting him no longer felt like it was worth it to continue. In revolutions, it's not the people that overthrow the dictator, it's the court/army which allow the people to overthrow the dictator, in order for them to install a new dictator[0]. > How do you overcome marketing that is engineered to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities you are not even aware of? Become more aware of your vulnerabilities so as to be aware of when you're being exploited. I recommend mindfulness and then making note of when you're being triggered in either a positive or negative way. If you know the enemy and yourself, you need not fear the result of a thousand battles[1]. > How do we patch our society and governing systems from being pwned? As these systems become more complex it requires more energy and complexity to maintain the systems, this additional complexity creates a larger attack surface and more internal fragility. Solving these problems requires more energy and complexity, exacerbating the problem and delivering diminishing returns on additional complexity. Systems should to be designed to collapse in a way that minimizes losses of knowledge (especially of why they collapsed) and with mechanisms to recover quickly using the accumulated knowledge to build more robustness into the new system, this would be an anti-fragile system. Centralized, too big to fail, institutions (Facebook, et al) are a major component of fragility in our current systems[2][3][4]. I think you can avoid the marketers and advertisers by learning how they operate, nobody gives away shit for free, so anybody that claims that is either a marketer/advertiser trying to lure you into a bait/switch or is using you as the product (TANSTAAFL). Be flexible and avoid lock-in to any single service/company, always be ready to drop a service when they start acting against your interests or the interests of society as a whole. [0] CGP Grey, Rules for Rulers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs [1] Sun Tzu, Art of War - https://sites.ualberta.ca/~enoch/Readings/The_Art_Of_War.pdf https://sites.ualberta.ca/~enoch/Readings/The_Art_Of_War.pdf [2] Joseph Tainter, Collapse of Complex Societies - http://wtf.tw/ref/tainter.pdf http://wtf.tw/ref/tainter.pdf [3] Nassim Taleb, Antifragile - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile [4] JP Crutchfield, The Hidden Fragility of Complex Systems - http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/FOCS.pdf http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/FOCS.pdf