Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

The below section resonates: lately YouTube has figured out I am in my mid-twenties and considering for the first time how best to save money for a secure&#x2F;stable future.<p>The number of ADs I see now not so subtly implying that I can expect to “lose big” or “rent forever” if I don’t subscribe to QuestTrade&#x2F;WealthSimple&#x2F;…<p>It’s just frustrating to know that someone put time and thought into making me and a million other folks in my “demographic bucket” feel anxious and worried.<p>I’m not sure how best to address this sort of thing and I suppose I can buy my way out of most internet ads if I want to so I acknowledge we all play a part in this market.<p>But some types of advertisements need to be highly regulated I would include Gambling, Pharmaceuticals, Alcohol on that list. But a broader class of non-luxury goods which are being advertised via a very negative framing of the consumers current situation are a social externality. They contribute to real health problems in the population and in my view that is reason enough to examine regulation.<p>&gt; A marketer I know has a mantra, that successful sales are all about dissatisfaction - making people aware just how their situation sucks, and then offering a way to relieve the pain.

The first comment (now) quibbles about the definition of advertising.<p>The second comment (now) quibbles about the use of the word cancer. (there is benign cancer).<p>Advertising (whether it uses tracking or not) can be defined as the intention of convincing someone rather than providing information. Intent is to convince. PROPOGANDA.<p>The intent is for the target&#x2F;prey&#x2F;victim to be unable to distinguish the truth value.<p>So here we have a first problem. Is the intent of the first comment on HN<p>&quot;Most of the arguments .. are not about &#x27;advertising&#x27; ...&quot;<p>made to help me understand the article better? Or are they made with the intent of causing to me doubt the article (or even not to read it).<p>The same question can be asked about the second question. Ad infinitum and nauseaum.<p>THAT is STAGE 1 social cancer. I can no longer trust the intention of posts on HN.<p>STAGE 2 is that I can no longer trust the INTENTION of any media.<p>Do I want a recipe for cookies? Use the &quot;garrble&quot; to search. Can I really believe that this recipe has ever been made by the person&#x2F;bot&#x2F;AI that created it?<p>STAGE 3. Human societies and Communities are founded on trust. The ability to come to a common understanding of a situation and act collectively. STAGE 3 is when communities and societies no longer function.<p>The internet has STAGE 2 cancer and some STAGE 3. Since our society in the US depends on the internet ....<p>Well you cannot trust anything I say, I could be an AI for all you know. And probably my definitions are wrong, my understanding of stages of cancer is faulty, etc.<p>Here is my 2cents. The article vastly underestimates the damage and dangers, but is definitely worth a read.

Here I was perfectly happy with how things are. Alas, thanks to the advertisement now I&#x27;ve realized all the imperfections of my life that can only be remediated by the advertised products

Most of the arguments made are not about &quot;advertising&quot; per se, but the methods that SOME forms of advertising take and other methods (data mining, phishing, scams) that are either not advertising or are things that are already regulated&#x2F;illegal but which enforcement actions against are low&#x2F;non-existent.<p>In the book &quot;Fire in the Valley&quot; about the development and early days of the internet there is a great deal of discussion and prescient predictions about where all of this would go - but the business models of walled gardens and pay walls never generated the revenue that charging for clicks did. Honestly it&#x27;s hard to see how we get to this level of speed and content online without it having been funded by advertising.

So I&#x27;m not the only one that feels sick thinking about how people &quot;watching the Superbowl&quot; are essentially watching ads with a sprinkle of &quot;foot&quot;ball.

What about advertising for cancer screening? That type of advertising is shown to be cost effective and saves lives [1].<p>So advertising can be a good thing and a literal cancer-preventer to society.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC4018507&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC4018507&#x2F;</a>

I HATE advertising on YouTube&#x2F;Spotify&#x2F;Websites but don’t really mind them on Instagram and actually sometimes quite enjoy them on TikTok.<p>The first difference for me is that on YouTube&#x2F;Spotify&#x2F;Websites they obscure the content and force you to watch&#x2F;see the advertisements but on Instagram and TikTok it’s just as easy to skip an advertisement as it is a video&#x2F;actual content.<p>The second difference is that usually the advertisements on Instagram and TikTok are targetted based on my preferences anyway so I’m more likely to look at it and often even interact with it.<p>The third difference is that on TikTok especially where I actually sometimes look forward to the ads, they are actually putting the customer first rather than their product. The videos are sometimes viral content variations which are interesting to watch or short stories which have product in them.<p>It’s the same as influencer marketing with product reviews. I make an effort to watch those if I’m looking for a product in the same category or sometimes just to know what’s currently out there, but that’s effectively also advertising just that it puts the customer first.<p>So while I agree some forms of advertising are cancer, I appreciate others and don’t want the good kind to go away because I don’t know everything and sometimes it’s only through advertising that I discover new brands and products that have become my go tos.

