My Theory: Advertising is a lot like capitalism itself
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.
>Both ads and capitalism are messy and have some externalized harms, but are better than the alternatives.
Some 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.
Very well said.
Capitalism works very well within boundaries. When those boundaries expand too much, capitalism becomes degenerate.
The ideal is a strong state which polices capitalism so that we get the benefits but not the harms.
Same for ads - allow in general but make laws for privacy and harmful products.
Advertising is the worst way to monetize an app, except for all the others.
Advertising is just part of the gospel of the capitalism religion, with its prophets and preachers of the markets, its churches and cathedrals of profit, its dogma and prayers, its even got its cults of crypto currency and the fanatics that believe in profit without production. Advertising is just like the religious pamphlets of old, today just praising the gods of consumption and excess, promising salvation.
Capitalism ain’t a religion, it’s a system. It’s Libertarianism, as a philosophical and moral view of society and markets, the one that can be seen as a religion. And I also think it’s, just that it believes in “supranatural” rights of property rather than “supernatural” beings or moral sources.
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.
This relies on false definitions of capitalism and communism, definitions which I believe are carefully crafted to preclude you from having certain thoughts.
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.
Just as the OP has “definitions crafted to preclude him from having certain thoughts”, I’d argue the same for this comment.
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.
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