i truly believe that there's an open war between Humanity vs. Advertisers and their allies.

Advertising is pollution

All advertising is a psyop

All advertisers are eco terrorists and gaslighters.

They are enemies of normal people.

They have forgone their humanity and our planet and our own well being.

They should not exist.

Advertising doesn't have to exist.
Like, we could just pass laws restricting or outright banning certain kinds.
I think people just forget that we can tell corporations they can't do whatever the fuck they want.
- Think about how much waste in bandwidth and electricity happens just to make a webpage unreadable.
  Marketers are the opposite of accomplishment.
  It’s a job that only exists in capitalism
  If you’re a marketer and you read this, fuck you personally.
- they forget because the corporations pay for propaganda to tell them it's impossible
- And then those people can go do something useful with their lives!
  The catch: it's honest work
Are these, like, the opening lines to an awesome, dystopian sci-fi novel?
I'm a walking ad for PostgreSQL, free and open-source RDBMS. It's so much better than any other database, you should give it a try.
I am none of the above.

I agree with Bill Hicks.

https://youtu.be/9h9wStdPkQY

Came here to say that, he called it decades ago. Advertisers, marketers, and developers, all of them parasites

With modern advertising techniques, adverts mainly work by psychological manipulation - putting a name in your mind, making you associate it with an emotion (for example cars are "freedom", perfume is "lust"), induce fear of a non-existing problem and then sell you a "solution" and so on.

It's like being the focus of a crowd of untiring salesmen who are slick manipulators with training in Psychology and with no ethics at all.

That's how it is every day in every place (even the comfort of your own home) in the advert heavy world we live in if one doesn't fight to keep that shit away.

"It's like being the focus of a crowd of untiring salesmen who are slick manipulators with training in Psychology and with no ethics at all."
It's not LIKE that. It IS that. It's literally exactly that.
- Actually I think it's worse: human salesmen cost money whilst this shit is mainly automated or uses distribution systems were one person presses a button and millions get exposed to it (for example TV), so the numbers involved and the relentlessness of the pestering is far, far larger in scale than if human salesmen were doing it.
Also, "problems" that are things capitalism created for itself, and then sells you a solution. Such as services that scrub old subscriptions that you don't use, or companies that get you out of timeshares.
Advertising hasn't been that psychological since cable TV. These days, almost no work is put into advertising creatives. The goal is simply to spam and inundate you with messaging so the product is in your mind at all times. People have incredibly short attention spans thanks to smart phones so advertisements need to be virtually instantaneous in delivering their message.
Its really all about statistics these days. Very little thought or effort is put into advertisements.
- Have a look at Perfume adverts on TV: they are literally entirely made up of imagery meant to make one think about sex and being sexy, with not a single thing in any of them about the actual quality of the product.
  Car adverts too are similar, but their imagery is about things like Freedom, Family, Friendship, Party, Joy and so on (depending on the car). Almost none of them talks about the qualities of the actual vehicle.
  Adverts not relying in this kind of psychological manipulation are the ones which look a lot like 1950s adverts and talk about the actual qualities of the product.
  Under-investment into training advertising creatieves doesn't mean that the adverts aren't using Psychology tricks anymore because that way of doing adverts is now so widespread and common in the industry (because it works!) that people just learn those things as tricks of the trade rather than needing any kind of special extra training in Psychology.

What’s distressing is the way they’ve been accepted. Ads are baked into many experiences, particularly online. Is this post an ad? Is the recommendation thread? The quiet suggestion that there has to be a solution to some problem? It’s impossible to say.

Hailcorporate used to be active, but now it’s a ghost town where specters whisper to one another, depressed and sardonic. That’s why I love lemmy. Aside from the sticker and knitting scammers, we’re nearly clear of ads. If you’re a human reading this, I very probably appreciate you!