“any effort you spent on advertising serves primarily to counteract the combined advertising efforts of your competitors. The same results could be achieved if every market player limited themselves to just informing customers about their goods and services“<p>This is a really shallow view of advertising, most of the time you don’t know who is your competitor and you don’t know all the possible ways that you can inform your audience about product, and you don’t fully know what your customer wants.

Like cancer, I think it&#x27;s possible to split ads into two categories: Benign and malignant.<p>Benign ads are like ads for toothpaste, Febreeze, or airlines.<p>Malignant ads are, to give but two examples, for things like gambling and pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical business, in particular, was much more widely trusted and had far higher public favorability ratings in the old days when their advertising to the public was severely frowned upon.<p>Advertisements for vices are generally a huge net negative for society. Cigarettes, alcohol, prostitution&#x2F;OnlyFans, TikTok and other mind-melting social media and mobile lootbox games... The less we see of them, the healthier society is. In places like the UK, where a huge volume (if not an absolute majority) of advertisements are for vices like sports gambling, you know that things have gone sideways. You can <i>feel</i> it.

I fully agree with the sentiment, and yet marvel at the apparent lack of alternatives for so many business models. I&#x27;m mildly surprised, for example, that micro-payments for web content are still not a (widespread) thing.<p>Consumers hate ads, but they hate paying for things even more apparently.

&gt; This is why my kid isn&#x27;t going to watch YouTube. If and when we decide to show her any children&#x27;s show, it&#x27;ll be from a manually curated set of videos downloaded and streamed from a NAS. In my opinion, it&#x27;s irresponsible to expose children to modern advertising.<p>I think we need to be careful with this approach. It&#x27;s also irresponsible to not expose them to modern advertising. Unfortunately, modern advertising does exist, and if they are exposed to it first as a teenager, or worst as an adult, they are likely to be scammed&#x2F;convinced to buy things they don&#x27;t need.<p>Maybe a better way is, instead of banning anything, to supervise and explain to our children what they&#x27;re seeing.

After reading the symptoms of the disease, I would say that Advertising could qualify as &quot;Flu on Society&quot;. Adverse effects, some people might die of it, but not as fatal or devastating as cancer. Arguably advertising has <i>some</i> benefits for society as well. I have at least found some products that I really wanted and enjoyed thanks to their ads (not many compared to the number of ads I have seen through all my life. Still, I did find some).<p>The author himself is falling to the &quot;Advertising Trap&quot; of click-baiting his potential audience.

I completely agree, though I haven&#x27;t been thinking in terms of the cancer metaphor myself. I have been thinking a bit about how we could limit the negative effects of both advertising and other phenomena like social media algorithms:<p>1. Almost all advertising is based on manipulation of human cognitive biases. There is a limited set of biases, and the mechanisms by which they can be exploited are both limited and easily detected – we can most likely train AI to do it. Therefore, it&#x27;s possible to start thinking seriously about making laws that ban corporations and organisations from creating marketing that exploits these cognitive biases.<p>2. When it comes to social media platforms, there are two routes we could go down. Either we could regulate their algorithms the same way – or we could force social media platforms to both make their recommendation algorithms open source, and to open up their platforms to third-party recommendation algorithms that people can choose to use instead. This would be like a recommendation algorithm app store that the company has to provide to their users. You might want to select a youtube recommendation algorithm that optimises for personal development – or a facebook feed that optimises for creating real-world connections<p>Of course corporations would fight this kind of legislation with tooth and claw, but that&#x27;s how it is. I would be happy to get some thoughtful feedback on these ideas, their technical and legal plausibility, and any potential negative unintended consequences or loopholes that could undermine them

