Internal emails highlight how an advertising company can use its in-house resources to oppose public policy proposals.
One of the world’s largest advertising firms is crafting a campaign to thwart a California bill intended to enhance people’s control over the data that companies collect on them.
According to emails obtained by POLITICO, the Interpublic Group is coordinating an effort against a bill that would make it easier for people to request that data brokers — firms that collect and sell personal information — delete their dossiers.
Advertising and marketing are mind poison and everyone hates them and we should retaliate against them politically and economically. Destroying the advertising market is something global society should do.
Ad blockers/VPNs should be the norm.
You say everyone hates then but honestly it’s really not true. Plenty of people are annoyed by ads, others tolerate them, sometimes people even enjoy them (see Superbowl shit or people sharing meme ads and commercials) and honestly that’s part of the problem. Ads have been a part of so many people lives for so long they can’t even imagine a world where they aren’t constantly bombarded by ads and having them privacy exploited for corporate gains.
Personally I’m vehemently opposed to ads and go out of my way to block them in every way I can, but fundamentally many people don’t see them as an issue or are too attached to the corporate teat to try voting with their wallet to suppress the problem.
Just because you like to be attached to a pole doesn’t mean we should let companies attach us all to a pole.
If someone “likes” commercials, well I guess we could have a web-place for them where they can go and we can avoid.
Ads themselves are just annoying but tolerable. But we’re talking about targeted marketing. Ad companies keep data on you, the user, so they can squeeze out a bit more money from avertisers. That requires the users’ consent in many parts of the world and ad companies still try to weasel around that. When you don’t want them to have your data, a word from you should be enough. No hidden options, no clicking through a dozen pages, no ifs and whens.
Capitalism turns anyone into a fucking soulless ghoul.
Not necessarilly. What it does is encourage the people with sociopathic tendencies to be sociopathic, and discourages kindness and comradery.
Nothing can turn someone who doesn’t have sociopathic tendencies into an outright sociopath.
Respectfully but strongly disagree. If people’s survival requires constantly competing in scenarios that favor sociopathic actions and outright sociopaths while also repeatedly discarding kindness and devaluing communal activity in general the outcome is the same.
While you are right that the people at their cores might not be sociopathic and may be very uncomfortable and unhappy with the way they’ve become required to live their lives, the resulting society becomes as if it were entirely inhabited by sociopaths.
You can definitely condition people into acting entirely in their own self interest in the public sphere. And, unfettered capitalism is undeniably very effective at doing this. In fact, it’s arguable that governments worldwide have been trying to regulate against this with almost no effect. I think the global climate emergency is an excellent example, though far from the only one. It’s more the sum total of all humanities failures at this very thing.
Well said.
Ben the nice bus driver will kill in a war, kill fathers, sons, anyone, because he got indoctrinated (maybe brainwashed, or just convinced) to do it. We got enough of records of that to know it’s true.
This must have been the best description of this that I‘ve read so far. Thank you very much.
Sure, society as a whole is much more individualistic and sociopathic compared to human nature (as shown by anthropologists, where people just shared things in the past) as a direct result of capitalism. I just don’t think on the individual level that capitalism can change the nature of an individual to become sociopathic if they weren’t already.
With human nature, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” rings true.
Also mass industrialization and urbanization caused people to not know their communities nearly as well, if at all, leading to an even more individualistic culture.
Sociopathy isn’t defined by what people will do in extreme contexts, but what they’ll do in “normal” ones. Yes, humans have survived so successfully in part because we have a strong survival instinct and will do whatever it takes to live. But there’s a meaningful difference between that and sociopathy. Context matters.
Not a technical sociopath, no, but it does a damn good job of of getting people to mimic those tendencies. It just means those with the barest amount of empathy aren’t successful capitalists, they just end up exploited and happy about it.
… and if you refuse to become a soulless ghoul then you become the merchandise.
