I hope this isn’t a hot take, but after seeing the apparent endgame of “democracy” play out over the last 10 years or so, I’m fine with business being done using a completely contrasting system.
You should consider all possible systems then and include the possibility that the system your criticizing isn't a very good democracy or maybe is democratic in ineffectual ways.
shrug Maybe you know some good governments that I don’t. It’s just that all democracies I know about are in various stages of being hacked by bad actors in bad faith. I think it’s because none of them were developed in an environment that had the tools being used now to convince people of lies that are profitable for those doing the convincing. So they’re not particularly resilient to this stuff.
I don’t want to see any company that I want to succeed making decisions like a democracy does today.
You probably won't agree, because it's not a very charitable thing to say about marketers, sorry.
My position is that democracy works well when the will of the people gets translated into action in a way that still resembles what those people organically need.
Marketing is the process of tampering with that translation such that what actually happens benefits the marketers' customers, typically at the expense of the people.
Presumably there are practices and technologies that we could invest in which preserve this translation, but we haven't been investing in those. Instead we've been investing in marketing. We're building a world where you can spend money to shape public opinion, and that's a world that's toxic to democracy.
Perhaps there was a time when information about available goods and services was hard to come by. Maybe you legitimately needed somebody to get the word out. But I don't think we live in that world anymore.
In case you're not familliar with "the shoe event horizon":
> As a society sinks into depression, the people of the society need to cheer themselves up by buying themselves gifts, often shoes. It is also linked to the fact that when you are depressed you look down at your shoes and decide they aren't good enough quality so buy more expensive replacements. As more money is spent on shoes, more shoe shops are built, and the quality of the shoes begins to diminish as the demand for different types of shoes increases. This makes people buy more shoes.
> The above turns into a vicious cycle, causing other industries to decline.
> Eventually the titular Shoe Event Horizon is reached, where the only type of store economically viable to build is a shoe shop. At this point, society ceases to function, and the economy collapses, sending a world spiralling into ruin. In the case of Brontitall and Frogstar World B, the population forsook shoes and evolved into birds.
That's what is happening to us, except instead of shoes, it's ads. We're diminishing the legitimacy of making a good product or being a good leader, because an easier way to win is just pay to shape public opinion.
What you win isn't as good as it would have been if you competed on merit, but that doesn't matter because competing on merit is hard and your opposition isn't doing it.
So I'm saying that it's Marketing vs Democracy and Marketing is winning. Thus we're living in Marketing's endgame and not Democracy's endgame.
Would it surprise you that I largely agree with you? Or that I'm at least sympathetic?
For context, I just published a book called Insurgent Marketing. The central thesis is that the world is being shaped by propagandists, has been for a long time, and that the best (and most pragmatic) way to combat their influence is to play their game better than they do.
All businesses market themselves. Try running a business without doing anything remotely resembling marketing, and let me know how that goes. But that doesn't mean marketing (and marketers) should get a free pass for the damage many of us cause.
I think of marketing as neither positive nor negative in it itself, much like speaking or any form of communication. Some of us speak love. Some of us speak hate. Most of us spew garbage.
The problem isn't marketing, per se, but human greed. Both are as old as written history, and probably older. By blaming marketing, we excuse ourselves from taking responsibility of our role in shaping the world around us. The problem is "other people", those evil marketers. (Or politicians. Or bankers. Or the alt-right. Pick your bogeyman.)
Regarding this "Shoe Event Horizon", I hadn't heard of it before. My initial take is that as long as businesses keep getting bigger, quality will suffer. But we live in a time when it's easier (not easy, just easier) to launch a business of your own and produce shoes (or any product) of the quality you're looking for. Yes, most people will shop at Wal-Mart for the cheapest thing. Again, human greed, on behalf of both the corporation and the customers.
But thanks to technological advances, we're at a turning point where anyone with a smartphone can effectively market their goods. It's not the sole domain of corporations and governments anymore.
My hope, and my personal belief, is that more people will seize this opportunity so that we start to see an explosion of independent entrepreneurs producing products they're proud to stamp their names on.
It only surprises me a little. After all, I'm a software engineer and I have lots of criticisms about software engineering.
I like where you're trying to go re: independent entrepreneurs. If that were the norm I'd likely have no bone to pick with marketing.
I'm skeptical, though, because I think that having 2x as much money doesn't just make you 2x better at shaping the narrative as the other guy, it makes you 4x better. So power concentrates in the hands of the few, and it's their misbehavior that I take issue with.
> By blaming marketing, we excuse ourselves from taking responsibility of our role in shaping the world around us.
If all we do is blame, then yes. But I don't really blame marketing. As you say, something like it has been going on forever. I blame technologists like myself for building the web in a way that that is so easily abused by marketers and propagandists.
I want to see a world where it's considered rude to share a link data that contains ads, or malicious javascript, or anything else with ulterior motives. Instead, you should strip the malware and share the cleaned version.
That's an unreasonable ask in today's web. Ain't nobody got time to re-host cleaned copies of everything they want to talk about. But in a content-addressed world, it's a little different, users have a bit more control over which version gets circulated.
So I'm trying to build a web where it's easier for users keep it clean and harder for outsiders to corrupt. It's slow going, practically everything root-of-trust is off limits (dns, ssl, ...), but at least it feels like meaningful work.
I fully agree with you! Although I think it’s possible to market without violating data privacy. There’s a small but growing movement among marketers and advertisers to ditch all of that, to the best of our abilities.
I can’t help that Google and Facebook track everything, but I CAN avoid using those aspects of their tools.
I like to target based on content, not user profiles. Google Search ads, for example. Yes, Google is absolutely building profiles on everything you click, but we don’t have to use their remarketing tools and the like. We can simply say “show my ads on related content” or “show my ads on related searches”.
Do most marketers do that? Absolutely not. But I’d like to think the tide is turning, if only because of the public backlash.