Even here I’ve posted about how advertising is a destructive force that ruins everything it touches and literally should not exist and there are people that are so indoctrinated by the industry that they rush to defend it
“But how will small businesses prosper without the ability to annoy you with direct mail marketing and Facebook campaigns!”
And truly misunderstanding the difference between something like a business directory, that you willing submit yourself to as a consumer, and can be listed and compiled objectively without competitive advantage for rich assholes, vs advertising, which intrudes on your life.
- Objectively, certain services could never have been created without advertising, and I recognize that. But I’m not going to stan for them or accept an antiquated system just because it was the starting point. Funny that it took a communist Linux forum for me to recognize the viability of passion projects.
knitting scammers
Wait... what?
- Just classic spam
  “wow, such a pretty ____. where can I buy it?”
  “Here’s a link to my store”
- I think he's referring to kitaboga.

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

– Banksy

It's that...the reason we are so dissatisfied with our lives? We may not even pay attention to most adverts, but subconsciously, they affect us and make us fell unhappy?
- yep, it's a psychological attack (on your subconscious) to create unrealistic expectations and feelings of inadequacy among consumers who do not experience the same outcomes.
  whether you pay attention to it or not, it's still a psychic attack
- hi. you must be new here. welcome to capitalism, consumerism, and the modern dystopia. what will you be doing to destroy it?

Advertising is the blistering puss of an underlying Capitalist stage four cancer that has broken the surface of the body.

Yeah, it's one of the necessary tools for achieving ever growing profits.
- Run away, uncontrollable, unregulated and unlimited growth is known as one thing .... Cancer
  and it usually eventually kills the host

Advertising exists to manipulate behavior beneficial to clients, out of target groups. It is propaganda and psychological manipulation. The days of simply informing people of products and services is a fairy tale. Maddison Avenue was built off of Nazi Germany's mass media propaganda strategies.

I loved those old Chevrolet commercials from the 1930s that explained things like how a differential or transmission works in a car and I'm not even a car guy
- I only remember the one, but yeah that was an absolute gem

Yes, but you misspelled "capitalism".

I propose we make a massive product database. If you need to buy something, you can see your options there on a level playing field. Companies who spend more money don’t get any more visibility than any other. If you don’t feel like spending any money, the database isn’t trying to push you down a spending spiral.

It would be so nice if there was one place to look for housing. So tired of rental scams.
And then for convenience, add a shopping cart so it's not a separate research step - congrats, you've invented Amazon.
- Amazon is everything but a level playing field and it is highly manipulated.
- Congrats, you missed the whole point about Amazon.
  As others already replied, the business model of Amazon (and any marketplace that sells its own products within it while being part of an oligopoly) is precisely to prevent unbiased comparison. Amazon gets data on all the products being sold on its website, its warehouses occupancy ... then make Amazon Basics and replace them. They did that before also with diapers among many other examples e.g. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/emails-detail-amazons-plan-to-crush-a-startup-rival-with-price-cuts/ but they also do the same with software products, e.g. AWS.
  So no, clearly Amazon is not about having fair comparisons and a shopping cart. Amazon is about being the ONLY shopping cart one can have fill it with Amazon products.
  PS: to clarify also something very obvious but just in case it's not so, Amazon by the simple fact of controlling the order of search results control what customers can, or can not, see and thus compare and in fine buy. Even if it did not sell it's own products (which again, it does) it would still be able to manipulate what customers buy. That is, again, the opposite of an unbiased product comparison service.
- Yes but now do a search for the item in your cart and buy it somewhere else.
- My idea is a bit different. You would be able to define exactly what you are looking for, and the database would display the results a the order you want.
  Let’s say you want a refrigerator with specific dimensions and features. Then, you would sort the results based on how loud they are, with the most silent ones at the top. You look at the results and realize that some models draw too much power, so you filter out all the E and F tier entries.
  You know, basic database query stuff.

Advertisers waste our time which is the only measurable currency we are all spending at the same rate

we have ads because services paid for with attention are more accessible and get more traffic than services paid for with a monthly subscription ... we could probably subsidize a lot of websites or make them community efforts (like Wikipedia), but because there is a desire to profit from websites, we have this aggressive push for ads and monetization in every corner of the web.

