To me, it is worrying how much human effort we're investing into advertising as a whole. The top minds of our generations, backed by billions of dollars in funding, are working on increasingly manipulative ways to capture people's attention and use it to generate profit.
We're constantly getting better at it; who knows what path this will lead us down. I suspect it might not be the one we had wished for.
It seems like a larger and larger percentage of our economy is being taken up by parasitic sectors that have a net negative value for society. Advertising, soda, highly processed food, credit cards, car dealerships, (most) sales people, etc. We'd probably be better of as a society paying these people to do nothing than to do what they do now; we'd be even better off if we paid them to do something actually productive.
There's a lot of talk about what impact mass automation will have on our society, and what kind of work people will have once they're replaced by machines. This is always framed in such a way as if it's a problem we're about to face, but it looks like it's actually a trend that's been going on for decades (at least). And the answer is that, unless there is an effort to direct these people towards productive ends, many will continue to flow to these parasitic sectors.
You'd be smart to accuse me, here, of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but the core parasite is Capital, which siphons value from the labor of mankind in a Byzantine labyrinth of social games meant to obscure this essential truth.
But capital through markets is how we get around the "labyrinth" that is the economic calculation problem. I think it's like complaining about how you lose power when you transfer electricity over wires. It's true, but there's always going to be a transmission cost.
>The Mises Institute has put it up for free, which is surely off-message but whatever.
Ah, a clearly well-rationed article is at foot. Here’s a hint, if someone isn’t able to model free things in their understanding of capitalist systems, they don’t understand them enough to critique them.
Anyway, the rest of that “critique” isn’t actually a critique. It’s just goal post shifting to the point where it assumes socialist systems by nature have perfect demand discovery mechanisms (none of which are alluded to) and can never produce a surplus. Conveniently, it follows that clearly socialist systems are perfectly efficient and do not allow surpluses because they have this neat built in mechanism of perfect demand discovery.
So it’s “not true socialism” if there are any inefficiencies in food production, energy production, etc because “true socialism” has a mechanism by which everyone gets exactly what they need.
Did someone inform the author of this that such a mechanism has never existed and the most efficient mechanism we have discovered so far is markets?
> the most efficient mechanism we have discovered so far is markets?
This thread originated in a discussion of the detriments of advertising, I would remind you. The "markets" we're currently employing to "discover demand" find greater profit in engendering it.
I know people love to parrot this libertarian talking without really thinking it through. Generally young, logic-minded people that end up following some kind of Randianism and cannot fathom the possibility that people are, by and large, basically bastards to each other.
The truth is the government is a social contract designed to actually protect people from violence. Yeah, it taxes people. But it also protects them from mobsters and racketeers and is at least supposed to offer a chance to poor people. A libertarian paradise dooms the poor to never be able to afford education and basic necessities unless they sacrifice through slave wages. In a libertarian paradise, the rich run amok, and children of rich people start with an insane advantage that no amount of smartness or slaving away will ever erase. And no, by and large, people are not Howard Roarks in hiding. Most people are within 2 sigma of the mean--i.e. not geniuses. In a situation with no social contract, the 5 sigmas both in terms of intelligence and aggressiveness prey on and suppress the rest. Inequality skyrockets. It ultimate results in violent revolutions, like France. In short, libertarianism is madness.
In general it'd be great to have a discussion about these things, but since this comment is just some non-thinking spouting of absurdity, I'll just leave it here. I already said too much.
But your example of the French Revolution detracts from your argument, because that occurred in the context of a strong monarchist government, not a libertarian dystopia.
I do think the period directly following the revolution in which the rival factions fought over the country is a context of a libertarian dystopia, if only a glimpse of one.
Another way would be to say that effective government ensures that the rule of law is maintained, that contracts are enforced, that the environment is protected, that trade is conducted efficiently etc ..
Granted, none of the above are absolute, some governments will do better than others and some will abuse their power.
What is the alternative? Somalia in the late nineties? All government functions handled by corporations? something else?
