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By this point in humanity's development, their brains had developed the ability to automatically block the parts of reality screaming for their attention, resul
by titzer 4y ago
By this point in humanity's development, their brains had developed the ability to automatically block the parts of reality screaming for their attention, results of an economic system based on coercive consumption. Attention grabbers bifurcated into subtle, nefarious actors intent on slipping past in-brain ad-blocking and the shouters, turning up the volume and animations to make ads impossible to not see. People were subtly crippled, partially blind, now. Yet it was, after all, the mind's defense mechanism against an increasingly hostile environment trying to rob it of its most precise resource: attention.
That was, of course, until they banned psychic violence in the "Goddamn, get out of my brain" amendment in the late 21st century.
- tinalumfoil 4y agoYou could say almost the same thing walking through an ancient Bazaar as sellers yell advertisements at you for their wares.
- manimino 4y agoEspecially if the Bazaar sellers followed you throughout the day through your work and leisure time.
- TremendousJudge 4y agoAnd took notes on your personal life and tried to sell you things they'd specifically think you'd want. And traded notes with other sellers.
- Double_a_92 4y agoIt's not uncommon in smaller rural villages to have sellers slowly drive through the streets and yell that they are selling things.
- jjoonathan 4y agoRight, but it probably sucked. We heavily romanticize it today, but we romanticize all sorts of things that were actually not so great.
- gonzo41 4y agoLike the middle ages. All of it sucked.
- bsedlm 4y agowrong. some of it sucked maybe even the majority of it (if you insist) but most of it is not all of it.
- notriddle 4y agoThe Black Death sucked. Most of the middle ages probably wasn't that bad, but the civilization-destroying plague destroyed civilization, and Renaissance-era propagandists exploited the living memory of the plague to make themselves look better.
- titzer 4y agoThe one constant throughout time is that things sucked if you were poor and rocked if you were rich.
- ajmurmann 4y agoI'd rather be middle class in a developed country now than any king 200 years ago. No amount of wealth could have gotten me modern medicine, especially anesthesia(!). Even stuff that's now trivial like pretty fresh tropical fruit or good food from other countries in general would have been very hard to come by. I have way more knowledge and entertainment at my finger tips than any medieval king could have ever dreamed of.
- titzer 4y agoTo each his own. But look at all the wonderful things that medieval kings commissioned to keep themselves occupied. Art, music, cathedrals, palaces, sports, plays, libraries, etc. The impact of a (generous) medieval king in terms of things others could eventually enjoy far outpaces this age's netflix consumption.
- MisterTea 4y agoThe sellers don't attempt to follow you around until you die.
- dredmorbius 4y agoThis started becoming common in shopping malls at some point during the aughts or 2010s. Usually accompanied by large in-corridor vendor displays which further obstructed already-crowded walkways. I stopped going to malls. High-street shopping districts still don't affect me to the same viscerally-negative degree. Even those which seem to be fairly consciously emulating and attempting to create a mall-like atmosphere. There's something about the open-air nature, and the fact that sounds attenuate rather than echoing off hard surfaces from all sides.
- CSMastermind 4y agoIn NYC you're mostly trained just to ignore people trying to get your attention. Or at least I was. I assume ignoring banner ads is a similar phenomenon.
- Poppys 4y agoOr the same about YouTubers, I'm fascinated that my kids don't find the constant yelling and over emoting annoying or at least suspicious.
- xeromal 4y agoYeah, if you live in a city, you're conditioned to ignore people trying to get your attention. Nothing is free. Don't believe it. I remember one time my little brother from my tiny hometown was visiting me in LA and I warned him to ignore the guy with the CDs. Don't let him put it in your hand and avoid eye contact. Told my sister the same thing but she didn't believe me and lost 20$ to a shitty mixtape in a millisecond. Those guys are slick. haha
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y agoIt happens to this day in many parts of the world (like mine).
- amelius 4y agoIt was sort of acceptable before the sellers in the Bazaar did a mind-melt that made them all effectively the same person.
- pessimizer 4y agoYou can't say the same thing about the Bazaar because that's why you went to the Bazaar. The shouts are what's going to be directing your entire journey. That's why ads aren't annoying in a trade magazine, because the ads are probably the reason you bought the trade magazine; the articles are commentary on the ads.
- anigbrowl 4y agoAccurate. And in a trade magazine, most the ads are making a value proposition of some sort; the ones that are purely based on emotional appeals tend to end up as industry memes, synonymous with vacuity.
- pessimizer 4y agoYup. A trade magazine ad is 100x more likely to be an undecorated copy of a datasheet than some vague emotional bullshit.
- anigbrowl 4y agoThat's exactly how it feels for me to look at the magazine rack in a drugstore, except that little to none of it is interesting.
- mschuster91 4y agoToo bad it's too long for r/WritingPrompts, would be an excellent starting point to draft a dystopian story from.
- yissp 4y agoI was totally expecting it to be a quote from a Gibson novel or something.
