Comment by imiric

I can assure you that the employees of Altria at least are not stigmatized in their community.

It's well trodden ground already. Bill Hicks had it worked into his routine 30+ years ago.

I disagree, the problem is the race to the bottom in advertising.

Drugs ads being able to show 30s of the one positive side effect and then spend 0.5s speed talking through all the negative ones is not a fair description of the drug.

Almost every product advertising being here's a celebrity (who has no idea how the product works) using the product without any real description of what the product does. Imagine a car ad that had to show you had to pump gas!? It's like one of the most common things you do with a car.

And other product advertising being 100% vibe based. We're the company of tomorrow! The fuck does that even mean?

Conceptually, you need advertising. How else will you learn about new technology? The problem is that current advertising only teaches you the existence of something and not what it does.

> How will one fund the server costs for newspapers, social networks and search engines?

All of these currently exist without advertising. The problem is advertising sucks all of the oxygen out of the room, convincing you it's the only business model because it's so lucrative.

Look around at the businesses that are entirely supported by advertising and ask yourself honestly how worse off we would be if they disappeared overnight. Do you believe that the vacuum they left would never be filled by other business models? Sure, it would probably look a lot different, but that's the point. What we have now is horrible, and I don't think society collapses if we got rid of advertising.

It's not my place, nor am I smart enough to propose a solution. But if you ask me, I would start with much stricter regulations regarding company transparency, data collection, and data privacy. There are two things making this very unlikely, though:

- Governments and companies are in symbiosis. Companies can influence which laws are passed and how they apply to them, and governments depend on these companies both financially, and practically for their services. Nowhere is this clearer than in the US, where actual CEOs are now running the country.

- The general public doesn't really care about these issues. For most people their data and privacy isn't a concern, and even when it is, it's not a large enough of a concern that they would be willing to stop using these services, or use alternatives. Since advertising/propaganda works on a subconscious level, they're literally brainwashed to not see a problem at all.

So I realistically don't see a way out of this. It would require changes in deeply rooted sociopolitical systems just to get on the right path, and then years of effort to keep us there. And without unanimous public support for all of this, it will never come to pass.

As for alternative business models, that's the least of our problems. Technical solutions for this exist today, and wouldn't be difficult to expand and build upon, but the actual challenge is changing the public perception of what "free" means. The solution likely wouldn't be as profitable for companies as advertising currently is, which is why we would need regulations to force it. When weighing the success of another billion-dollar corporation against our society's mental health and stability, the choice is obvious to me.

> Note that lots of people won't (or mostly can't) pay, so how does a social network work in this case?

If there's not enough consumer demand for a service, and it's not a public utility that's worth funding through taxpayer money to maintain equal access for everyone, the logical, supply-and-demand-based, hundred year-old solution is to just admit it's not a good business idea and move on.

If their leadership teams can't come up with an offering worth paying for, well, tough luck, the list of neat ideas that just didn't atract enough customers is perpetually open.

If (under our current economic system) it is impossible to run generally useful services like that without subjecting their users to advertisements, then clearly, there's something wrong with the economic system itself and we should start investigating alternatives.

The current situation incentives advertising as the only way to monetize something so it's no wonder you want advertising to exist. The fundamental way is always going to be a peer-to-peer network, where you can contribute in so many different ways apart from paying. The majority of the web is filled with people who has no idea on what the original web stood for and frankly, they couldn't care less which is why we are in such a bloated mess

At low cost, like Craigslist?

Businesses not being able to find a sustainable business model is not my problem.

Regardless, I block all of their ads anyway.

There's a world of difference between broadcasting true capabilities of a product or service, and embedding subconscious thoughts into the minds of people to associate a brand with a feeling, in the form of "lifestyle brands", "torches of freedom", etc. The former is informing people about something that exists, while the latter is psychological manipulation straight from propaganda playbooks. Please read about the life and work of Edward Bernays, and this distinction will be clear.

Actual "honest" advertising doesn't exist. Companies that attempt to do that are outcompeted by the vastly superior revenues of companies that don't. The story that marketers tell themselves that they're simply informing the public about a product or service they might not know about is absolute BS. If it were true, large companies like Coca-Cola and McDonald's wouldn't need to advertise at all. The truth is that it's all about constantly molding the public perception of a company in a way that makes them associate it with a positive feeling, so that they will subconsciously choose to give them their money. These are the same tactics used in propaganda, but instead of making people part ways with their money, it makes them think or act in any way that's beneficial to a specific cause.

The language I use is not hyperbolic, analogies aside. It's the only way of describing the insanity of the world we live in, which now resembles in many ways the fictional world novel authors have been writing about for decades. If you want to engage in the discussion, you can start by refuting anything I've said.

> you're so hyperbolic and hysterical I don't even know where to begin.

No they aren't.

The situation is just so absurd and extreme, yet normalized, that accurately describing it makes people sound weird. That's why Chomsky speaks in that extreme monotone, to counterbalance the very real horror and extreme nature of the things he is saying.