In a system where we (richly) reward people who buy and sell securities back and forth, or who manipulate people into wanting to buy mountains of crap (with lovely side effects such as the above post mentions), or produce clothing and food, transport them half the world, then set it on fire, when the system rewards these behaviours then of course this is exactly what will happen.
It's not like there's some central planning committee that sits down and decides what to pay everyone.
Citizens decide where to spend their money -- at least the part that the government doesn't tax and spend for them -- and all of these industries you name exist and pay well because people value them and choose to spend their money on them.
> and all of these industries you name exist and pay well because people value them and choose to spend their money on them.
I think his point is, these industries are not valuable to people; they are just aggressive at extract wealth from other people. In net, they have a negative value (from his perspective) and thus society will be better without them.
No one's being forced to buy soda, eat highly processed food, have a credit card, or use a car dealership. Yet people voluntarily choose to spend their money on these things, so they obviously do find some value in them.
When you characterise them as 'not valuable to people', you're making a prescriptive moral judgement (and not one I necessarily disagree with), as opposed to a descriptive observation of where free agents choose to spend their money.
I don't drink soda or eat highly processed food, I don't have a credit card, and I didn't buy my car from a dealership. But the fact that many people choose to spend their money on all these things tells me that those people do see value in them, and I don't think my preferences are right and theirs are wrong.
If the advertising industry is such a powerful force of mind control that we literally have no free will anymore, then why did they let _you_ figure it out?
You're giving them way too much credit. Do you notice how the world is full of failed advertising campaigns? How the world is full of failed companies and failed products that the evil geniuses in advertising weren't able to make people buy?
There's a world of difference between 'we can use some principles from psychology to try to exploit people's fears and make them more interested in our product' and 'our unlimited powers of persuasion make free will an illusion'. And despite the hype, most big-data, machine learning, 'downloading your thoughts from Facebook before you've even had them'-style targeted advertising amounts to showing you ads for the thing that you just bought.
Almost correct. Governments have a strong say in what is incentivized and what is not through taxation and monetary policy.
The people running government are (in most places) elected by the people but that is affected by political manipulation, gerrymandering and politicians often represent the moneyed interests that got them into power.
Governments have a strong say in what is incentivized and what is not through taxation and monetary policy.
Governments have similar competition problems as individuals and companies. If taxes are raised too much, the people with money will take it to other countries with more lenient tax systems.
And unpopular policies will cause other political parties to seize the power from their promoters. Money and advertisement also plays a part in campaigns.
Finally, if you try to extract competition from politics, you get a tyranny.
People on HN likes very much to write comments with the "we as a society" or "we as a species" or "we should do that", but there is really no such we.
Okay, explain to me how the government is incentivising 'advertising, soda, highly processed food, credit cards, car dealerships, (most) sales people, etc.' through taxation and monetary policy.
How about the chicken tax [1]? Or how any truck is allowed to bypass CAFE standards for emissions [2]? Or the fact that if a truck or SUV is used for "business" it can be written off completely over time as opposed to a limited amount [3]?
That's off the top of my head. Taxation is control. And the wealthy & powerful have undue influence over who chooses what gets taxed - using the above methods I referenced.
Well, to start, corn is highly subsidized. This means corn syrup is cheaper than it should be, making soda and most processed foods cheaper than healthier options.
Low quality ingredients will always be cheaper than high quality ingredients, regardless of subsidies and taxes. That's an unfortunate fact of life, not a government decision.
And there's nothing to stop people buying diet soda.
Wrt soda, and highly processed food, I think that FDA and similar agencies could make an effort to evaluate the consequences of prolonged consumption of such food and figure out what quantities are safe. They could require proper labeling and not allow children to buy such foods (as with cigarettes and alcohol).
For credit cards, maybe he meant that in some countries, where individuals cannot default, banks are comfortable taking too much risk and advertise credits aggressively. I have personally witnessed several victims of this (yes, people can be dumb).
