My Theory: Advertising is a lot like capitalism itself
Both ads and capitalism are messy and have some externalized harms, but are better than the alternatives.
In the "advertising led" model of customer discovery, businesses advertise to essentially tell the market that they exist and provide a service. They do so by paying for advertising space across various mediums. This includes everything from their store signage to Craigslist ads, to TV and sophisticated digital advertising.
Most modern advertising is an auction where businesses compete to serve their message to customers the algorithms think are most likely to be interested.
This function - of matching users that might be interested in products to businesses providing products - is at this point hugely scaled.
People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category. That, they say, would be the ideal method of product discovery, along with word of mouth.
However, that runs immediately into the same problem that communism has historically. Who actually controls these directories, which would be a huge source of power for society? I posit that that it is impossible to centralize this effectively, and that the most likely most effective method for idea and product dispersal is something close to modern marketing and advertising.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 36.0 ms ] threadSome is doing an awful lot of work there. Both ads and capitalism have become so degenerate and abusive that I'm no longer confident that either are better than the alternatives. Even phrasing it as "better than the alternatives" is a symptom of one aspect of the overall decline: seeing everything as an either-or choice.
All other alternatives than capitalism or partial capitalism have been ruled out by any country that has anything to do in the world, or for any society in which material well-being is present for the majority of their population.
The fact that ads are annoying doesn’t mean that capitalism is bad or degenerate.
If I have had a bad girlfriend and I’m ugly as hell as to not afford any other, then yes I’ll be prompted to say the relationships market has become degenerate. But probably it’s just that I can’t find good partners on it.
The same if you can’t pay for YouTube Premium, X Premium+ or the like. And precisely because capitalism isn’t degenerate but buoyant, ad-free solutions like Perplexity for search are rising at such a rapid pace it can’t do anything but increase optimism in the future.
You seem to understand capitalism as "freedom" and communism as "government control". These false definitions are what leads people to believe Democrats or Nazis are leftists, when they're very far from it.
Really, capitalism is that thing where when you work harder your boss gets richer. Someone else besides you is the owner of the products of your labor. Capitalism allows the capital-owning class to use the worker class as machinery for a free ride through life.
Socialism (communism isn't quite the right word here) is "worker ownership and control of the means of production". Yes that has included tyranny in the past, but modern socialists are mostly of the libertarian type and totally reject government control of anything.
Yes, advertising is a lot like capitalism, but that's because they both serve only to redirect productive capacity towards things which the parasitic class wants instead of what we need. Advertising convinces you to buy useless trinkets and to think in ways you never would have thought otherwise.
You have essentially used a bad-looking, cynical description of capitalism vs an idealised description of socialism. It’s not fair game to compare a cynical view of capitalism in practice with an idealised view of socialism in theory. You either both compare them in practice, in which capitalism wins every time; or compare in theory, in which both are probably on ties, because any idealised version promises the same prosperity and society well-being.
Capitalism is about investment, more than anything else. Why was capitalism born at the creation of the Stock Exchange? Because then savers could use their savings as funding for entrepreneurial endeavours. As British Victorians wanted, the goal was “to live off from the interest made by interests”, referring to their investments’ growth and compounding returns.
In socialism, they essentially want to strip off capitalists from their savings and funding and let the State manage it all. Socialists assume a centralized institution can handle all of the information and get right the incentives, which has been seen to not work every time you try it.
It is also a contradiction of terms to say that socialism, as it was defined by any socialist theorist, is of the “libertarian type”; who by definition wants both economic and social liberties to individuals, whereas socialism by its very postules looks forward to remove any economic liberty and ownership of capital as means of production, whatever vague definition they use to define these (a laptop can be both a means of production and a consumption good at the same time).
Further, advertising is like capitalism from the business perspective, not from the customer perspective. For the business it’s an investment. From the customer it’s just the cost to pay to use a service. And, as said, what defines capitalism is investment, not consumption, and prove of that is that we’ve always consumed stuff along history but only when investment was institutionalised and carried out at scale through a Stock Exchange that capitalism was coined, referring precisely to the act of investing and reinvesting.
Capitalism actually wants to convince you to be frugal, save, and invest your savings. It is consumption, and not capitalism, that tries to convince you to spend it all. Both are antagonists. Consumption is born from opulence, not capitalism. If socialism did also produce abundance in extreme levels for everyone they would be as consumptionists as they could ever be, just as we are in our rich, Western societies. Note that less consumptionist societies like Singapore do better and are considered to be more capitalists than countries like Spain or Italy.
Again, it is opulence that causes excessive consumption: and it’s only capitalism the system that has indeed produce overwhelming wealth to every individual, both poor and rich, something that no other system has ever achieved at the same order of magnitude. And that’s nothing mystical or religious: it’s just that capitalism = investing and reinvesting, so no wonder we have much more to consume if we are all day reinvesting the product of our means of production into more means of production.
Anyhow, capitalism = saving, investing and reinvesting. You can see more details on my reply to MountainMan1312. It ain’t look that bad as a system, philosophy or even religion.
It’s probably consumption that you are attacking, with all the right and common sense of the world; yet that’s cause by opulence, not by capitalism. It’s true that capitalism create staggering wealth that’s a quite remarkable tendency to then produce opulence (desiring luxury stuff in great amounts for the sake of just having and exhibiting it). But that’s correlation, not causality.
Sadly, you can’t criticise socialism on having a consumptionist society because they don’t have anything to consume at all. They aren’t a superior race or morally superior; they just can’t consume as much as we do with the liberty we do, so they don’t.
Yelp is a great example of a beneficial review system run by dicks. A objective review platform would be a huge benefit. But they corrupted the intent. They solicit bribes from businesses to suppress negative reviews using their default “suggested sort”.
A review platform run honorably for the public good could entirely replace advertising, increase competition in areas of price and quality and create a far more pleasant society. Instead we get the endless bullshit machine aggressively selling you things you don’t want or need while burying true value in a mountain of mediocrity.
Advertising is where capitalism started to go wrong. The more our society resembles it the worse it will be for everyone.
So, what do you think about additional taxes aimed directly at advertising to reduce the overall amount of advertising? In the same way that increasing cigarette taxes reduces the rate of smoking, taxing advertising should reduce the amount of it. Less advertising means less other ads competing for attention, making the remaining advertising more likely to reach its intended audience.
An ideal ad tax would be based upon volume of ads, but I can't think of a good way to implement this without it being channel-specific, which is likely to introduce market distortions. Any ideas? But even just a simple ad revenue tax would help filter out the low-value ads from the market, as their ROI would go down fastest.