| 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. |
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.