Wrt "car dealerships and (most) sales people", it is probably not affecting the individual so much, but if you look closer at "enterprise sales" and government spending, you will certainly notice some "interesting" practices. However, I think that this is a lot harder to solve than the other case above, because it is not so directly aimed at the masses.
But you're talking about guiding your children, not observing your neighbours. This is 'how do I make other people choose the same things I would choose', not 'people aren't free to make their own choices because [the government somehow]'; it's not 'people aren't free to choose', it's 'I don't like what they choose'.
I also don't like what they choose, and I don't disagree with any of your suggestions; I think these would all be good ideas. But you're asking for less freedom, not more.
That's the problem, to a large extent we don't because of the pervasive manipulation the advertising industry does to us, the industries reason for existence is literally undermine our free will.
What percentage of the products that you see advertised every day do you buy? 100%? 50%? I'm guessing it's probably less than 1%.
No one would argue that businesses spend a lot of money on targeted advertising, and targeting is something that marketers are constantly trying to refine.
What is targeting? Showing things to the people who are most likely to buy them.
In the world you're describing, targeting wouldn't exist, because the mind control techniques of advertising have made free will a thing of the past, and people will just buy whatever the all powerful advertising agencies tell them to buy.
The value of soda for example is that some people like the taste and sensation. It brings them a little bit of joy. Not everything has to be coldly utilitarian.
There was a scientist who's work was to find the optimum amount of sugar to put in soda - the "bliss point" that would get people to keep drinking it without getting fed up with the sweetness - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)
You aren't making any decisions when you enjoy soda: a large corporation paid some people to conduct studies and ensure that you can't not enjoy it on a basal level.
Of course it's not bliss - it's not good for you in anyway. In fact we know - completely - that it has massive long term deleterious effects on your overall happiness - because it's not optimized to actually "make you happy" - it's optimized to keep you drinking it.
I disagree. You can make anything seem valuable by defining value in the most cynically narrow terms possible like that.
By that same logic, heroin has great value in society, and hitmen and we shouldn't be trying to stop these things. However we do, because the popularity of the product is no measure of its contribution to society.
Continue on with that logic and literally everything is valuable, making it a meaningless distinction.
> You can't say as an individual that something has no value to society.
I can and did. It's an opinion not an assertion.
If you are creating a need that didn't already exist, like targeting people's predisposition to addictions to substances like sugar, or nicotine, or heroin, then I posit that you have created no real value whatsoever.
By your logic music and art have no value to society, because there was no need for those until they were invented, someone could assess their value as zero, they consume natural resources which harms all of us, and the people could be doing something more productive (by some unstated metric of yours) instead.
You just don't enjoy soda. There's nothing wrong with other people enjoying it. Either in moderation, or irresponsibly in our opinion, which is their own business. Other people don't enjoy music and art and should probably think they should be done away with you like you with soda.
Art and music aren't produced with the intention of fostering addictions in people. They don't cause death and suffering simply by being sold, or even being abused (how would one abuse art or music?).
So no, that's not my logic at all. There was already a need for art and music. There wasn't already a need for Coca Cola and Lucky Strikes.
I don't accept that sodas are either. I think they're a honest product. They aren't healthy, but they don't pretend to be. They say very clearly what they contain and they're marketed as a treat. They are optimised to be as delicious as possible I'm sure, but singers also optimise their songs to be as pleasing as possible so you'll buy their next album.
Kola nuts, which contain caffeine, were in the original formulation. It's a stimulant - that's partly what some people are drinking Coca Cola and similar drinks for in the first place. It wasn't added later to increase sales.
Right, but nowadays there's no reason for it to be in there. You said they're marketed as a treat, and optimized to be as delicious as possible. So what's the caffeine for then? They're not marketed as energy drinks or designed to be as stimulating as possible.
I say that the caffeine is in there solely to keep people addicted to it even more.
> hey aren't healthy, but they don't pretend to be. They say very clearly what they contain and they're marketed as a treat
Soda manufacturers include this information because they are required to by law. It is in their interests to hide this information from you.