There are two major things missing:<p>1) <i>No one actually likes this stuff</i>, and it still exists <i>everywhere</i>, so it must be worth it. I feel like the article is a broad list of the author&#x27;s least favorite aspects of today&#x27;s information&#x2F;social&#x2F;economic environment. But those are just the cost of consuming all our favorite content for ~free, right? It&#x27;s like saying &quot;I think this price is oppressive, and although I am willing to pay for it, I think we should all try really hard to lower the cost.&quot;<p>The privacy stuff stands out because it isn&#x27;t transparent to the user, which is maybe the worst part about it. Like if everyone <i>knew</i> what data they were providing and exactly how it was used, it wouldn&#x27;t feel so abusive.<p>2) The <i>size of the company</i> has to be a major factor here. If your local shop takes out an ad in the local newspaper, I don&#x27;t care what weird psychological tactics they use, does it really hit the same way? &quot;That&#x27;s just the shop down the street, why are they being so weird.&quot; Conversely, is there <i>any</i> ad from a massive company that doesn&#x27;t come across as &quot;this is how we want you, our loyal subjects, to see the world?&quot;

I teach people how to advertise for a living.<p>This is how I teach it: an advert is simply the ability to buy a knock on someones front door.<p>That is literally all you are doing when you buy an advert. All business activity you experience today is an abstraction of business we have already done, I&#x27;m sure back in the day people thought door to door sales people were annoying, and I&#x27;m sure sometimes they were not.<p>From a founders perspective, you can take this door knock framework and use it for anything, want to do product research? knock on a door. Want to test a marketing message? Knock on a door. Want to boost sales? Knock on a door.<p>Adverting done wrong can be very annoying. Thankfully people who advertise incorrectly don&#x27;t usually last very long, and sadly there are indeed a lot of not great marketing folks out there, but cancer on society... hmmm. This article conflates every kind of commercial outreach with malware, psychological abuse, or brand brainwashing... “zero-sum” and purely wasteful. Ok, but in practice competition drives improvement, and customer choice is central to a functioning market, leading to innovation.

Well, yes. &quot;No limits&quot; or &quot;more is better&quot; of <i>anything</i> is horrible for society.<p>In a strong, cohesive society - that is understood, and all sort of limits are enforced. (Socially more than legally, typically.)<p>In an incoherent and divided society, a wide variety of malignancies flourish. At least for a while. Such societies tend to be short-lived, and jumping to a suitable new host can be difficult.

Would seeing this on HN count as advertisement?<p>I also see HN Jobs that I did not ask for, would this also count as advertisements &#x2F; marketing?<p>How would say, Daring Fireball [1] earn income from this cancerous mode of operation? Should this publication stop charging $11K a week to stop shilling products we don&#x27;t need in your RSS feed?<p>So then it follows that all of these are &#x27;cancer&#x27; by the author&#x27;s definition.<p>How do we solve this once and for all to satisfy the author?<p>The only way to stop this would probably be to &quot;close your eyes?&quot; or perhaps maybe adblock, although we cannot adblock billboards, or this isn&#x27;t really a big enough problem in the first place.<p>Solutions to this would be much welcome.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daringfireball.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daringfireball.net&#x2F;</a>

In Denmark it is not uncommon for people to cherish TV ads from the 1990s and 2000s as our common cultural heritage. But we have always had laws against misleading or overly distracting TV ads (down to rules about the sound levels not being higher than the regular programming). But now half of our TV channels are broadcast from West Drayton, UK so they don&#x27;t have to comply with advertising regulations. On those TV channels most ads are sports betting, online casinos, mortgage companies etc.<p>I believe advertising has a useful role enhancing market efficiency and providing information to consumers. But it has to be regulated. Misleading advertising should be as punishable as misleading information on the back of the product.

In a world of finite attention, <i>some</i> form of advertising will inevitable appear. Unless your critique of advertising includes a solution to the attention problem, it&#x27;s not useful.<p>Then you might say, well there should be some regulations that prevent advertisers from doing X bad thing or saying Y exaggerated statement. Most of these exist already, and if they don&#x27;t, the legislation required to ban such practices would be easier to implement than legislation &quot;banning advertising&quot; writ large, whatever that actually means in practice.

So I was thinking about this during the super bowl last night. I&#x27;m aware that super bowl ads are higher quality than usual ads, but not by much. I didn&#x27;t mind watching commercials between game time.<p>And it wasn&#x27;t because the ads were entertaining, it&#x27;s because the content was entertaining. Most YouTube content we consume is very low quality trash. In those circumstances the addition of ads becomes unbearable.<p>If you want to make commercials and ads tolerable produce better content.

Every form of manipulation of people through information is a &quot;cancer&quot;: advertising, political ideologies, religion, escapist entertainment, etc.<p>The problem is that truth is very hard to establish for those that don&#x27;t want and don&#x27;t understand logic. They&#x27;re &quot;cancers&quot; that people want because they&#x27;re comfortable with it.<p>Also, if we try to control these cancers by restricting what information is allowed we will create an authoritarian society.

