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this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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Constantly being brainwashed to consume is one of the great evils of our time. Consumerism is bad for mental health and the environment. But advertising also creates many biases in content creation.
When was the last time you heard anything about bad effects of advertising? Not just superficial "stupid ad" but as a massive corrosive force on society? That is how much freedom of speech we have.
Yeah, large portions of economies are being driven by consumption. I feel like so much stuff is just landfill fodder.
I was hoping you might have some examples, I'm not sure.
Here's an example.
I was advertised camel smokes as a kid.
Everytime I relapse it's on camels. Camels are shitty and cheap.
I relapse and then switch to a brand that's not garbage. Then figure out again how to beat the addiction.
It's a substance use disorder directly caused by advertising. And cancer causing (so my physical environment).
Here's another mental illness that's very easy to trace back to advertising.
Eating disorders.
I think those are good examples, thanks.
Off topic: I don't smoke, but do generally hate smoking so much. I dislike the smell, and the affects on people around the user, like you said. I appreciate vaping. Not because of some hopeful idea that it would be safer, but cause I either can't smell it, or it smells like cotton candy. Who doesn't love the smell of cotton candy?
Also, props for quitting all the times you have. I'm probably majorly addicted to caffeine. Like smokers tell me they have one first thing in the morning, coffee is the first desire after I'm out of bed. I've already limited myself to two-ish cups/day, but I don't think that helped. Coffee also has negative effects on others...fortunately, my wife has coffee breath too :)
just to say, it's about 95% less full of harmful chemicals. even opponents admit that. vaping is safer. not safe but safer. and unlike the 200+ times i tried to quite over 45 years (hypnosis, gum, patch, groups, acupuncture, and a heap 'cold turkey), it took me just a few years to quit by first switching to vapes. and within a month of the switch, i felt better in every way. all the bs restrictions in place are so dumb.
I'm glad that helped. Was it the ability to dose down intentionally that helped?
It's also more addictive than tobacco. Which isn't saying it's not safer. But the vape ROA hits the brain faster than smoking. This reinforces the addiction cycle more effectively. One of the reasons crack cocaine is so fucking addictive. It's vaped cocaine.
No the other way around. Smoking hits you very fast, almost instantly because it's very fine particles that pass into the bloodstream. Vaping is much slower because it's vaporized droplets that get absorbed slowly through mucus membrane, and it's less effective (like 50% effective after 30 min vs. 100% after 5 min). Nicotine salt e-liquid "improves" that a bit to hit faster, to help people stop smoking. You can find articles and papers on this.
Huh... I was basing this info off huberman labs episode on nicotine. He's usually very accurate (he's a neurobiologist and a professor at a major university)
Vaping has associated the smell of cotton candy with assholes who can't keep their smelly (and potentially dangerous) substance abuse away from unconsenting people, because they think no one will mind because it smells like cotton candy.
Edit: I legitimately prefer the smell of cigarettes at this point. At least no one's deluding themselves about the social acceptability of that.
let's ban it along with cooking smells, car exhaust, perfume, and cheap deodorant. and any other smells you personally don't like. sound good?
I should just let this go, but part of what offends me about vaping is that people will do it instead of smoking in spaces where smoking is explicitly banned. Since it's smoking adjacent to me mentally (and to a limited extent in causing harm to third parties), I dislike that. And we do ban things like perfume in gyms because it causes unreasonably unpleasant experiences for the people around you, and I shower after grilling or frying if I'm going out, because it is unpleasant for the people around me. It's different degrees of unpleasantness for everything, but I don't think it's unfair for me to dislike people blowing vape clouds in my face indoors.
where i live, you can’t vape where you can’t smoke, so we don’t have that issue. i can see how it would bug people, for sure.
Just saying that second hand vaping exposure seems to be something that isn't well understood, but potentially harmful. Just like how vaping is proving not to be harmless to the paper these days. That's what differentiates it from those other smells you're mentioning to me.
Car exhaust is so much worse for you than vaping. Much less second hand vaping.
That's fair, I did miss car exhaust from that list with my previous comment.
it’s the same stuff as in digger machines at shows. anyway, in my town you can vape whet you can smoke. which is outside.
I wonder if the smell of hamburger is offensive to vegans?
lol, since when are Camels cheap?
