> After taking a step backwards you're just exploiting/taking advantage of vulnerable people looking for help and using that to manipulate them into giving you money.
This describes an uncomfortably large section of our (customer facing) economy. Casinos, tobacco, payday loan sharks, etc are the obvious actors. But if you look more closely, you will see that there are essentially two families of competing in b2c:
* productive: quality, service, price.
* destructive: bait and switch, seduction through marketing (unrelated to the actual product), etc.
All of the destructive forms eventually boil down to: abusing the faults in our human brain. Once you start looking at the world this way, you will see it everywhere. Almost every commercial on tv is destructive. E.g. car commercials never talk about car specs; they just try to seduce your fallible brain. Perfume. Clothing brands. Any food franchising (which are not about food, they are marketing companies who happen to sell food). Etc etc etc. None of these advance society forward.
There is an all-out, 24/7 war on your brain. It is what hippies mean when they talk about “buying shit you don’t need”. The only problem with that statement is it puts the blame with the consumer. But we are only human, and fighting a mental war 24/7 is exhausting. The problem is more insidious than mere gluttony / consumerism.
The example here is egregious and very clear. But make no mistake about it: it exists, in smaller form, everywhere you go.
When I was in college I really thought I wanted to make video games. But I watched my friends and I struggle with tuning out and falling behind on our schoolwork.
I got a job making new software and learned what a Skinner Box was and changed by plans. I don't need to be part of that.
As long consumers keep paying more to be advertised to (buying) than they're willing to pay to not (donations, subscriptions, boycotting) it'll stay a lopsided game.
It seems to me like there's plenty of good people willing to fight the good fight, but their lifestyle comes first and ideals second.
That only works if companies actually support that option. Many don't, because it would cut into the data that could be collected and remarketed.
Furthermore, try sitting down with a teen, twenty, thirty, or heck, anyone not technologically inclined and try to explain the causes and ills that "marketing" causes. It is difficult. However, many are aware of and despise it, but have no idea what to do about it.
I'm sorry, but GP is right. Advertising has gone too far. It really is just customer predation at this point. It is no longer about making sure your business is out there if the consumer comes looking, it is about exploiting every heuristic that can be used to short circuit the consumer making a conscious decision to see anyone else but you.
At some point, the intrusion and attention manipulation has to end.
> Many don't, because it would cut into the data that could be collected and remarketed.
The reason advertising companies collect all this data is to use it for marketing/advertising (among other things). The truth of the matter is that Google et. al. would lose users if they charged them what it actually cost to run and continually improve their services and make a profit (which is their prerogative/duty as for-profit companies).
Consumers may say that they'd be open to paying for services, but I have a strong suspicion this is not true at a large enough scale to be even worth exploring.
People paying for online streaming services versus cable may be a counter to that argument, although then it seems like it takes decades for the ad-fatigue to set in...or the ratio of ads to content has to steadily keep increasing until it reaches the tipping point where people would rather pay (and still throw a fit when Netflix raises their prices).
People paying for online streaming services versus cable may be a counter to that argument, although then it seems like it takes decades for the ad-fatigue to set in.
Pay-TV over cable arrived in the US in 1972. Netflix's streaming service was first available in 2007. The problem wasn't that people took decades to be annoyed by advertising on cable but that for decades Netflix (Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Now) did not exist. Once paid commercial-free streaming services arrived, uptake was rapid.
20 years ago, I knew plenty of people who would be willing to pay good money for a TV service without ads.
Today I find almost no one willing to pay enough for, say, Facebook without ads. Most people I asked say $0 or $1/month. To get the same revenue as they currently do, FB would need to charge $20/year to everyone. Since many (most) will not pay that amount, they need to charge even higher.
I don't see how a company like Facebook would make that much profit without ads.
And to be frank, decent enough non-ad supported alternatives exist. I can't get one person in real life to switch to them.
News is another example that mostly hasn't worked without ad money. There are some examples (e.g. government funded), but even those don't have enough reach compared to what the ad supported ones did 20 years ago.
That it worked for TV is not an indicator that the general model can be applied to all ad-supported services out there.
My point was that advertising has gone off the rails, and on the offensive.
Advertising is "Hey, we're here!"
What they do now is more akin to attempted social engineering/psychological manipulation.
It's disgusting to see, disrespectful to everyone, and if I had to guess, I'd say it is fueling a counterculture that could very possibly put a leash on the current understanding of free 'marketing' speech.
News and the main stream media have the same problem. They focus so much on paperclip maximizing for viewership that the quality of actual useful productive content is being degraded in order to 'lock in' target audiences.
> As long consumers keep paying more to be advertised to (buying) than they're willing to pay to not (donations, subscriptions, boycotting) it'll stay a lopsided game.
The reason most American consumers prefer advertised-supported products to paid products is simply that can't afford them otherwise.
Unlike people in the top 10% of incomes, like most here on HN, most Americans simply don't have the means to pay an extra $10 or $20 a month here and there for various subscriptions or products. Almost 50% of all Americans have a negative net worth AND struggle to pay their basic bills like water, rent, electricity, and phone/Internet.