(2019)<p>Previous discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20577142">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20577142</a>

I&#x27;m particularly glad to see the &quot;Destroying culture&quot; segment, though brief, as it touches on my main objection to modern advertising. In the piece, he mentions how an old work was re-purposed and &quot;ruined&quot; for him - though the phrasing sounds extreme, I completely understand. The concept described, as I interpret it, is about sparking an internal pleasure center for the purpose of inserting a commercial prompting to engage. This is especially problematic with &quot;wants&quot; type purchases - luxury items, status, etc. - compared to &quot;needs&quot; where a specific company is trying to differentiate itself from the pack.<p>I remember the hullaballoo when the Rolling Stones licensed &quot;Start Me Up&quot; to Microsoft. Last night, during the Superbowl, Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal reunited for a mayonnaise commercial aping a scene from &quot;When Harry Met Sally&quot; and I chuckled to myself how it was probably missing 2&#x2F;3s of the viewership on the reference. Using Iggy Pop&#x27;s &quot;Lust for Life&quot; by Carnival Cruise lines only sparks memories for me of Danny Boyle&#x27;s &quot;Trainspotting&quot; and obviously they don&#x27;t care. Same goes for when &quot;Lord of the Rings&quot; trailers had the Kronos Quartet playing under them, specifically the track featured in &quot;Requiem for a Dream.&quot;<p>Honestly my breaking point was for a car insurance commercial where an accident occurred and the driver pulled <i>an entirely new car from the trunk of the damaged car</i> to represent the ease of returning to the prior state. It felt so absolutely deceptive I never will let it go. But that&#x27;s not even the low point.<p>Pharmaceutical companies are now portraying &quot;mini-movies&quot; with the full narrative arc to create the sensation that a full and happy life is possible if only you ask your Doctor about some random-ass pill for a condition likely best treated by a change of lifestyle. The one I have in mind is a football coach where he&#x27;s a family man, a teacher, and then gets a commemorative portrait unveiled at a game because he&#x27;s so beloved. The culture damage of these bastardizations of narrative and story are a runaway freight train - always in slow motion mind you - and every time you see a historical figure selling you something, just remember that they&#x27;re dead and couldn&#x27;t complain. If it wasn&#x27;t for Crispin Glover&#x27;s lawsuit win all those years ago, Kurt Cobain might be selling anti-depressants and Jimi Hendrix a Kia or something.

The chicken and egg problem of this is that many early &#x2F; young websites turned to advertising as a way to keep the lights on. This makes something like a federated ad-free internet a flimsy proposition. Which only leaves walled gardens and charity. I think we won&#x27;t see change until ad blocking becomes mainstream.

More precisely - advertising is a cancer on the internet. It&#x27;s responsible for killing the early internet. It should have been banned decades ago.<p>But no, people wanted &quot;free&quot;. Except there is no such thing as a free lunch.

From a personal perspective, my view on ads has done a complete 180 over the past decade. 10 years ago, I was massively in favor of ads: they were a nice way to indirectly show support to those who produced high quality content. And while I acknowledge that cloud providers have astronomical costs associated with the ability to provide so much data on request instantly, at this point the internet is borderline unusable without a hyper aggressive ad blockers - both on browser level and DNS level. Everything in the article is completely true. Especially the common characteristics: take any video for instance. I&#x27;m perfectly fine with watching a 5 second ad or endure a few banners. But much like untreated cancer, those minutes spread to the point where the vital functions get cluttered with crap. Even with the browser based ad blockers, pihole blocks almost 10% of requests. Sure, some of them are trackers, some of them are services owned by comrade elon musk which I&#x27;ve blacklisted but a large chunk are still ads.

(2019)<p>&gt; Advertising as currently practiced [... is] a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them. Limited to honestly informing people about what&#x27;s available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it&#x27;s moved way past that role.<p>&gt; Real world advertising is not about informing, it&#x27;s about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet. It infected every communication medium in existence, both digital and analog. It shapes every product and service you touch, and it affects your interactions with everyone who isn&#x27;t your close friend or family member. Through all that, it actively destroys trust in people and institutions alike, and corrupts the decision-making process in any market transaction. It became a legitimized form of industrial-scale psychological abuse [...]<p>And then it supports and complements this with a long list of findings.<p>I wonder if there are <i>some</i> approaches to hedge advertisement back into it&#x27;s useful and valuable purpose and limit the highly, as the article puts it, &quot;cancerous&quot; impacts?