I was referring to quality lol
I can buy a pack of American Spirits and half a smoke will satisfy me.
I finish a Camel, and I'm like, wtf happened to that thing?
The entire goal is to use money to change your behavior. They're inherently manipulative by definition. It's literally weaponized mass manipulation. There's no way to spin that as a positive effect.
If you think about it in terms of it's effects, advertising is the closest thing we have to mind control: companies are paying money to change the behavior of millions of people. Even without any concrete examples, you can easily see how dystopic it really is when you just think about the intention alone
Sorry I don't have any great sources on this. It's rather speculation because how could you research this scientifically? Even if you could, an experiment like that would actually be unethical! And who would fund this, there is no way to talk in mainstream about advertising without running against massive financial interests. There are some search results but most of those articles look like mental garbage.
My guess is that because we're constantly being told what to consume our minds work quite differently from what they would without advertising.
Our minds constantly have to resist intrusive advertising and psychological manipulation which means we constantly have to switch between and adversarial mindset and whatever content we were watching / reading. Or we become obedient and just "let the advertising wash through us". And advertising constantly has to find new ways to activate our emotions.
Just as massive is the effect on content produced, there is a "natural selection" that any content that helps sell advertisement is more successful on the market. It's not just that you can't piss off your advertiser but that generally you want the consumer to be in a certain mood - or that content producers who do this naturally are more successful and grow.
Then there are privacy concerns which reduce humans to machines and creates a powerful system that can and is abused for political control (public relations).
How can any of that not have massive societal impacts, since it's being done on a massive scale and is near ubiquitous? How can anyone assume these effects are not incredibly bad?
You could have a country banning advertising that has a kind of "content tax" that is funded publicly and administered independent from the government through separate elections. And that has strict mandates and distributes the money to news papers, websites, movies and video creators dependent on views - similar to music rights agencies. But none of this is even talked about. We've completely lost the ability to even think seriously about how to improve our society. I believe in large part this is due to advertising.
PS: There is a film called "Branded (2012)" about the "horrors of advertising".
I stopped quoting because you made many good points. I imagine we could find some supporting material for this basic idea. It seems like a safe idea to say people adapt to the environment they are in, including our thinking patterns based on what we take in and feed our minds (books, media, streaming, conversation, etc).
I wouldn't be eager for a new tax, but the creative problem solving and imagining new ways to do things is good.
Also, thanks for the movie mention.
i have an idea. let people buy the books and magazines. the ones people want to read are successful. others oh well. i'm a genius!
also: you have a good point about our minds working differently.
um, i just now hear it mentioned. by you...
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The great evil is that we keep going to places where we are shown ads, despite having a choice in theory. It's demoralizing.
I'm living mostly ad-free due to adblockers everywhere (except android) but most people don't know, can't do it or are brainwashed to think it's amoral to block ads. If more people would catch on adblocking would be made illegal. And either way my personal choice doesn't change what content is produced and how society is influenced. Personal responsibility doesn't solve this just as it doesn't climate change. Because advertising clearly does work.
Android is one of the easiest places to block ads.
Is it? Maybe. I managed to install the apps I need from f-droid and use firefox but it felt more difficult than on PC - where you just need to install an adblocker in your browser.
What ads are you trying to remove?
Firefox on android allows you to use uBlockOrigin. YoutubeRevanced is an excellent application patcher system that you can use to remove ads from YouTube, Twitch, Spotify, and many other. F-droid has some good resources.
If you're playing games with ads, it's a little harder. You probably need a piHole on your home network for that (they are super fun either way).
In general, yes, I guess it's a little harder to remove ads from your entire phone than it is to just remove them from a desktop web browser. Way better than Apple's options though.
Yeah basically the problem is the apps because mobile browser / mobile websites are less usable than desktop browser. I use NewPipe / PipePipe for youtube on android, hopefully it'll keep working. Right now I don't have any ads on android. But I'm only using very few apps. Thankfully the android ecosystem seems to be improving.
Both of you should look up AdGuard. It's the only adblocker I use and it works system-wide.
adguard works pretty well for me on ios and i believe they have it for android too. the free version is good, the pro even better.
Use this Site, Go to method 2 -> Android and set up your DNS manually. That's it, no more ads on Android.