Once you understand this, then you'll understand why most Americans can't afford to pay for additional services even if they understood the true cost of advertising-supported services. Unlike the average software developer, they don't have an extra $1000 discretionary income a month to save or spend. They spend their entire income on necessities.
Plus, the cost of ad-supported services are not always evident to the average American, which reinforces their belief that it's not a bad idea to use Facebook and similar services (where they are the product).
And a pretty common consensus among technologists seems to be, "That's their fault. They should have gone into STEM. Losers."
stacked against people, this narrative goes. Even being on the wrong end of the structurally inherent information asymmetry between seller and buyer is the buyer's fault, somehow.
How did they get there? Because they wanted to change the world to benefit the rich & richer?
Or is it the golden rule at play? He who has the gold makes the rules
The issue at stake here in the US is that money is the final arbiter (with a few exceptions that prove the rule). There is no higher authority (despite the religious types claiming otherwise - many of their clergy are also soaking in the lucre). So our bright, not-foolish engineers should not be solely blamed for the rules in place.
The amount of money that Google and Facebook make from these huge CPCs and CPAs is insane.
Marketers in this industry are bad and would find a way to do it without Facebook and Google, but you’ve got to admit the engineering/UX/product teams are indirectly enablers in the system as well.
People sneer when I say I would categorically ban all advertising, but the more I observe the more convinced I am of this. Advertising is brain manipulation, nothing more. It's unreservedly evil and harmful, and we would all be much happier without the constant bombardment.
Advertising can help people become aware of products they never though could exist. One recent example is a baby toy that sticks onto the high chair tray with a suction cup. I bought this $10 toy from an advertisement and because my daughter loves to play with it so much, mealtimes go much faster. I have probably already recovered 20 hours of cleanup time because of this toy, and an advertisement was the only way I’d know about it.
Businesses already categorize this stuff. It's just another color of money. It's more a case of them labeling lots of things as advertising that a might cause a reasonable person to narrow their eyes.
Buying ads and ad services for one. Not sure how I feel about 'market research'.
>Advertising is brain manipulation, nothing more. It's unreservedly evil and harmful.
I'm no fan of advertising (canceled cable decades ago, happily use Ad Blocker, etc). But these sweeping statements do not sit well with me.
Any time I try to persuade someone to do something, I am engaged in brain manipulation. As someone who in the last few years decided to take up subjects like negotiation and communications, most effective communication is brain manipulation - and not in a way that is significantly different from advertising. As the GP said - once you learn these topics, you begin to see it everywhere - in all the ways people talk.
For most of my life, I tried to convince people with purely objective means, and for the most part, it was a failure. If you want to achieve good for most people, brain manipulation is not just a nice-to-have - it is a must.
So declaring it to be brain manipulation is not, in my mind, a negative. It is unfortunate, but not unreservedly evil. Certain applications of it are evil. But banning advertising wholesale is just a lazy way of not dealing with the problem.
The fact of manipulation is, itself, morally neutral. When you manipulate someone into something that's against their interests, but serves yours, and that manipulation is done by means of shading (if not worse) the truth somehow, it's pretty unambiguously a negative, in my book.
Unless you somehow think that having a "society" or "economy" is predicated on that kind of manipulation. I actively repudiate that notion, personally.
Some people who have been considered great leaders have manipulated people into something that is perhaps against their interests, but in the long-term interest of society at large. It's hard to say that the soldiers who died in the Civil War had their "interests" served, but it's a lot easier to make the claim that fighting that war was better than the alternative.
Thanks for your opinion. Do note that nowhere in my comment did I endorse manipulation by shading the truth. Nor did I suggest all manipulation is OK. My parent was making a statement without qualifiers, and I was highlighting the dangers of such statements.
>The fact of manipulation is, itself, morally neutral.
I don't disagree. The person I was responding to, however, seems to.
Computers and the internet have given us unprecedented tools to introspect human psychology and perform hyper-targeted campaigns more fine-grained than even just individuals. Companies are weaponizing these tools to hijack our collective brains and alter our behavior for profit via marketing and advertising.
One could argue that we've been influenced by ads for centuries, and the concept of targeting isn't new. But this is one of the cases where a change in amount (how detailed targeting gets) becomes a change in kind. Yes, it looks like the same thing as before just with more data, but it's actually a fundamentally different kind of thing.
Every time we make a discovery or invent a new tool we play around with it for a while, exploring its uses and implications, and find its boundaries. Atomic energy for example. Before we knew exactly what radioactivity was Marie Curie carried around bottles of highly radioactive stuff in her pockets, she was so nonchalant about it that now her notebook has to be kept in a lead box, 100 years later. Since then we've created power sources and weapons and had disasters. Now everything highly radioactive is regulated and tracked.
We're in the "Marie Curie" stage with our advertising tools. We will need to dial back how nonchalant we are about employing these tools against others eventually. Either it comes from within the industry, or it comes from regulation, or we devolve into a dystopia where companies more and more literally own your mind.
This comment makes me feel both hopeful - we did learn about the dangers of atomic energy and have found a pretty stable balance between the useful and harmful aspects of it (weapons stockpiles aside), and hopeless - I don't think we'll come to grips with computers and the internet before the powerful have weaponized our brains against ourselves so thoroughly that reining them in is impossible.