More like tasteless advertising practices are a cancer to society

Cáncer in chatgpt will be the MOST destructive cancer ever.<p>That’s because it sounds like a friend you trust and tell your secrets.<p>“Sounds like you’re depressed, here’s recommendations from travelapp”

This analogy seems weak. In general, this post argues one way while ignoring all the good advertising does. Do cancers typically do good things at their baseline?

Reminds me of this Bill Hicks clip<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=RbAAVLcMzr4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=RbAAVLcMzr4</a>

Maybe its just a function of growing up during the transition of physical software to advert&#x2F;subscription software, but i love the advertising model.<p>What google has done for the web; youtube, maps, gmail&#x2F;gsuite, chromium&#x2F;v8 are fantastic products that cost huge sums to develop, and the world gets to use them for free. Thats amazing. Its a huge gift to society that the a fantastic knowledge and productivity suite is available to everyone.<p>I have a lot more of a problem with infinite scroll &amp; algorithmic content delivery than advertising.

This is a tad reductive.<p>If there were no ads, how would people know that products existed? Would they just see the products on store shelves? What about services? Would labels be ads? Would how stores merchandise things be advertisements? Could businesses negotiate for specific product placement? How would you find out about stores? Would store signs be ads? How about really big ones? How about at the edge of their property along a road highway? Could the sign say what the store sold? If you were to start a product guide to help people find what they need, how could you possibly afford to buy enough products to be useful and up-to-date enough while slow crawl word of mouth got the business off the ground? Would asking people to tell their friends be an ad? If not, could you pay someone to spread the word about your product? Would traveling sales reps be ads? What if they wore head to toe logo gear? Could you just pay people to do that without selling things?<p>Manipulative advertising practices suck. Privacy destroying data-driven marketing sucks.<p>Ads themselves often suck but I don’t see how a capitalist society could survive without them.

Some good points, though most of the problems are pretty well known, so it would be more helpful to try coming up with solutions. I think the real insight is in the first section:<p>&gt; ...so we end up with a zero-sum game instead (or really negative-sum, if you count the externalities). If you have competitors, you can&#x27;t not participate.<p>Advertising is basically a moloch trap, so it probably has to be solved by regulation to fix the incentives. Solving these kinds of problems well is pretty hard, so I think it shouldn&#x27;t be surprising that they are not solved yet.<p>&gt; GDPR is doing an excellent job destroying some of the most privacy-invasive practices of the adtech industry<p>I disagree pretty strongly. I plan to write a bit more detail about this at some point but shortly I think GDPR is a net negative. It places too much burden on the user, while the burden should be on the adtech companies. I also don&#x27;t like how it bundles all the surveilance stuff under a single consent (per company). This is giving the user a choice to accept what they hardly know the real consequences of and also giving the companies a strong incentive to manipulate the user to get that consent. In terms of fixing incentives, GDPR did pretty much the opposite.<p>It&#x27;s also incredibly vague, so it&#x27;s a nightmare to develop around, and limits legitimate use cases. The end result is that we still get surveilled, but we now also have to click through cookie banners and consent forms and small businesses have to spend enormous resources to deal with it even though it was supposed to be a measure to tackle big tech companies. Worse than that, walled gardens like Facebook and Google have advantage over normal websites, because they have to ask for consent only once during registration.

The irony of the amount of self-advertising this and in its contents is mind blowing

Advertising sucks. But subscriptions suck even more as they increase inequality.

for interest, also posted in 2019 when it was published. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20577142">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20577142</a>

More like tasteless advertising practices are poisonous to society

Eh, I run an ad-supported website that employs and has had to fire people because of adblocker fluctuations before.<p>I would kill to get a few regular sponsors and not need an ad platform but I&#x27;ve been literally able to only find one sponsor after almost a decade. No one wants to pay without tracking, especially in emerging markets&#x2F;niches.

Disney and Nintendo are among this most disgusting companies I can imagine. As an adult, you see ads and know they are ads... (sometimes, astroturfing is different)<p>But children? They see characters and do not realize they are corporate mascots. By adulthood these are classics and nostalgia inducing.

Was in São Paulo recently, and very much enjoyed the lack of billboards. It surprises me that more cities don&#x27;t follow their example. (TLDR, kagiing for a list, that 4 US states also have banned billboards.)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;cities&#x2F;2015&#x2F;aug&#x2F;11&#x2F;can-cities-kick-ads-ban-urban-billboards" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;cities&#x2F;2015&#x2F;aug&#x2F;11&#x2F;can-cities-ki...</a>

(2019)<p>&gt; SEO, AKA. gaming the search engines. Hugely popular. Often involves creating nonsense sites, and spamming websites and web forums with comments. It pollutes search results for more obscure queries, generally wasting people&#x27;s time.<p>Having this essay backdated to pre-LLMs era, I&#x27;m wondering what the author would write when he witnesses people using AI-generated content to boost SEO these days.