Lobbysists for junk food manufacturers are always hard at work fighting against these kinds of regulations, because you knowing what is in their product is harmful to their bottom line, because they are selling you what amounts to a mild poison.
People fought to get this labelling required by law. These companies aren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
> They are optimised to be as delicious as possible I'm sure, but singers also optimise their songs to be as pleasing as possible so you'll buy their next album.
The difference being my health isn't harmed by a pop singer trying to improve their voice. Nor are they creating a need or addiction to music that didn't already exist. There has always been a need for music among humans. Even tribal war drums count as music.
I'll concede that most pop music is lowest-common denominator crap manufactured and marketed to as as wide a demographic as possible for no other reason than profit, but really, pop music is such a small part of the entire musical landscape.
Even if it were, what damage to people is pop music causing? What addictions is it fostering?
You could debate about the dumbing down of music that manufactured pop music encourages, but we are talking about actual harm caused by fostering addictions here, which things like sodsa and cigarettes do, as a result of their being addictive as well as damaging to health.
The pop music analogy isn't a very good one, because music doesn't damage your health by encouraging your addiction to substances harmful to your health.
> I'll concede that most pop music is lowest-common denominator crap manufactured and marketed to as as wide a demographic as possible for no other reason than profit
Bah I think you're showing yourself to be a cynic and a snob with statements like this. You don't like that music so it's 'lowest-common denominator crap' and you can't see any purpose for it apart from profit, no matter if other people chose to enjoy it.
I'm not being a cynic and a snob. There are studies showing how much simpler, more generified and more homogenous and less dynamic pop music has become over the last few decades.
You didn't address the point of my post though, the pop music analogy was just an example you used that I felt didn't work very well because music, even pop music, doesn't harm your health or exploit addictions in the ways many advertised products do.
I can't second this strongly enough. Why are we utilizing such vast amounts of our limited resources to persuade people to make certain decisions? In my humble opinion it's usually because the decisions the people who employ advertising tactics want the people they are advertising to, to make, are suboptimal, if not downright bad, and people wouldn't make those decisions, but as a by-product of having been advertised to.
Quite frankly, advertising is psychic violence, and you can't escape it. Exploiting people's psychology to consolidate their resources for yourself is tantamount to theft. When men do it to women to push them to sell sex, we call it "pimping", and judge it as a completely reprehensible, unredeemable act. Of course your general well-being is diminished by a barrage of messaging encouraging you in every conceivable way, that the only road to satiety is to act against your own self-interest. How could that not totally fuck with you?
Spending your time coming up with more devious mechanisms, and ways to decrease the escapablity of said mechanisms is a fucking unseemly way to behave, as an individual. As a species, it's absolutely tragic that all those brilliant people doing it, can't break from the comfort of those fat paychecks and find something better to do with their time on Earth... Myself included.
We all have to stop focusing on the short term quarterly profits and growth and zoom out and see the big picture. Not only is software eating the world, but it's appropriating it for a low kind of social programming--turning us all into zombies. Software wants to mediate all of our experiences as humans, and advertising is right there with it, trying to interpose to do, as you wrote, "psychic violence" in little drips throughout our daily lives.
It's amazing that we let our minds be run by the shit in computers. (including all of this! haha!)
I don't care how much education they have, the minds who are focused on developing ways to capture people's increasingly fractured attention are disqualified from being considered the top minds of our generation.
honestly, its just a thinly veiled repetition of the American/boomer dad stereotype that money flow is the key arbiter of intelligence (even though I think at the higher end of intelligence its actually the opposite/ non correlated)
I think that's a nearsighted appraisal of people in these industries. Advertising is effective and so is the myth that money gives you actualization, to me it makes perfect sense that smart kids are going into a high paying industry while missing it's harmful effect.
And then the math geniuses that could be the next Einstein are slaving away in cubicles writing algorithms for the stock market. So much potential lost in the pursuit of increasing someone else's wallet.
