[rwz]

I'm blown away by author's refusal to spend even a second to adversarially pressure-test his idea and try to imagine for a second what the world would realistically looked like with advertisement banned.

Like, the movie industry as a whole cannot exist without advertisement. Nobody would spend hundreds of millions of dollars on production of the scale of Odyssey, if there's no way to communicate to enough people about the movie's existence so they could come to a theater on a given date and pay to watch it.

How can someone take risks and spend time and capital inventing or building a new product if there's no reliable way to let potentially interested people know about it other than word of mouth? What about antisocial people who don't have friends and prefer to not talk to strangers? How are they supposed to ever find out about new shit that could change their lives?

Am I allowed to walk around saying "I really like product X" out loud? If not, then it feels like a freedom of speech problem. If yes, how can you be sure I'm not financially or some other way incentivized to do so by the company producing product X?

The fact that the author doesn't even attempt to engage with any of these questions makes articles like these really infuriating to read.

[davidivadavid]

Having working in that area a little bit, simple heuristics to know if someone has dumb ideas about advertising are whether they: a) think it's some kind of magical MK-Ultra-level mind control technology, b) think the business that pays them for a living could exist without any form of advertising. Once that's acknowledged as fantasy you generally get into goal-post moving territory about what is or isn't really advertising but that's purely academic.