Commercialization, though, is the problem more than advertising itself is. Monetization through "native ads" or affiliate link marketing is just as insidious and toxic, and pervasive. Just like people hate loot boxes and games that have mechanics where skill is less important than paying cash for in-game content to gain an advantage, the root problem is commercialization.

This is just capitalism, and cyberpunk as a genre is meant to be critical of capitalism and its rotten fruits.

I think it misses the mark to interpret the war as a war between humanity and advertisers when it's a war between the powerful and wealthy and the 99%.

Exactly, also stop vilifying “advertising” when the cause of advertising is corporations. There would be no advertising without corporations paying for it. It’s like complaining about ashes instead of the fire.
I know that the advertising problem is just the tip of the iceberg. My observation is in how it seems to me that this antagonism between the Human experience vs. advertisers seems to be the first active front in a more generalized class war.

Online ads can be easily circumvented, I am more annoyed with giant billboards polluting public spaces. Oh well, one more reason to spend more time in nature.

Recently I've become more aware of how intrusive traditional advertising methods are: billboards everywhere, radio commercials interrupting the music, etc. It's incredible how immersed we are in that crap and how most of us don't realize it.

Started with 8Chan, where the same radicalised incels who support the rise of fascism worked in unison to move the Overton window. Allowing big Tech and Rupert Murdoch to constantly run propaganda against immigrants, whilst sustaining high levels of legal immigration to afford cheap labour and push the working class against eachother. All while Google, Meta, Microsoft and all of those clowns sell our active location Data collected from our phnes to Saudis, Russia and other extremely wealthy families so they could see businesses with less footfall during COVID, allowing them to bankrupt the global economy by shorting those companies through options. Netting them billions in profit and bankrupting businesses causing further economic downturn, in conjunction with the hostile takeover of the taxi cab and food delivery businesses. Further damaging restaurants and creating more unemployment, leading to fewer entry level jobs, normalising isolation and creating an atmosphere of distrust between people. Allowing for the further radicalisation of now unemployed young men by circulating millions of misleading, and sometimes, totally fake stories about immigrants. People that they brought here in the first place. All in order to push the world into a global conflict, buy up Earth and install themselves as the rulers of the ashes at the cost of billions of peoples lives.

This reads like a total conspiracy theory. I hate that it all rings true.
- That's what the denigration of the term conspiracy theory was about. Did you notice? Conspiracy theory was a term made up by the CIA in order to dismiss peoples claims about government experimentation during the MK Ultra experiments. Media called those questioning 9/11 "truthers." Which just so happened to include guys saying the planes were CGI and people who questioned how a group of goat herders from a country with literally zero infrastructure, living in caves, managed to hijack and divert commercial airliners in a perfect sequence of synchronistic events and American intelligence agencies, had no idea.
  Now conspiracy theory means, The pyramids are ancient batteries, the flat earth conspiracy and heliocentricism. We have been conditioned to associate the term "Conspiracy Theory" with lunatics and junk science. This rejection of intellectualism is all carefully co-ordinated on platforms like tiktok and Youtube. They don't want you to know things, if you see them for how they are you might rebel.

You could generalize that to "exploiters vs. humanity", ads are just a part of that.

Honestly, it always goes back to the seven deadly sins. In this case, I'd say greed and gluttony are most relevant.
Or, Capitalism

If I had a magic internet/media button I know what it would be.

It would be a brand banish button. If I see an ad, I wanna just have a button to banish them from all my devices…forever. I already have a rule you poss me off with adverts …I defo won’t buy.

So much tech potential that just does not exist!

YouTube ads were only ever advertising to me on what not to entertain purchasing.
- I agree. Everything being advertised on YouTube is sketch. Same with all the repeated podcast adverts honestly.
  The fact that youtube hits me with an ad for a game that says everyone thinks its fake, with the most bullshit sounding voice over, tells me they are happy to take money for obvious scam products.

You just need some special sunglasses to see the real messages.

🥇

One day ads will be unskippable, unless you get a 12 hr AdPass by watching 60 minutes of uninterrupted ads while eyeball tracking software monitors your attention. You will get mini games where you need to sing along or high five a friend. You can get an instant AdPass by purchasing the featured product.

