Ad companies are the ones destroying civilization

Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨showerthoughts@lemmy.world⁩

The internet runs on ads.

Ad companies pay for all the “free” social media we use. Ad companies dictate to social media what their clients want their ads to be associated with, not associated with, and drive media of all kinds to push inflammatory and click-bait content that drives engagement and views.

So lowbrow political rage bait, science denialism, and fake conspiracies drives people to interact and then gets pushed to the top because it gets ad revenue. Content that delves into critical thought and requires introspection or contemplation languishes.

Ads are destroying society because stupid and rage sells views.

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choui4@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I think the answer always comes down to capitalism

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- RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Capitalism does play a part, but it’s more the lack of hard rules to curb it rather than the economic method itself. You want to make an even broader claim, just say “greed.”
  
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  - jmankman@lemmy.myserv.one ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    This was an understandable perspective when we had those regulations in the USA, but since FDR’s New Deal, the Republicans have walked back practically every law and regulation we had to curb the greed of Capitalism. This is the natural tendency of Capitalism
    
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  - choui4@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    This is where we disagree. What are the fundemental tenants of capitalism vs say, communism?
    
    (Just doing a thought experiment with you, in good faith)
    
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turboSnail@piefed.europe.pub ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
That’s an interesting thought, and I would like to add a few things to it.

The whole idea of having ad funded things is fundamentally flawed. It has also become too dominant, and difficult to compete with. Ads are the tool used in this business model, but are they really the root cause of the problems you mentioned? I would say no.

Theoretically, you could still have ads without ruining everything. When other business models aren’t competitive enough, the whole system naturally gravitates to the mess we’re currently in.

I think cheap mobile games have showed that you can charge a small amount of money, and people will be willing to pay up. That way, everything doesn’t have to be ad funded. It’s just that this business model doesn’t appear to be appealing enough in other arenas, and that’s a real problem.

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- grue@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  Theoretically, you could still have ads without ruining everything. When other business models aren’t competitive enough, the whole system naturally gravitates to the mess we’re currently in.
  
  There’s no such thing as “competitive enough.” Corporate greed is literally insatiable, inherently and by design. There’s an entire series of Supreme Court decisions – not just Citizens United – that would need to be overturned to fix that.
  
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- HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  
  I think cheap mobile games have showed that you can charge a small amount of money, and people will be willing to pay up.
  
  emulation’s another thing. i was glad to toss the duckstation devs five bucks so’s i could keep it easily updated on my phone (i like the psx generation, it’s great for that screen size) and so they could hopefully afford to keep working on it. it’s been so long i can’t remember if they charged or if it was a patreon thing, but five bucks is five bucks.
  
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- thethrilloftime69@feddit.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I think as funded stuff is the only way to get things done in a capitalist economy. There may be other types of economies that could get by without ads, but we’ll never know because this is the world we’ve created.
  
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- A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  having ad funded things
  
  Do you remember those free “newspapers” that used to choke your mailbox once a week, or your favorite club? With like 75% ad content and a few poorly written articles? That’s how I learned about the power of advertisment. The internet just put that in hyperdrive. How much of it is driven by ads these days?
  
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SpruceBringsteen@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Bill Watterson tried to warn us

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- HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  i still want a calvin peeing on calvin peeing on fractal sticker
  
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masterspace@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
You’re right overall, but the mechanism you listed about advertising only appearing near safe content is not that big of a deal compared to other mechanisms at play:

psychological manipulation vs competition - the way that a capitalist economy is supposed to work is that a bunch of firms compete to sell you a good or service, you pick the best one for your situation and buy it, then the firm that produces the best good or service gets more resources (money) to grow, rewarding the best product maker.

Advertising breaks this. It lets you spend money on psychological manipulation to get people to buy your product, instead of just trying to produce a better product. True conservative capitalists should fucking hate advertising for distorting the economy, and letting big companies pay advertising money to drown innovative competition, but there are very few of those left these days.

engagement driven algorithms - because advertising operates on the basis of psychological manipulation rather than actually informing you, it means that its effectiveness always scales with volume.

i.e. I can read everything there is to learn about two different laptops, watch YouTube videos, read all the specs and reviews, and after about two hours of research I’ll know everything there is to know. A company can try and provide me with more information about their product to sway me, but at that point it’s probably ineffective because I know everything about them already. However if they bombard me with slick fun ads that evoke certain emotions in me over and over and over and over and over again, it will create an emotional bias towards one over the other.

This distinction is super important because it is what leads to most of advertising’s ills: most specifically engagement driven algorithms, which social media uses to keep you scrolling and are what are truly destroying society. The amount of human time and effort wasted to them is incalculable, the amount of languished relationships, neglected kids, over tired and angry people etc. is truly jaw droppingly damaging.
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- A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  a bunch of firms compete to sell you a good or service, you pick the best one for your situation and buy it, then the firm that produces the best good or service gets more resources (money) to grow, rewarding the best product maker.
  
  Advertising breaks this.
  
  TBF, the original meaning of advertising was just that: spread the word about your product. Sure, praise it, add nice pictures, but that’s about it. People need to know that your product is out there.
  
  The systematic psychological manipulation only started in the 20th century, particularly when a relative of Sigmund Freud came to the USA (there’s an interesting documentary about it called The Century of the Self).
  
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Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Follow the money. Advertisement exists because businesses demand it.

Your post is literally shooting the messenger.

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- RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  The messenger is delivering poison. The messenger is the problem.
  
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  - crozilla@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Who’s paying for and giving them the poison? Corporations.
    
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supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
People interested in storytelling have been obsessed with the “Hero’s Journey” for decades, which a fatally sexist man hacked together as a concept from a poor interpretation of James Joyce and of cherry picked anthropological evidence.

