[seasoup]

I think they are missing the biggest issue with advertising, which is it incentivizes businesses to create things for the sole purpose of drawing their attention to the advertising. Truth is less important than shock value. Utility less important than appearance of utility. Extremist rhetoric gathers more eyeballs than moderate views. Advertising's biggest negative effects are in how it manipulates people into manipulating people's attention.

[ericdykstra]

I take a little bit of issue with Truth is less important than shock value, which implies that news media is selling out their content for profit. The vast majority of news outlets don't make enough in ad revenue to stay afloat, and rely on outside funding. The news itself is the propaganda. Carlos Slim didn't put $250 million into the New York Times out of charity, he did it to buy influence.

[nihalot]

So hasn't NYT sold out for profit?

[ericdykstra]

The common conception is, like the person I responded to originally, that news outlets optimize for clicks and eyeballs in order to sell the most advertising. Many will cite "if it bleeds, it leads" as a mantra for news corporations that will do anything to get viewers.

That's just not how it works now, though. The narratives of the stories are what they're selling to you, and the advertising is secondary. It's something you can't unsee when you start noticing.

[eswat]

It’s a colossal move but we have to move the marketplace away from the current growth capitalism towards one of real utility.

[erentz]

While there are bigger changes we may need to make in terms of growth capitalism you refer to, for the simple subject at hand - advertising - there is a simple fix. Simply ban advertising in more places and ban more types of advertising. It's really not as heavy handed as it sounds. Bans on billboards in parts of the world show the way.

We can ban tracking of users. We can ban collection or sale or personal data. Things like this really aren't that crazy, it's how the world used to be up until a few years ago and the world still existed. Yes it might mean that some websites won't exist anymore. Other websites will be smaller and subscription based. Essentially your service will need to have some utility that at least a small portion of it's users will pay for. That's really not a big ask.

[mayniac]

I formed the opinion a while ago that we should go a step further: ban advertising entirely (not exactly a new idea, Bill Hicks came first [1]). Billboards, TV ads, newspaper ads, paid-for articles, promoted Instagram content, all internet ads, everything.

One of the main tenants of capitalism is that it naturally produces a meritocracy. Products which are of a higher quality or cheaper than their competitors should, in theory, sell better. Advertising in any form subverts that. More expensive and lower quality products can completely outsell competitors by out-advertising them, which fundamentally undermines capitalism. I do not believe that any limits can be imposed which will make a meaningful impact: banning individual forms of advertising which we think have gone too far will be a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Kill the industry entirely.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0

[zdragnar]

Unfortunately, I think your solution would effectively destroy democracy at any level other than mayor and dog-catcher in tiny cities.

Televised presidential debates? Those are advertising for party-sponsored candidates to the disadvantage of write-in candidates. If all publicity is good publicity, then the same holds true for all news articles about candidates running for any office. How is a newspaper editorial proclaiming that "Elected official X is bad for Y!" any different than a campaign ad in the same newspaper that "Elected official X is great for Y!"?

In one case, the newspaper makes money to put the content to be there, in the other, the newspaper makes money because the content is there.

The same goes for books: how is publishing a biography of someone not a form of advertisement for or against that person?

If I'm not mistaken, that happens to also be the heart of (at least one of the justices' deliberations on) the Citizens United case that declared corporate spending on elections to be covered under free speech.

[A2017U1]

All democracy should be grassroots. I find the concept that you simply can't win an election or a candidacy without a large warchest to be abhorrent.

We live in an age where media dissemination costs essentially zero. All politicians should have volunteers and not be able to raise donations nor spend a cent on advertising. Easier said than done yes, but still a far better outcome for democracy.

Let the best ideas flourish by themselves.

[ericdykstra]

I get the sentiment, but advertising is just a small part of how public perception is manipulated. Edward Bernays laid this out in his 1928 book, Propaganda, which is a how-to guide to indoctrination and manipulation of the public.

[dunstad]

What do you believe that people without 'merit' deserve?

[Draiken]

Isn't that impossible? I mean, capitalism is literally profits above everything else. Since evil marketing == profits, it will never change. It will only get worse.

[JohnFen]

It's not impossible at all. Math tells me that growth capitalism can't be maintained forever. The only question is when, and under what conditions, it will end.

[jodrellblank]

Why can't it be maintained forever?

If a house can be valued at $4,000 one year, and $40,000 a few decades later, and $200,0000 a few decades later, what's the reason that "value" can't keep increasing eternally? There's obviously no real substance to "the value" of a thing, only people's interpretation and desire for it, and there's plenty of "value" where there is no physical substance at all, like exclusivity, or emotional content of art, or novelty of experience. What math tells you there is anything which can be full or supplies run out?

[titzer]

Because any exponential growth rate will eventually reach the physical limitations (i.e. carrying capacity) of the underlying processes that produce goods, whether that is fish or molybdenum. Eventually, even if we can keep scaling exponential growth by spreading to other planets and stars, the growth is fundamentally limited by the speed of light, which means expansion in space is limited by O(n^3), and oh yes, even O(1.00000tiny^n) will eventually grow faster than O(n^3).

https://bollocks2012.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/the-greatest-s...

[jodrellblank]

Yes, I've watched Albert Bartlett's lecture several times; and if we get to talking about converting literally everything to pure computronium in a sphere expanding in all directions at approximately light speed, I admit that's a lot further into "forever" than I was imagining.

I was more thinking of the near-term future of resource scarcity, to make the point that "value" doesn't run out just because gold or oil extraction from the Earth runs out; people value intangible things and the economy runs on that being real value.

[opportune]

The real value has to increase, not just inflation. If the number goes up doesn't mean anything if everything goes up in equal amounts

[JohnFen]

That's not growth capitalism. Growth capitalism requires constant growth in both supply and demand. Increasing supply requires increasing the usage of raw materials (not to mention the waste generated through their use). The reality is that we don't have an unlimited supply of any raw materials, so growth cannot be maintained indefinitely.

[jodrellblank]

Increasing supply requires increasing the usage of raw materials

Recycling exists; Planet Earth has been doing it with organic matter for a couple of billion years without running out.