Thanks to enshittification I've gone back to reading books, so, thank you advertisers?
- NON ADVERTISER FRIENDLY MEDIA DETECTED WITHIN YOUR HOUSE
  PLEASE GIVE IT UP WILLINGLY TO THE DANGEROUS MEDIA DISPOSAL SPECIALISTS DISPATCHED TO YOUR HOME
- Amazon Kindle has entered the chat
- The next logical step is to use chat gpt to retroactively add product placement to existing novels. The enshittification will follow you.
Fine, I will stop consuming whatever it is they are putting the ads in front of then.
Books in the library don't come with ads. But let's be real I will just emulate old video games on my PC until I perish.
- They're working on defunding the library already.
- Left unchallenged, they'll start inserting ads at your work, where you don't control the devices. Mark my words. B2B ad and surveillance tech. The profiles will get dumped into the same data lakes, for thirsty ad ghouls to lap at. Just one big web of corporate iniquity, where they sell each other shit no one needs or wants.
  Left unchallenged, anyway.
Some time ago I thought of something: one day they will invent some bullshit that maybe they will call "Proactive Advertising", which is basically that instead of advertising a product, they will force you to buy it in order to continue enjoying a service. "Buy a Coke for 20 minutes without ads. Buy a Six pack for one hour" and so on.

Modern marketing, post WW2 was the privatization of propaganda.

Datavampires.

At least you are an adult so you have the tools, cognitive and cultural, helping you see the problem. Imagine a very young kid, say 5 years old, watching exciting video content. They do not yet possess such ways to protect themselves from for-profit manipulation.

Just few days ago I finished the IMHO excellent "Buy The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence" by Henry A Giroux and Grace Pollock so you can already understand where I'm going with this.

Yes, advertisers are terrible, they make money by manipulating our thoughts, probing our deepest desire, toying with our emotions in order to sell us whatever is made by whomever pay them the most. But... you and I are fully formed human beings in the sense that we are adults. We spend years navigating through the world, getting scamming, learning how to spot lies and marketing pitches. The problem is, as showcased by Disney in that example (a very important example!), the process is not random. It is a very thoughtful and strategical one, namely how to transform a human being to a consumer from the youngest age.

Anyway I won't dig into the obvious but the book ends with a couple of practical links e.g. commercial free childhood (what a name, how can how even imagine that would be needed?) which since then became https://fairplayforkids.org/

If you prefer a video on the topic the 2001 yes still relevant 2001 documentary (52 min) "Mickey Mouse Monopoly - Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power" https://films.mediaed.org/Film/Mickey_Mouse_Monopoly/f56fd530-8724-460b-b2bc-6eba9868f0e7

I personally pulled that thread also thanks to the more recent 2016 article "Teaching Disney Critically in the Age of Perpetual Consumption" https://www.jstor.org/stable/45157190 but, again, the point is that it's systemic.

There's a French film called "BigBug" that makes an interesting parody about this.

They're building the internet for AI now, and were building it for advertisers for years before that, what with SEO choking up search results.

What should have been a wonderfully expressive, collaborative, and unifying medium is just being completely ravaged.

I, unfortunately, work in web development.

Ay they even do Seo for LLM now where their product is recommended more likely by an llm
- Haha yeah that's what I mean; the marketers at work are constantly blathering on about how we need to develop for ChatGPT and it's just like... Fuck off 😂

The advertisers are merely a tool for the investors, the people who own everything. The "haves" as it were. They are always at odds with and trying to squeeze money and labor from the rest of us, you know, the "have nots".

Something something you basically just figured out communism on your own

Every single communist regime ended up operating in this exact same way...
I am not following if OP actually figured anything out beyond that this is a class war.

I think you mean Capitalism

Advertisers are basically just arms manufacturers, supplying the wealthy with the tools needed to manipulate and use the population. Cut the head of the dragon

Say it with me:

"Its Capitalism"

The profit motive is killingbus and the planet.

More and more people are talking about how intrusive and annoying ads are, even those who make their living from them.