Absolutely. I've often thought that this is the right time to remake it. It's definitely an artifact of its time, focusing on 80s economic struggles and the rise of the yuppies. You'd have to update it to more modern concerns, but given rising inequality, it wouldn't be hard at all. An ersatz Mark Zuckerberg, for example, would almost have to appear.
This movie also contains one of the best action hero bravado lines ever. I won't quote it here, as I think it's worth discovering in context, but I promise you'll be saying it after.
I rewatched this movie a few weeks ago with some friends that hadn't watched it before. They absolutely loved it. I'm not fan of remakes, and I think this movie is overly very critical to be remade today. Today, viewing the original one should be mandatory.
in my mind, a sequel to They Live would pick up ~30 years after the events of the first film, where it becomes obvious that everyone saw the ghouls in their midst and responded by essentially shrugging. it seems to me that's pretty much what happened irl.
There is a great BBC documentary that talks about this war on the brain called "Century of the Self" [0]. It's four hours long, but the first hour covers the gist of it. It goes into the want vs need and how businesses have been taught to utilize this part of our mind.
Not just for selling products and services. The very same techniques are constantly applied to get someone on your side of a political divide. Persuasion tricks warfare with every tweet.
I don't know what we do about the bigger part of this problem, which is that the only people 'exploiting' the virtuous side of this equation (manipulating your brain to get things that build you up instead of break you down) consists almost entirely of non-profits.
That is, if you are in the business of giving people a legitimate reason to feel good about themselves, you're either not 'in business' or soon won't be.
And so alarmingly many of the "trust the market" crowd with whom I've spoken simultaneously hold the position that if you've been taken advantage of by marketers who are leveraging the flaws in your brain against you, that's your fault.
A very small handful of cars on the market are competing to be a transportation appliance. The rest exist because people are willing to buy driving enjoyment, subjective quality, lifestyle projection, etc. above and beyond point A to point B transport.
This is largely an outgrowth of the used car market. People that are price sensitive tend to buy used, so car companies only survive by convincing people to make bad decisions.
Do you remember the Michelin commercial that's just a baby sitting in a tire? A little on the nose, there.
My libertarian coworker used to say to me, "well, you don't have to buy the product". He didn't buy my explanation, which was this isn't people just asking you to buy their product in an annoying manner. Its straight up psy-ops (psychological warfare) at this point.
can you give a specific definition of what constitutes psychological warfare or not, that you can present to a jury and get a reasonable judgement from reasonable people. Let's make it a standard that is specific enough that a jury would be less likely to be swayed, for example, by the color of the skin of the defendant or plaintiff.
I don't have much hope for us finding a legal definition of what psychological strings you are and aren't allowed to tug on and how hard. War crimes set a line for tugging until they break. It's a lot easier to define "way too much" than "too much".
This discourages me from wanting to go into long thought train about what I would like to outlaw. What I feel more confident about is adding lots of friction to the system.
>The only problem with that statement is it puts the blame with the consumer.
There's nothing wrong with that. You have to. It's where the change will most immediately happen. Grandstanding about how society is at fault etc etc won't change anything in the near-term. Corporations don't give a shit about the ethics of the situation. A more informed citizenry is the only way anything will realistically change.
Edit: Thinking about it more, it's 100% the fault of citizens. If everyone decided "you know what, fuck McDonald's" and stopped going to them the following day, the company would be sent into a death spiral that would have rippling effects of various degrees across the entire global economy.
You could say that the solution is that citizens should ensure a legal system that protects customers, prohibits predatory practices, and has a strong enforcement system. But that's still up to citizens to make that happen, it won't happen by itself.
The problem is that its hard to find more calories/$ without investment in ingredients and a kitchen; it's hard to fault the poorest people for buying what seems economically rational in the short term.
People eat at McD's because they want a burger and a quart of carbonated sugar water for five bucks and don't give a shit about their health, not because they are poor.
The bulk of their customers have kitchens and could make better meals choices.
This describes an uncomfortably large section of our (customer facing) economy. Casinos, tobacco, payday loan sharks, etc are the obvious actors. But if you look more closely, you will see that there are essentially two families of competing in b2c:
* productive: quality, service, price.
* destructive: bait and switch, seduction through marketing (unrelated to the actual product), etc.
All of the destructive forms eventually boil down to: abusing the faults in our human brain. Once you start looking at the world this way, you will see it everywhere. Almost every commercial on tv is destructive. E.g. car commercials never talk about car specs; they just try to seduce your fallible brain. Perfume. Clothing brands. Any food franchising (which are not about food, they are marketing companies who happen to sell food). Etc etc etc. None of these advance society forward.
There is an all-out, 24/7 war on your brain. It is what hippies mean when they talk about “buying shit you don’t need”. The only problem with that statement is it puts the blame with the consumer. But we are only human, and fighting a mental war 24/7 is exhausting. The problem is more insidious than mere gluttony / consumerism.
The example here is egregious and very clear. But make no mistake about it: it exists, in smaller form, everywhere you go.