

Advertising Shits in Your Head - auxym
http://strikemag.org/advertising-shits-in-your-head/

======
DanAndersen
This is why I have no moral qualms about using adblockers or anything like
that. I'm thankful that I grew up in a family where the tradition was to
always mute commercials on the TV. I can't help but think that if we didn't
already have a tradition of mute buttons, modern media systems wouldn't have
them. "You can't choose not to listen to these obnoxious ads, that's like
stealing!"

My main issue with ads is the power disparity that can result. Those in charge
of advertising and marketing have powerful tools at their disposal -- a wealth
of data about how people respond, real-time analytics and A/B testing down to
the pixel level to optimize that last percentage point of audience capture,
and training in the nature of cognitive biases and how to exploit them. It's a
hacking war in people's minds, and against such attackers, what defenses does
the average person have? To what degree are untrained people able to resist
these influences but by adblocking?

~~~
a3n
> I can't help but think that if we didn't already have a tradition of mute
> buttons, modern media systems wouldn't have them. "You can't choose not to
> listen to these obnoxious ads, that's like stealing!"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Kellner#Criticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Kellner#Criticism)

Jamie Kellner, former chairman and chief executive officer of Turner
Broadcasting System, said:

"Because of the ad skips.... It's theft. Your contract with the network when
you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't
get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch
the button you're actually stealing the programming."

And there was a lawsuit over at least one PVR's commercial skipping feature:

[http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020509_sprigman.ht...](http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020509_sprigman.html)

~~~
DanAndersen
And now I can't help but think of the "Xbox verification can" story:
[https://i.imgur.com/dgGvgKF.png](https://i.imgur.com/dgGvgKF.png)

------
boot13
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"

Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines,
and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts,
and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.

~~~
thomasahle
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PJNlmk5Yik](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PJNlmk5Yik)

------
kaiku
> "Public space is an arena in which no single authority should reign and
> multiple voices should be heard, so we started from a profoundly democratic
> conviction that the public sphere is a place for communication, a place
> where people can speak, establish their presence, and assert their rights."

As we spend more time buried in mobile phones and other screens, our eyes and
hands in intimate connection with these devices, I wonder how the artists
would examine "private" spaces like those. Could advertisements – which demand
attention and energy, even without active mental application – more damaging
in this smaller sphere than in the public one?

I like the idea of and motivation behind reclaiming of public space. The
artists nod toward property ownership and the "rights" of advertisers,
following it with, "no, thank you."

------
calinet6
A new thought has become clear to me recently:

 _Advertising is a society virus._ It's designed to infect and spread,
enabling the growth of the infection at the expense of the human hosts. It
piggybacks off receptors we use for rational thought and perception and uses
them against us.

Never is this more clear than on the myriad of clickbait viral media sites
where the virus is so clear and obvious and doesn't even try to hide itself.
It's clear that the purpose of the site is to force itself upon your mental
pathways in an attempt to spread by sheer statistics.

Such a strange symbiosis: our collectives simultaneously nourishing us in our
search for sustainable life and meaningful work, and at the same time
discovering any and all pathways to sap value from us in any way it can be
done; some genuine, others malignant. This is the new evolution. Society is
the organism.

------
cies
Let me take this opportunity to say: Thanks YC for keeping HN ad-free!

So even when I occasionally read it from a browser w/o an ad-blocker
installed, I still enjoy the content in peace.

~~~
samsolomon
I don't think this is entirely true.

Y-Combinator uses Hacker News as a vehicle to attract the best technology
talent in the world and display job openings to that talent. I love HN and
have no issues with YC doing that, but let's not pretend that it is entirely
altruistic.

~~~
mikecsh
Ad-free != altruistic

~~~
icebraining
But it's not ad-free, the ads[1] just blend in better.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs](https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs)

~~~
cies
Good point :)

------
l33tbro
How is "brandalism" anything but "culture jamming" rebranded? The rhetoric
here reads like the same undergraduate and naive ideas my friends and I used
to espouse before we scaled billboards and defaced their images 15 years ago
dressed as workers.

I'm not knocking their idealism for a minute (frankly, our culture need less
cynicism these days), but let's not kid ourselves about these ideas being even
remotely progressive.

~~~
icebraining
Brandalism seems to be a specific project of culture jamming, not a new word
for the existing concept.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
We've had a much better neologism for jamming advertising logos and symbols
for a while already - "subvertising".

~~~
icebraining
Brandalism seems to include subvertising, but not just.

------
emsy
Relevant: [http://zenpencils.com/comic/155-banksy-taking-the-piss-
expli...](http://zenpencils.com/comic/155-banksy-taking-the-piss-explicit/)

------
fragsworth
Not _all_ advertising is bad. For small companies and lesser-known products,
advertising serves a purpose by exposing us to things we wouldn't otherwise be
aware of. It allows valuable products to gain customers faster than through
word-of-mouth, which is usually very inefficient and slow unless your "viral
factor" is extremely high.

Some advertising (e.g. Coke, McDonald's) is an attempt to remind us and make
us feel good about a product that we already know about, and that's the kind
of advertising that "shits in your head" and doesn't seem to provide any value
to the world.

But there's other stuff that gets advertised, and we shouldn't vilify all
advertising just because some of it is bad.

------
tqi
What does the "right for us to choose our own identities, without coercion or
persuasion" look like? Isn't this fundamentally also an attempt to curate what
influences people experience, just via guerrilla tactics instead of money?

~~~
throwaway2048
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque)

------
tomjen3
Not unlike that hideos website design.

~~~
nodejsisbest
I came, Ctrl + F, and found this. Thanks for saying what had to be said. That
yellow background hurt me. No node.js developer would do that.

------
oldmanjay
I'm not on board with the tone do this article. evangelism is too strident by
nature. this is essentially just as much marketing as someone trying to sell
me something, but these people are trying to tell me how to think, which I
find even worse.

~~~
RodericDay
[http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977](http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977)
> What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the
forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance.
Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.