And their own. These people are writing algorithms for the stock market because it pays incredibly well. Same for the engineers at FAANG selling ads online. Our society values money/material above all else and it's making us miserable.
i think he was just giving a saying. that said it is a game when there are points and competitive at that. as far as life not a game indeed but it is still a game where the stakes are just higher.
Who funds that “potential?” Markets have a purpose. Increasing one’s wallet drives innovation. Patriotism and superpower competition led to the space race, however the same people that claim to hate profits also condemn patriotism/nationalism that has led to innovations like manned space flight. The Soviets didn’t care about space because they saw a benefit to humankind, it was to beat the US in propaganda. Tesla couldn’t build cars without investment. Bell Labs wasn’t a benevolent non-profit. Henry Ford didn’t make an assembly line ought of altruism. Capital and profits drives innovation, like it or not. Even universities reward innovation with the “profit” of tenure or increased project funding. So yes, we need smart people “slaving away writing algorithms.” Some of those algorithms help with the efficient allocation of capital — capital necessary to build stuff you care about.
Here's the reason they keep doing-- It works.
Stop rewarding it and they'll stop.
I actually think a large number of societal issues today are stemming from people's inability to think rationally for themselves. Things like fake news, being vulnerable to advertising, taking bad deals like minimum wage etc. If someone were able to think rationally and into the future to figure out, "4 years from now if I choose this [politician, car, job]" I'll be as bad or worse off, then those things would die out for want of funding...
I'd taken quite a lot of advertising courses during my education, and among the many truly scary things that I learned in them, one stood out above all others:
Knowing how advertising manipulates you, and even noticing it in the moment that it's happening, in no way makes it less effective. People who claim that they aren't affected by advertising are incorrect.
Nobody can just decide not to reward advertising, short of keeping a list of all the advertising you're exposed to (and are you sure you can spot it all?) and refusing to buy any product or service that appears on that list.
I would never say 'advertising doesn't work on me' but it definitely doesn't seem to have the intended effect (persisting the brand in my memory for future sales) in a lot of cases.
Example 1: Coca Cola adverts. I can't stand coke, it tastes like soap to me. No amount of viewing their adverts (which are everywhere) will make me want a coke.
Example 2: I find most adverts cringey and embarassing and they serve only to make me avoid the company responsible in the future. If I see an annoying ad, I react wityh an aversion to products by that company. It's not true of everything, but it happens enough that I notice it.
No amount of advertising will be able to convince you to like something that you dislike. Advertising is manipulative, but it's not mind control.
But advertising is not trying to (for example) make you like cola if you don't like cola. What it's trying to do is make you choose one brand of cola over another.
For certain types of advertising, such as soft drinks, they're aiming to influence a particular moment. As a Pepsi executive once explained, they're aiming for that half-second when you're reaching for a soft drink and are making a spur-of-the-moment decision about which one. That sort of advertising is about influencing that spur-of-the-moment decision so you're more likely to choose theirs. It's effective because, in the absence of thought, you're overwhelmingly likely to choose a brand that you recognize the most or have the most positive associations with.
Ads are not designed to get you to buy stuff. Ads are designed to familiarize you with a product. So when you plan a party and have to think what drinks to buy, you already know Coca Cola is a drink that exists. Maybe you buy it, maybe you don't. It doesn't matter. And if you go to a party, you also know that Coca Cola is a drink you can expect to get.
That's what ads are for. To get everyone to know that they live in a reality where your product exists.
Advertising does NOT affect me 99.99% of the time. How do i know this? Almost all the groceries I buy has no advertisement or even branding. The vast majority of my spending goes to housing, Taxes, grocery bill, gas, maintenance and insurance. Almost none of the groceries I buy have any kind of logo, marketing or advertisement: cucumber, tomatoes, potatoes. Even when I buy soymilk, once I get through filtering all my conditions (organic, no added sugar, no added calcium/sodium, etc) I'm lucky if I even have 1 choice left. Beans come from nameless bulk, etc. Gas is based on location and price (not brand). Maintenance is always done at the cheapest place of the 3 closest repair shops. All my utilities offer me no choice at all. I have no idea what brand the clothing I'm wearing. etc.