What pisses me off is it makes people only want to talk about “Narrative” with respect to storytelling, and it misses the most essential aspect of storytelling in that good stories are always inherently plural in their nature. A good story is a cacophony of potentially true narratives all vying for your soul on stage, not a simple list of plot points delivered to convince you of a particular belief.

This leads to a massive learned blindspot about advertisement in that Advertisement is the annihilation of Storytelling where the invitation for the audience to interpret and construct their own unique Narrative is buried in an avalanche by an overwhelming reifying force that simplifies a complex reality down to a single corporate produced Narrative. People who do sports wear Nike.

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- mushroommunk@lemmy.today ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  That’s an interesting take. Have an article or blog post or paper anywhere that gives into it more? Not sure I agree or disagree but it’s an interesting thought
  
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  - supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    That is a difficult question to answer, I am not the first person to think this by any means but finding people who put it into simple terms and connect the dots is difficult.
    
    This is a great example of the species of brainworms I am talking about though.
    
    People fall in love with the story arc and the characters in these hero’s journey examples because they see themselves in the “before” phase—feeling stuck, small, and unseen.
    
    They crave a transformation.
    
    If you want to get better at selling your product or service, you have to understand that people don’t buy products or services.
    
    They buy transformations.
    
    Your customer is trying to get from point A to point B, but they don’t know how to do it on their own. If you want to sell to them, make your product or service the bridge between where they are and where they want to be.
    
    That’s why this storytelling structure works so well in marketing. Your customer is the protagonist, and your product/service is what helps them answer their call to adventure.
    
    I’m reminded of this quote:
    
    “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” —Henry David Thoreau
    
    thevectorimpact.com/heros-journey-examples/
    
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- rhymeswithduck@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I think you’re giving Campbell way more credit than he is generally given by the writing community at large. Yes, that is one way to write a story, but it’s certainly not the only method taught. For example, slice-of-life stories are completely acceptable, however it is harder to get some of the nuance across to new writers. The hero’s journey is an easy starting point, that’s all. And I really don’t think Campbell was trying to say that’s how everything should be. He was making observations about what he already saw in popular western media.
  
  I don’t understand your seeming conflation of advertising and art, which seems like a separate point from your criticism of Campbell. Advertising does not control art, nor vice versa. It makes more sense to look at things through the lens of money: art can be basically free to create (writing, drawing, street art are all pretty cheap). Anyone can do it. Now, something like making a film is not cheap. It can cost millions of dollars, and not many people have enough lying around to do so without getting a return on that investment. In other words, film has to make money. They know the hero’s journey will sell because it is easy for the average Westerner to digest and enjoy. So you see a lot more hero’s journey stories on the screen than you do in the wide world of books, which can afford to be more experimental or art-driven. Someone like Banksy isn’t worried about finding a rich buyer to recoup the cost of his stencils and paint. Would you agree?
  
  Advertising is a different beast altogether, and I’m not sure why you would criticize it for not being art. It was never supposed to be that.
  
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  - supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    They know the hero’s journey will sell because it is easy for the average Westerner to digest and enjoy. So you see a lot more hero’s journey stories on the screen than you do in the wide world of books, which can afford to be more experimental or art-driven. Someone like Banksy isn’t worried about finding a rich buyer to recoup the cost of his stencils and paint. Would you agree?
    
    I think you see this conversation as discussing a serious of fairly innocuous individual elements whereas I see it as part of a broader, irrevocably intersectional problem that must be addressed in a wholistic fashion by integrating all pieces of it.
    
    Campbell’s theories therefore provide justification for white westerners to reject the interpretations that non-western peoples give for their own stories, if those interpretations don’t align with what the white westerners in question think the interpretations should be. Thus, western perspectives are portrayed as universal perspectives and non-western perspectives are dismissed.
    
    talesoftimesforgotten.com/…/the-heros-journey-is-…
    
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- SippyCup@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Somebody watches too much Maggie Mae Fish.
  
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  - supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Somebody doesn’t watch enough Maggie Mae Fish
    
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- pelespirit@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I disagree. James Campbell was not a perfect man, but he did coalesce what humans like to see in a story most of the time. It’s not a perfect scenario like he claimed, but more of a guide to most cultures. If you look at boring structures of story, it’s usually because it doesn’t follow western structure (the hero’s journey). Joseph Campbell hated Noh from Japanese culture because he couldn’t follow it as a hero’s journey. Even if he didn’t speak the language, he could usually tell when they followed it. I’m assuming that’s what you’re talking about when cherry picking. He’s right in that to a westerner, it will be hard to understand and may be boring. To the Japanese though, it’s been around a long time.
  
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  - supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    He’s right in that to a westerner, it will be hard to understand and may be boring.
    
    Ok, but he is wrong in believing that says anything meaningful about Storytelling, it is just a shitty mirror to our own failings as a culture to point out this repetitive structure and then idolize it as “universal” when it isn’t.
    
    Over the last few decades, this structure has come to dominate much of popular storytelling, and Hollywood cinema in particular. With so many bestselling novels and international blockbusters using the Hero’s Journey to great success, it would seem at first glance that Campbell was right—that most or all great stories can be distilled down to a formula, which is universally applicable across time and place.
    
    However, as we’ll be exploring in today’s blog post, Campbell’s theories aren’t always a perfect fit for the needs of storytellers in the real world. The Hero’s Journey is not as universal as Campbell would claim—and the framework is weighed down by Campbell’s own antisemetic and sexist thinking.
    
    freerange.com/…/joseph-campbell-history-and-antis…
    
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