[mapt]

Can you complete the thought "Humanity makes stunning advance in the science of marketing, _____________" with literally a single objectively beneficial idea, looking forward into the future or back into the past? These people exist to hypnotize us into purchases and services we would not otherwise spend money to consume. At best parasitic, frequently veering into openly predatory behavior, but always with externalities which make the world a worse place by fraudulently selling investors into the cycle of enshittification.

They are witches. Suffer not one to live.

[squigz]

There's plenty wrong with marketing, but it's pretty foolish to think that there's no benefit to it at all. And calls for violence against people in that field? What?

[mapt]

What would you do if you became the focus of someone with mind control technology? What defenses exist? It is an existential threat, a seizure of your agency, by powers of uncertain intent, for which you have no recourse. It is a game-theoretical WMD - study into mind control tech is a field we cannot allow anyone to make progress on. Better a smoking crater with abundant collateral damage than a person who can create thralls out of human beings. It's a foundation not just of one neighborhood of science fiction, but of horror. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End_(Vinge_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renfield

Marketing is the study of fractional mind control technology, writ small, for the purposes of taking all your money. Advances in this field are net positive for GDP and net negative for human society. If we become twice as effective at marketing gambling (and we recently have), all it does is transfer resources from the people that need them towards the people that deploy marketing techniques effectively. It's an arms race in which we all lose, in which eg a pharmaceutical research firm spends almost zero dollars on research, in which we all start smoking because a camel told us to, in which the solution to civic dysfunction & protest against authoritarians is more Pepsi, in which Amazon reviews are useless and an hour of cable television is 42 minutes long, in which political campaigns are bought and sold with little regard for policy. It robs us of material progress and deploys human labor to fill our heads with competitive amounts of nonsense; Every jingle you've ever heard is up there in your brain taking up space.