[picometer]

On the contrary, I think the author addresses this via the "cancer" metaphor:

> It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them.

> Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet.

I interpret the loose analogy as: if controlled advertising is like normal cell growth, then out-of-control resource-consuming advertising is like cancerous cell growth.

It's much easier to control advertising if its deployment has more friction, e.g. in a physical newspaper or billboard. On the internet, it's different. We haven't figured out how to control advertising on the internet yet, such that it doesn't have all the harmful side effects cited by the author.

I bet that if we do figure it out, it will be because we've made significant technological advancements in customer<=>product matchmaking* combined with an unrelenting focus on preserving humane values.

* This will also probably entail us, as a society, somehow reframing the way that customer<=>product matchmaking happens, putting more control into the customer's hands.

I think there is room for a bit of optimism here, but it means admitting that there are serious problems with the current system.

[ameister14]

Yeah, the problem with that is it's a completely flawed premise.

"It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them."

No, it isn't. It's an expansion of the idea that people are more likely to buy things they have heard of. If it was just to connect people with what they already want to buy, there would be no product development, no product roll-outs, because people don't know they want to buy something that has never existed before.

Also 'over time it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest' is a joke. It's been dishonest since the start. Criers lying about the effectiveness of some tonic, the attractiveness of some woman, the strength and wisdom of some leader.

[dwaltrip]

You are being a bit pedantic and misdirectional with that first quote. It's not an important thesis of the article that people already know about the products ahead of time.

In no way have you demonstrated a "completely flawed premise".

> It's been dishonest since the start

How is it a rebuttal to the say that advertising was always dishonest and manipulative...?

[ameister14]

Firstly, I don't think it's unnecessarily pedantic to say that the origins of advertising and what they are for are not what he says they are.

>How is it a rebuttal to the say that advertising was always dishonest and manipulative...?

Because if your argument is that advertising is becoming or has become dishonest and manipulative and it needs to be pulled back to what it was before, that is a lot weaker if advertising has always been dishonest and manipulative.

[Zeklandia]

> It's been dishonest since the start. Criers lying about the effectiveness of some tonic, the attractiveness of some woman, the strength and wisdom of some leader.

If those are harmful practices, why would someone turn them into a business venture? To profit off of evil? Making something into a profitable business does not cleanse an activity of morality.

There is also a significant difference between saying you have found a magic bullet for all illnesses and saying you have discovered a specific treatment for specific diseases and had the treatment studied by independent experts to characterize its positive and negative effects in detail. Trying to convince people they need something (advertising) is manipulative, but informing people of something they might need is not.

[davidivadavid]

That analogy applies to literally anything that can grow. Great. Startups are a cancer. Technology is a cancer.

[mrmuagi]

>> I interpret the loose analogy as: if controlled advertising is like normal cell growth, then out-of-control resource-consuming advertising is like cancerous cell growth.

> That analogy applies to literally anything that can grow. Great. Startups are a cancer. Technology is a cancer.

Not a logical flow in that analogy from my perspective. There is legitimately bad advertising out there that is blatantly malicious -- malware, popups, click jackers, spyware, non-consensual tracking, etc. -- that could be described by that to a tee. But the original article goes further and calls all advertising cancerous which is just plain dogmatic and frankly, extremist. Its extremely easy to put down advertising, but the truth is everything in life is advertising, since advertising is just a game of attention -- predating the internet and printed paper. I think an average internet denizen has a viewpoint somewhere between.

Then we have people who work in marketing, and might see the article and be opposed to the article. But I don't think that matters. Advertisement is not going to stop because of some article putting it in a undefended spotlight, it's a fulfilling prophecy from a game theory perspective precisely because you can't not advertise -- as the article notes.

[e_proxus]

That's like calling a growing baby a cancer. It's a reductio ad absurdum.

[antisemiotic]

On the internet, you can never be sure if your interlocutor isn't just a particularly pretentious teratoma.

[killjoywashere]

What makes the current system suboptimal? I mean, the markets are Dutch auctions, which penalize overvaluation. Compared to my youth, I'm definitely exposed to far less advertizing.

[randcraw]

If advertising truly is an arms race, then the cost is money and effort wasted on keeping up with the competition -- building an excess of supply because you lose if you can't keep up.

Of course there are also plenty of opportunity costs to wasting billions annually on the overpromotion of overpriced products that are consumed in excess...