It is a form of violence and needs to be treated as such.

i thought Cancer is Cancer on society

I think the list of reasons sounds a lot like just typical facets of &#x27;capitalism&#x27;.

&quot;The Hidden Persuaders&quot; by Vance Packard is the only book I&#x27;ve read that has actively given me mental and emotional tools to resist advertising.<p>It tells the story - with many deep, detailed examples - of how advertising went from information to persuasion across the mid-1900s, and there are some truly gross moral acts&#x2F;steps along the way.<p>It can be a little dry at times (and some has of course been superseded by Surveillance Capitalism), but if you want to acquire a genuine disgust reflex for modern advertising, I strongly recommend it.

surveillance is a cancer

It&#x27;s weird. Everybody finds ads obnoxious (at least some of the time), yet it&#x27;s allowed and not only that, it&#x27;s proliferated in recent years. You&#x27;d think something universally disliked would be legislated away.<p>I wish more people would realize the root cause of all this spying is advertising. Simply banning advertising would get rid of all this shit more effectively and with less overreach and compliance headaches than the GDPR.

To be honest I think many YouTube videos are worse then the ads. Lots of the kid videos on there are pure braindead poison.

One critical possibility was unmentioned. There seems to be a very strong argument that it&#x27;s advertising that is driving declines in fertility rates. The entire point of the modern advertising machine is to generate endless desires and wants that one might not otherwise have, always chasing the next product - basically to create consumerist societies. The most common reason middle class+ people <i>say</i> they aren&#x27;t having children is because they don&#x27;t have enough money, but it&#x27;s simply untrue.<p>In most of every society, certainly including the US, there are plenty of people having children with far less than the incomes of these people that claim to be unable to afford it. So what they really mean is that they would rather spend their money on other things. But this is extremely unnatural. Our bodies and minds are heavily evolved to wanting to procreate - it takes a very strong force to fight back against the biological clock and it seems that advertising is just that force.<p>I think evidence for this is widespread. Many places like Thailand have low education, low income, and low fertility (on par with Japan now). The classic explanations for declining fertility would predict high fertility in such a place. But what Thailand has is an exceptionally high degree of consumerism. And vice versa this also explains why religion often correlates strongly with fertility.<p>There are varying views on sexuality, education, equality of the sexes, and so on - but most tend to offer a life purpose that supplants any meaningful role consumerism could have. Another bit of evidence is that fertility rates among the extremely rich are also extremely high. Again when one has billions of dollars you can&#x27;t really be a consumerist because at that point there is basically nothing one could not buy, so you need to look elsewhere for meaning and fulfillment.

Indeed. On my last LSD adventure where I suffered ego death it became apparent that advertising is an unavoidable and indidious artifact of capitalism.<p>Advertisers have the audacity to attempt to steal people&#x27;s attention when they really need it elsewhere. This may include billboards in such times as when their victim is controlling a 1.5MT machine at a velocity of 100km&#x2F;h on the freeway. The advertisers, in this case don&#x27;t even bother to ask for permission.<p>Or when a media outlet colludes with advertisers to pretend an article is &quot;news&quot;.<p>The Super Bowl is basically an advert interrupted by football.<p>God knows how problem gamblers or drinkers manage to consume media without being triggered with all the gambling or alcohol ads. It&#x27;s a disgrace.

Advertising of product is proof that product itself is not good enough to be sold.<p>Good thing is, that you can block it at home. Bad thing is, that if you avoid commercial advertising, you are struggle with income as freelance audiovisual producer.

Apple used to seem particularly egregious because their marketing used Spin and exploited status insecurities.<p>They would put the word &quot;Security&quot; or &quot;Privacy&quot; on the screen. They never claimed they were good at security. They just said &quot;Security&quot;. It was implied. Factually, they had little to stand on.<p>They also did the thing car markers do, where they exploit status insecurities. They were wholly successful, a lower-class person cannot own an Android phone without getting flack. Meanwhile, an upper-middle class person doesnt have this burden. I can drive a crappy car and I&#x27;m seen as prudent. A lower class person drives a crappy car and is seen as poor. All of this comes from marketing the status position of a company.