And majority of them won't do shit about it and keep complaining.

I know, there are user-friendly tools to deal with it, but the problem is that those people are lazy enough to not even bother spending few minutes looking for and implementing them.

People refuse to install firefox or ublock origin. Its really annoying.

Very Cyberpunk.

Just another battle ground of the class war that has been waged since ruling class figured out they can dunk on pedons

i don't know what happened to us as a society... we seem to have lost all semblance of media literacy.

it feels like in the 90's we were all very ad-aware, and actively opposed the idea of 'selling out'... then the rolling stones sold the rights to Start Me Up to windows and we've been in a race to the bottom ever since. why are we talking about 'monetizing your hobbies'.

what happened to shows like Media Television, magazines like AdBusters? does nobody remember reading Naomi Klein's 'No Logo'??

edit: Remember when Adam Curtis made 'A Century of the Self?

Oh god the "side hustle" hobby culture gets me fuming mad.

I feel the same. Besides what you mentioned, there is also the effect on what news and content will be produced and shown (see Manufacturing Consent). The advertisers who are the customers of shows want the viewers in a buying mood. So while "if it bleeds it leads" works fine but controversial topics that disturbs people or make them think will not be shown.

Best example is youtube - once the demonetization came there must have been significant effects on what topics were discussed and how. Without sponsorings and patreon it would be worse, but this or rule is shaping our global civilization for the worse.

People pay far too much attention to ideology, but it's the rules of a system that lead it to converge to different outcomes. And advertising is a big one.

Advertising, marketing, and the stock market are the worst aspects of capitalism, and the system could be improved dramatically with heavy restrictions on all of those. Yeah it would shrink the economy, but the new steady state would be much better. Less waste, better stuff.

The economy doesn't represent the people, doesn't feed anyone and doesn't reflect their well being.
You have my vote.

Chris Hayes spends a good deal of time on this subject in his book The Siren's Call which I can't recommend enough.

Ads literally make me disabled. There presence challenges my freedom to interact both online and the real world.

On the one hand, yes. But also, it's mostly capitalism.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with "I'm starting a frisbee club for fun. We're going to meet saturdays in the park. I'm going to put up some flyers and tell my friends about it".

But at some point that can mutate into "i put a 30 second unskippable ad for FrisbeeFranchise on youtube, and a giant billboard over the subway stop that implies if you don't play frisbee you'll never be happy". That's bad.

I think targeted ads should be illegal as a first step. I don't think anyone except the worst sort of advertisers would go to bat for those. Old fashioned static ads where they put an ad for bike stuff by the bike lane in town is annoying, but somehow we've invented things so much worse than that.

Calvin and Hobbes warned us

Advertising as a concept is not bad. But given the realities of capitalism, the greedy executive and shareholders can never resist the easy money. As a result anything that implements ads will eventually be completely overrun and ruined by them. Might take a year, might take 10, but once that door is opened it is inevitable.

As a service meant to inform people of things they could benefit from, I see it. Like, we have public service announcements about food banks, giveaway days, and fun events. Honestly, if it was done for something other than profit, I'm not even sure the term "advertising" really applies - at least not how we usually use it.

LOL no, the advertisers won that war decades ago. It's been an occupation ever since.

What Bill Hicks said

Advertising is the reason why privacy is nonexistent now... it is kinda incredible just how much information they gather.

In centuries past when people were writing constitutions and what rights people have they had privacy and warrants and spying and all that shit done based on what evil governments can do to their citizens. I don't think a single one of them ever realized just how fucking massive corporations would be and how much shit they steal from us.

Is this a self affirmation or are there other people in your shower?

There could be thousands of people in that shower if they were pondering in the rain!
I would also like to know who else is in their shower.
- It is I, I am in OP's shower!
Our shower comrades
- .ml many loofahs

The wildest part is that advertising has become so poisonous that now over 50% of a Americans use adblockers and over 1/3 of people world wide. It's not just techies installing adblockers for their grandmas, it's become mass market!

Meh, the advertisers are the ally, not the other way around. Still, a good point.