I find this quite easy and intuitive. I'm not against advertisement at all. I've seen and remembered several advertisements but they almost never offer a product compelling enough to buy. When an ad does offer me something I actually want, I'll buy it (this happens for far less than 1% of my spending).
and yes, i'm well aware of how advertisements influence our perception of brands. but how is it effective if I never buy anything that has a brand? and when I do buy, I usually never have a choice: Utilities, etc
I have a 15" macbook pro that may have been aggressively marketed by Apple. But once again, I had no choice. the reason I bought it is because I'm a developer who used to create IOS apps and I needed the development environment to build apps (no choice but to use apple machines for that).
>Knowing how advertising manipulates you, and even noticing it in the moment that it's happening, in no way makes it less effective. People who claim that they aren't affected by advertising are incorrect.
Is there any evidence for such a claim? I've heard people say this again and again, but I can't see how this is true based on myself. Sure, I've been guided to a product based on advertisement once in my life, but everything else I've ignored obvious advertisements. I can't say that I haven't been swayed by an advertisement that's masked as a review, but that's divorced from this I think.
>Nobody can just decide not to reward advertising, short of keeping a list of all the advertising you're exposed to (and are you sure you can spot it all?) and refusing to buy any product or service that appears on that list.
But buying something that's advertised doesn't mean you're rewarding the advertisement. If you would buy that product regardless, then even if the advertisement stopped (or never existed) you'd still buy it.
There's research on nudging behaviours, and that being told you're being nudged doesn't negatively impact your decision vs not being told you're being nudged, which could be considered synonymous with advertising transparency [0] (although there are caveats at play that might make that unsound).
I don't doubt the effects I'd advertising. What I wonder is whether advertising affects everyone. Studies can show that it affects people on average, but it doesn't mean it affects everyone.
Advertising does affect everyone in the broad picture. Specific advertising campaigns don't affect everyone, though. Also, different people are affected by different approaches. What works for one set of people doesn't for another.
This is why there are a set of different approaches that have been shown to be effective (given names like "the bandwagon" -- which covers the group of people who can be swayed by convincing them that everyone else is into something). A comprehensive campaign will have different ads for the same thing, each using a different approach, to maximize the number of people they affect.
By the way, if you ever want a deep-dive into this stuff without actually taking college courses on it, my recommendation is to find a copy of guidelines provided to car dealerships. Those things are very comprehensive, unabashed, and to-the-point.
You misunderstand advertisement. It is not designed to get you to buy stuff. It is designed to get you familiarized with the product and to shape your view of reality. Did you think people thought smoking was cool back in the days just because? Do you think wedding rings are supposed to be expensive?
I don't know about smoking being cool (I'm very biased against smoking, because my entire family smoked and I have asthma), but I do know that people smoked hundreds of years before advertisements were a thing. I've also always thought that jewelry was silly and pointlessly expensive, but I do know that people were affected by advertisement.
You should read up on the relationship between smoking and advertising. It's actually really interesting, and there's no question that advertising alone is the reason that smoking became so prevalent in society.
A similar story applies to other things that we consider so normal today that we don't even think about them, like deodorants, women shaving their legs and armpits, etc.
All of these things only became common because of advertising.
Perhaps you cannot resist the advertisements you see, but you can take steps to limit how much advertising you are exposed to. Get Netflix, get an ad blocker.
Indeed, and this is what I do! I don't bother with Netflix or similar (there's no point -- I'm not watching commercial TV anyway), but I do avoid advertising as much as I reasonably can.
This is good advice for an individual and relatively useless advice when given to society as a whole. Yes, people should think for themselves. If you have kids you might even be able to teach them how to think for themselves.
But at scale, at the level of a population, an expectation of individual rationality loses out to the realities of these manipulative techniques. On an individual level they might not work, but on a population level they tend to work.
