this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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I mean... Yes.
I understand that if you have cool stuff you want to sell it to people, but on balance marketers and marketing companies are overwhelmingly trash selling us trash, compromising our privacy and autonomy, and exploiting "influencers" and customers instead of benevolent and useful to society.
I think there’s value to marketing, but the societal benefits of advertising are significantly less. Some use cases are beneficial, such as informing the public of a new thing that brings social benefit, but that’s a small minority of it. Marketing though is also researching and finding what people want. Even in a centrally planned communist society that is beneficial. It means that as more people want wheat than potatoes you plan your agricultural decisions accordingly (and use advertisement to manipulate demand for what exists or is more ecologically feasible). Similarly it can help guide which features engineers should be adding to products.
Now what it shouldn’t be is this over bloated system in which everything is controlled by advertisements and your every action is spied on to determine how to sell better to you.
This is very true and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise (hazard of text based comms like this), but I do think that our current "marketing" reality is overwhelmingly the gross creepy one, not the useful one. And I think the system incentivises that kind of behaviour, so we'll always trend toward that.
Oh absolutely I just don’t want us to wind up like we got as a culture with lawyers.
The fact is being advertised to constantly is really bad for us mentally. I don’t want to be constantly reminded who made my soap or something. I don’t want designs that are intended to catch my eye in a store everywhere in my home. And that’s just labels and logos. Then I come on the internet and am coated in ads. I go for a walk and there are ads around the city. It’s hard to get away from people trying to get you to consume more more more. And it combines with shitty business practices. So now the prices are high, if something can be a subscription or nickel and dimed it is, and wages in my career have been basically the same since I started high school over a decade ago. But no I need to consume more with less for more money and by the way the world is dying from overconsumption but I can’t have public transit because that’d hurt care sales and I’m some sort of hippie weirdo for not eating meat and using FOSS software and you can go fuck yourself for demanding bike lanes that are curbed off and actually go far enough out from the city that middle class people can get them. And while we’re at it, no the bus doesn’t go to the affordable apartments regularly.
Well said, and thank you for taking the time to articulate something I was lazily taking for granted when I commented.