- SturgeonsLaw 4y agoI fed that comment to Sudowrite and here is where the AI went with it: ---------- As the struggle for survival had escalated over the past few millennia, the human brain had developed a miraculous defense mechanism: the psychic immune system. Simply said, the psychic immune system regulated the production of thoughts and emotions to a sustainable level. But with the new law came a new synthetic freedom to attack the underlying problem of an economy based on coercive consumption. Marketers and advertisers, wielding their mental weaponry, had been on the offensive, attacking minds of the world's citizens unabated. Psychic immune systems, no matter how strong, were helpless against the onslaught. Now that the psychic immune system had been weakened, everyone was a potential target for propaganda and mind control. In the following chaos, advertising mutated into a new form. The ban on psychic violence was not comprehensive, and included exemptions for images used in the furtherance of scientific, educational and artistic works. To survive, the advertisers had to learn to speak the language of art. They were the only ones left with the knowledge to speak it.
- qw 4y ago> The ban on psychic violence was not comprehensive, and included exemptions for images used in the furtherance of scientific, educational and artistic works. To survive, the advertisers had to learn to speak the language of art. I'm impressed by the AI. It's actually what would happen if this law was introduced. There would be exceptions, and the advertisers would find ways to exploit them.
- SilasX 4y ago
- wizofaus 4y agoQuote from a novel? Not one Google knows!
- walleeee 4y ago> late 21st century I hope we don't have to wait that long :/
- Silica6149 4y agoThis would be a good idea for a speculative fiction novel, about how constant access to the internet could drive our evolution.
- foobiekr 4y agoYou might enjoy “Hell’s Pavement” by Damon Knight.
- slowmovintarget 4y agoExistence by David Brin carried similar concepts. Augmented Reality infested with ads, where the kids in the know all ran blockers and basically opted out of a varying levels of consensus reality.
- ravi-delia 4y agoI won't lie, the fact that my brain seamlessly adblocks pages at no cost to myself mostly strikes me as cool. Like ideally you wouldn't have to, but God knows I'm half blind with everything I ignore regardless (including headers which seem irrelevant, most introductions, every third word, etc), so like who cares.
- toss1 4y agoYup; same here. It started with the earliest intrusive ads. At this point you could display a big purple banner on my screen and then 60 seconds later break into my office, put $60million on the desk, a gun to my head, and ask the content of the banner to keep the money and not get shot, and you'd likely have to shoot me. I'd like to have an eye tracking study done on my viewing because the brain has a separate center that controls direction of gaze that is not part of the visual cortex that processes sight. With a normal human subject looking at a normal scene, an eye-tracking study will reveal in a few seconds the outlines of everything in the scene, trees, doors, windows, people, etc. because the eye tracks the interesting parts and edges. Also relevant is the fact that only a tiny section at the center of the field of vision is actually in any kind of focus - you cannot read anything resembling normal sized type with your peripheral vision. There's also the phenomenon of 'blind sight' where with people who are cortically blind, i.e., their eyes and optic nerves work, but their visual cortex doesn't (e.g., due to head injury to that part of the brain) When shows a panel of vertical or horizontal stripes in a forced choice test (i.e., they can answer "vertical" or "horizontal" but not "I don't know"), they answer correctly at rates much higher than chance (iirc from courses a decades ago, ~70%). It was thought that they might be unconsciously extracting the H/V information from the area that still controlled the gaze direction. I'm wondering how many of us have 'ad-blindness' that isn't just filtering our visual input, but is actually guiding our gaze away from intrusive content so we literally never see it because the focal area never rests on it. Anyone more up to date on neuroscience have any info?
- digitalengineer 4y agoYes. Eyetracking is rather useless as what we see depends on the task we have to perform. We filter out what we don't need and don't even register it consciously. As such, general eye tracking studies can only tell you so much... Case in point: dancing gorilla awareness test, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo.
- throw10920 4y ago> psychic violence Ironically, worse than the deluge of advertising described in this comment is the attempted redefinition of language for political agendas as exemplified in this comment. Both are a form of psychic warfare - except that while I have seen non-intrusive and useful forms of advertising (i.e. product discovery, not trying to brainwash me into believing that Coca-Cola isn't unhealthy), I have never seen a non-malicious instance of this kind of hostile language redefinition.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago> hostile language redefinition par for the course, and embedded in all political discourse. Recently we started calling anyone proposing higher taxes a socialist, which indicates total illiteracy, as it has no bearing on centrally planned economy Laws that stop business defrauding customers are called 'consumer protection' and 'red tape', but when we protect business from individuals it's called being tought on crime. When you make an extra copy of a song, you commit intellectual property theft, and the state can prosecute you for free and put you in jail, and you are a criminal. When a company does not provide warranty you paid for, its called a business dispute and you have to hire your own lawyer.
- swayvil 4y agoHow would you characterize a powerful force that sucks you into an illusion and bends your will to its agenda? Feel free to wax florid and metaphorical.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoThe Walt Disney Company
- ttgurney 4y ago> When you make an extra copy of a song, you commit intellectual property theft Don't forget "piracy"--associating copying information with looting a ship and killing everyone on board. I'd love to see an end to this ridiculous modern usage of this word.