If a population is being manipulated by political propaganda, then yes it's good advice to an individual to think critically / rationally. But that only affects change on the tiniest margin. The propagandists will still win overall.
I think on top of your points, the effect of decades of underfunding education - and on focusing on "marketable" skills over "soft" skills such as critical analysis - must be taken into account.
Why would education matter here at all? People are much more highly educated nowadays than they used to be. They even score much higher on IQ tests compared to people in the past. People understand the world better today than before.
You realise the reason why it's so effective is that it's psychological manipulation right? Telling people to just "stop rewarding" it is almost the same as telling abused partners to "just leave the relationship"; it's not that simple, and trying to reduce it as such is at best unhelpful, and at worst actively harmful.
But this is the whole point - they are unable to think rationally because went invested billions of dollars in trying to find out how to undercut people's rationality. This is the whole idea of advertising and evidently, it works.
You might as well complain that water does not flow upwards.
> Here's the reason they keep doing-- It works. Stop rewarding it and they'll stop.
That's like saying stopping rape is easy, just don't reward it. It completely ignores the non-consensual nature of the interaction. Except advertising is even worse, because at least rape victims are aware they have been victimized, people that are manipulated by advertising don't even know it. In fact, if you ask, almost everyone will say "advertising doesn't work on me." If that were true, then why do companies spend billions on it?
I actually think a large number of societal issues today are stemming from people's inability to think rationally for themselves.
Is this any different from the free market arguments about how regulation is bad, and the customer must inform themselves about literally everything and every consequence, with convenient disregard for the fact that it's impossible for a person to learn everything, and that it turns into a way to assign blame rather than to make the world a better place to live?
Why should "you must think for yourself" become a justification for you to be allowed to show advertising to me continually?
taking bad deals like minimum wage etc.
The only reason there are minimum wages, is because people fought for them, and refused to take even worse deals.
> If someone were able to think rationally and into the future to figure out, "4 years from now if I choose this [politician, car, job]" I'll be as bad or worse off, then those things would die out for want of funding...
Literally no one can do that for everything. The world is too complicated and, depending on the area, there are either too many or too few choices available.
This is the "capitalism doesn't work because of human nature" argument (which I agree with). It is impossible to train people to pursue profit and to value consumption without these horrendous side effects. Meanwhile, it is quite clearly possible to train people to do worthwhile things with their lives without requiring them to chase a profit motive. (Examples include the free software movement, academic research, etc.)
You don't know that a purchase decision wasn't subtly influenced by seeing a Youtube ad though. Many ads aren't designed to get you to buy a product right now, they are designed to make you feel a certain way about the product or even just make you aware, so that when you are in the market, you are directed toward that product.
I always order Tango at places like that because I like the taste. I can't remember the last time I saw a Tango advert, but Coke which I avoid like the plague because it tastes like ass, has ads absolutely everywhere.
Given the vaugeness involved with advertising and attribuitation being something humans aren't too good at I wonder hypothetically how long it would take companies to realize that consumer advertisement effectiveness dropped to zero vs other economic causes.
A good way to immunize yourself against something is to have weaponized it yourself in the past. Then you can recognize it when it appears, and you know its strengths and weaknesses.
The human vulnerabilities that advertising leverages are coded deep in the genome; building antibodies instead of avoiding the virus entirely could be wise indeed.
Lol, we're already incredibly far down that path. Have you been using the same smartphone since 2008? I ask seriously: how many have you owned since then?
Well, if you want to use a smartphone, you pretty much have to buy a new one every few years. They don't exactly have great upgrade-ability, do they?
If course, it doesn't excuse all the Apple fanatics (among others) who go through one every single year.
I am still using a cheapo Asus from 2012. It was relatively powerful when it was released, but its performance drives me nuts nowadays. Thankfully, my smartphone needs are pretty modest, but I can see why a more "advanced" user wouldn't want to use such old hardware.
We're constantly getting better at it; who knows what path this will lead us down. I suspect it might not be the one we had wished for.