Agree. Which is why I get so irrationally annoyed when sharing a good piece of journalism that's not catering to ad-clicks and the peanut gallery here grabs their torches and pitchforks while shouting "PaYwALL!" despite me posting the gist of the article in the post body (enough to get the gist but not the full article for copyright reasons). It's one of several reasons why I don't even bother anymore.

Like, good journalism costs money. That money's gotta come from somewhere if you want good journalists to be able to eat and keep doing what they do.

I think the answer always comes down to capitalism

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.

Bill Watterson tried to warn us

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:

1. 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.

2. 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, and it is fundamentally because advertising is a cheap way to manipulate you into buying something, and unlike true education, it's effectiveness keeps scaling with volume.

Advertising is one of the most prolific environmental pollutants of economic activity, and needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.

Kind of funny this has to be discussed in shower thoughts when its a central theme of our entire world at the moment.

I was thinking about this earlier today.

It’s amazing to me that in my lifetime, ads went from a thing that companies got to do as an extra once they had succes all the way to a thing that runs everything everywhere.

Nowadays if you don’t have ads in some form abusing the algorithm (which is in itself designed to be abused) then you get nowhere.

(Also holy shit this has a lot of comments, seems like people have this on their liver somewhat)

Oh shit, I thought you said "AI" companies and was about to say "nahh, it's the advertisers" lol.

Yes. Ads are a stain on our species and should be outlawed.

They are a waste of resources, clutter and manipulate our minds, and give a ridiculous advantage to those who already have the money to buy them.

Follow the money. Advertisement exists because businesses demand it.

Your post is literally shooting the messenger.

Yeah, I agree. People were doing an en masse boycott, using tiktok as a way to gather, and who to hit, then, bam suddenly the elites have to buy tiktok. I know they did that for other reasons too, controlling the narrative and what people see and know has been the M.O. of the evil elite, since days of old, but it just seemed like interesting timing. If we all just gather and boycott, together, as a movement, do targeted hits, I wonder if we could break their choke hold on us. I know there's a lot of movements for boycotting, people are moving away from the more evil things. I just feel like it doesn't get as widely spread as it should? Maybe? And I really appreciated the approach behind the other movement, they targeted one brand for one quarter, in a very calculated and planned strategy, so as not to affect anyone's jobs.

People interested in storytelling have been obsessed with the "Hero's Journey" for decades, which a fantastically 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 that the idea has taken such complete hold of artist's imagination that 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 with no easy answer, not a simple list of plot points delivered to convince you of a particular belief and singular structure through which to see a set of events.

This leads to a massive learned blindspot about advertisement in that artists lose sight of the fact that Advertisement is the annihilation of Storytelling where the natural human 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.

Advertisement is the attempt to annihilate art, it can be seen no other way no matter how many artists the advertisement industry employs in the process.

Many people will be shocked, however, to learn that academic folklorists and scholars of ancient literature almost universally reject Campbell’s theories as nonsense—and for good reason. Campbell’s outline of the “hero’s journey” is so hopelessly vague that it is essentially useless for analyzing stories across cultures. It also displays ethnocentric, sexist, heteronormative, and cisnormative biases and it encourages people to ignore the ways in which stories are fundamentally shaped by the cultures and time periods in which they are produced.

...

Campbell starts out with the assumption that every great story must be focused on a single hero, whom he generally assumes to be a heterosexual man. According to Campbell, the “hero’s journey” begins with the hero living in a state of normality, which is disrupted by some kind of “call to adventure,” which takes the hero into the realm of the “unknown,” which “is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, super human deeds, and impossible delight.

https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/

For those who disagree, can you not see how directly this imposed definition of what a Story is slots perfectly into rationalizing Advertising and focusing on it as the true purpose of an Artist?

They definitely try, but why do we let them?

This is why Josie and the Pussycats is the best movie ever.

(Join the army)