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The issue is that there is no difference between smell-water and "new thing that solves problems", under capitalism. If an advertisement can tell you about a re

The issue is that there is no difference between smell-water and "new thing that solves problems", under capitalism. If an advertisement can tell you about a real problem, and make you buy (or quarantine) then that's good, but an ad can just as easily create a problem, and there is no way to differentiate between those. So while ads may have done occasional good, or made someone's life a little better by offering a solution to a problem they had, it's also filled the ocean with plastic.

ineedasername 6y ago
"problems" have quite a wide spectrum. For some people, they perceive their problem to be that they don't smell the way they want to smell, or the way they think other people want them to smell. An ad that says "this smell water smells the way you want to smell" will help solve their problem. In this sense, to "solve" advertising, you can't just avoid advertising things that don't solve problems, you need to address the underlying causes for the perception of countless problems that may or may not actually be relevant/rational etc.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > For some people, they perceive their problem to be that they don't smell the way they want to smell, or the way they think other people want them to smell. This is one of the prime examples of problems that are explicitly created by advertising itself. What these example people perceive as a problem and the way they see it are product of generations of advertising. > you need to address the underlying causes for the perception of countless problems that may or may not actually be relevant/rational etc. There is nothing to address here. The market is an optimization system. As long as there exist a single exploitable loophole in the human psyche - and there always will be something[0] - advertising industry will evolve to find and exploit it. Lying to people, or making them feel bad and offering a product to relieve the emotional pain? All par for the course, tried and true methods. Advertising - and marketing in general - needs to be reined in, because it's a cancer on modern society. -- [0] - Even if we were emotion-free robots with perfect reasoning capabilities, there's only so much time an individual has to acquire and process information about any given thing. This limit, and prioritization in general, is exploitable too.
  - hvdfhbj 6y ago
    You seem to be suggesting that humans only prefer certain smells (eg a nice perfume) to others (dirt and sweat) because advertising has created this desire. I don't believe this is true.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      No, I'm suggesting that the problem of dirt and sweat smells is solvable with basic cosmetics, and doesn't require such ridiculously huge fragrance sector. What's propping it up is advertising - both directly, and by maintaining fragrance as social signalling mechanism.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    My point was rather that people always want things. Take away ads and that doesn't change: Long before ads people fought each other so one group could get the things the other group has. I'm not advocating for anything positive about ads, but when I say we need to address underlying causes, it's that thousands of years old behavioral pattern I mean. Destroy all ads, it will still be here.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      That's true. And I don't think we can really eliminate the underlying behavioral pattern entirely. But we can limit its consequences and channel it in productive ways. Advertising was never properly constrained, and it's grown far beyond its usefulness for society; I think cutting it down to manageable size would already be a huge win - after all, we ultimately care about negative consequences of advertising, not about the concept existing in the abstract.
      - ineedasername 6y ago
        I think we fundamentally agree, but I am also thinking about the greater system in which advertising exists. Ads drive consumerism, and we have an economy that is driven by consumerism. Technological advancement, economic stability and growth, it is paid for by the creation of economic value driven by consumerism. Societies with unstable economic systems do not stay stable themselves for very long unless the economic issues are addressed. So we cannot remove or drastically reduce advertising without it causing far-reaching second-order consequences that in turn have their own consequences. Less ads, people buy less stuff. Places that make stuff make less of it, or go out of business, and not as many people are needed to make that stuff. Businesses that supported those businesses suffer the same problem. Countries whose economies rely on us buying their stuff or having our stuff made in those countries suffer major economic losses. Lets take the consumer electronics industry. Lets say we just got rid of advertising for things to the point where everyone was willing to keep their stuff twice as long and buy less stuff they don't really need. That industry is about $1 Trillion/year. Let's say the second-order economic effects from support industries that depend on that are another $500 Billion. Still doesn't seem like a lot in the scheme of things, a little under 1% of the world GDP. But it's also not evenly distributed. Some countries are hit much harder. The economies of South Korea & China are hit particularly hard. And a part of China's stability is driven economic growth that supports propaganda promising increased quality of life. War may not break out, but small cracks start to appear. Do that same for the automobile industry, and that's about another $2.5 trillion out of the economy. So we cannot remove from this system a part we don't like and still have that system function the same way. I guess we can go into it eyes-open and say "it's worth the consequences" and go ahead with it. Or, and this is my preference, we can try to understand the system well enough to figure out how we can change the parts we don't like smoothly enough to avoid the worse of those consequences. None of this means we shouldn't complain about ads, and want them to go away. But if we're being practical about it, we don't just need a way to get rid of ads, we also need a way to patch that hole in the system.
harry8 6y ago
>The issue is that there is no difference between smell-water and "new thing that solves problems", under capitalism. Yeah, but not just capitalism. Anywhere you don't have unelected legislators imposing censorship on what they feel is good and wholesome and what isn't. Competing candidate's platform advertisements in the run-up to a union election in that union's newsletter isn't displaying a lot of capitalism and it's as true there as mop advertisements between talk-show segments on late night tv. (One or more of the candidates might be, gasp, wilfully and knowingly telling, omg, lies!) When the ads are creating a problem that is actually difficult to solve they're revealing a problem that is not the ads themselves. It's a crisis in education and the general public's ability (or the pereception of it) to do a decent job critical thinking and bs detecting. Making cruel fun of ridiculous fear-mongering accross society ought to be the answer to organised lying. When it isn't, getting Zuck & Jack to censor it is kind of a worrying development. Tough to get that back in the bottle even if it's initially done in support of causes you kinda like, coz you know that condition of it only being "for good", (where /you/ define good) will not last. Guaranteed. Never does.

