[krapp]

Does it drain you that much?

It doesn't drain me. It's anecdotal but no one I know seems to be suffering from some psychological equivalent of battered-spouse syndrome due to the effects of advertising.

I don't even really see a lot of advertising that uses psychologically demeaning tactics, sneering and flippant insults and shaming and the like. Maybe I just don't notice them. But to me, demeaning your customers isn't likely to result in them being more likely to buy your product.

[fendrak]

Does it drain me entirely every day? No. Does it drain me some days or in particular instances? Certainly! Are some people far less resilient than I, and are perhaps drained to a larger degree? It stands to reason so.

To be clear I'm not saying any one advertiser is directly attempting to demean any particular person into buying their particular product, because clearly this isn't a winning strategy. It's the dose that makes the poison, however.

If one person walks up to me on the street and says "I've got some shirts that would make you look really slim" I would shrug it off as a weird happening. When the second person say "I used to look large, but this brand really made the pounds seem less obvious", I think it's been an odd day. When this continues to happen over the course of the month, perhaps I begin to think I'm looking a bit large around the middle.

Taken in isolation, no one instance is going to break me. Taken together, over a lifetime? That could change my own perception of myself in ways I can't even begin to estimate.

[krapp]

>When this continues to happen over the course of the month, perhaps I begin to think I'm looking a bit large around the middle.

Maybe you are. I certainly am. Are these theoretical shirt-sellers trying to convince you you're getting overweight to get you to buy a shirt for overweight people, or have they noticed you're overweight and have a shirt you might want to buy? One is clearly abusive but the other isn't.

[fendrak]

Indeed. I wonder though whether they could possibly know the answer to that question to a degree of confidence that would make them comfortable to pursue me endlessly to make their sale, and sell and trade my information and their inferences about me with their advertising partners in order for them to do the same, just with 1000 different variants of the above example.

And I wonder whether they're incentivized to care. In either cases above, my money is still green and smells like money, and makes the same number go up in their quarterly sales goal dashboard.

My point, and I gather the point of the Banksy quote, is that any one instance has a negligible effect on me, but that in aggregate I'm stuck staring down the barrel of a machine that has infinite stamina and resources that's attempting to wear me down, and is likely succeeding in ways I can't detect, nor have the power to detect if I wanted to.

If being exposed to this aggregate process all day makes me less patient with my family at night, to what degree is it worth it? If it makes me less willing to treat someone else with kindness, is it still justified if it's only a _little_ less willing?

No single advertiser is literally laughing at me while doing the backstroke across their vault full of money, but none of them needs to have such overtly malicious intent for the aggregate effect of the entire system on me to be just as corrosive.