ineedasername 6y ago

"problems" have quite a wide spectrum. For some people, they perceive their problem to be that they don't smell the way they want to smell, or the way they think other people want them to smell. An ad that says "this smell water smells the way you want to smell" will help solve their problem. In this sense, to "solve" advertising, you can't just avoid advertising things that don't solve problems, you need to address the underlying causes for the perception of countless problems that may or may not actually be relevant/rational etc.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> For some people, they perceive their problem to be that they don't smell the way they want to smell, or the way they think other people want them to smell. This is one of the prime examples of problems that are explicitly created by advertising itself. What these example people perceive as a problem and the way they see it are product of generations of advertising. > you need to address the underlying causes for the perception of countless problems that may or may not actually be relevant/rational etc. There is nothing to address here. The market is an optimization system. As long as there exist a single exploitable loophole in the human psyche - and there always will be something[0] - advertising industry will evolve to find and exploit it. Lying to people, or making them feel bad and offering a product to relieve the emotional pain? All par for the course, tried and true methods. Advertising - and marketing in general - needs to be reined in, because it's a cancer on modern society. -- [0] - Even if we were emotion-free robots with perfect reasoning capabilities, there's only so much time an individual has to acquire and process information about any given thing. This limit, and prioritization in general, is exploitable too.
- hvdfhbj 6y ago
  You seem to be suggesting that humans only prefer certain smells (eg a nice perfume) to others (dirt and sweat) because advertising has created this desire. I don't believe this is true.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    No, I'm suggesting that the problem of dirt and sweat smells is solvable with basic cosmetics, and doesn't require such ridiculously huge fragrance sector. What's propping it up is advertising - both directly, and by maintaining fragrance as social signalling mechanism.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  My point was rather that people always want things. Take away ads and that doesn't change: Long before ads people fought each other so one group could get the things the other group has. I'm not advocating for anything positive about ads, but when I say we need to address underlying causes, it's that thousands of years old behavioral pattern I mean. Destroy all ads, it will still be here.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    That's true. And I don't think we can really eliminate the underlying behavioral pattern entirely. But we can limit its consequences and channel it in productive ways. Advertising was never properly constrained, and it's grown far beyond its usefulness for society; I think cutting it down to manageable size would already be a huge win - after all, we ultimately care about negative consequences of advertising, not about the concept existing in the abstract.
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      I think we fundamentally agree, but I am also thinking about the greater system in which advertising exists. Ads drive consumerism, and we have an economy that is driven by consumerism. Technological advancement, economic stability and growth, it is paid for by the creation of economic value driven by consumerism. Societies with unstable economic systems do not stay stable themselves for very long unless the economic issues are addressed. So we cannot remove or drastically reduce advertising without it causing far-reaching second-order consequences that in turn have their own consequences. Less ads, people buy less stuff. Places that make stuff make less of it, or go out of business, and not as many people are needed to make that stuff. Businesses that supported those businesses suffer the same problem. Countries whose economies rely on us buying their stuff or having our stuff made in those countries suffer major economic losses. Lets take the consumer electronics industry. Lets say we just got rid of advertising for things to the point where everyone was willing to keep their stuff twice as long and buy less stuff they don't really need. That industry is about $1 Trillion/year. Let's say the second-order economic effects from support industries that depend on that are another $500 Billion. Still doesn't seem like a lot in the scheme of things, a little under 1% of the world GDP. But it's also not evenly distributed. Some countries are hit much harder. The economies of South Korea & China are hit particularly hard. And a part of China's stability is driven economic growth that supports propaganda promising increased quality of life. War may not break out, but small cracks start to appear. Do that same for the automobile industry, and that's about another $2.5 trillion out of the economy. So we cannot remove from this system a part we don't like and still have that system function the same way. I guess we can go into it eyes-open and say "it's worth the consequences" and go ahead with it. Or, and this is my preference, we can try to understand the system well enough to figure out how we can change the parts we don't like smoothly enough to avoid the worse of those consequences. None of this means we shouldn't complain about ads, and want them to go away. But if we're being practical about it, we don't just need a way to get rid of ads, we also need a way to patch that hole in the system.

harry8 6y ago

>The issue is that there is no difference between smell-water and "new thing that solves problems", under capitalism. Yeah, but not just capitalism. Anywhere you don't have unelected legislators imposing censorship on what they feel is good and wholesome and what isn't. Competing candidate's platform advertisements in the run-up to a union election in that union's newsletter isn't displaying a lot of capitalism and it's as true there as mop advertisements between talk-show segments on late night tv. (One or more of the candidates might be, gasp, wilfully and knowingly telling, omg, lies!) When the ads are creating a problem that is actually difficult to solve they're revealing a problem that is not the ads themselves. It's a crisis in education and the general public's ability (or the pereception of it) to do a decent job critical thinking and bs detecting. Making cruel fun of ridiculous fear-mongering accross society ought to be the answer to organised lying. When it isn't, getting Zuck & Jack to censor it is kind of a worrying development. Tough to get that back in the bottle even if it's initially done in support of causes you kinda like, coz you know that condition of it only being "for good", (where /you/ define good) will not last. Guaranteed. Never does.