Agree on getting rid of advertisements, they have this weird dystopian feeling to them and I get the feeling that advertisements are trying to tap into people’s psychological and mental processes to exploit them to gain the company more money

Just being aware of ads trying to exploit your psychology should help curb it a bit alteast in my personal experience but you need to keep reminding yourself so don’t forget, writing this paragraph just now made me think what else have humans forgotten that we need to remind ourselves of to seperate ourselves from the mass collective thought of society

Also the entirety of capitalism is bad, it exists to exploit and exploitation is inherent to capitalism

If advertisements are the worst of capitalism, that’s high praise for capitalism.

Well, they make the funny lines go up, apparently, so we need them!

Several cities, including Paris and Grenoble in France, São Paulo in Brazil, and Chennai in India have taken concrete steps in this direction. In São Paulo, ads are banned from certain parts of the city, and in Paris, they are prohibited near schools.

Several more cities are following suit, with a growing ad-free movement aiming to make cities a better place to live. ‘Adfree Cities,’ a UK-based nonprofit, is one such example. Cities such as Bristol, Birmingham, and Cardiff are part of its network, attempting to drastically reduce the amount of urban advertising

This is an excellent trend, and one that only lobbyists would fight against.

Since the online advert bubble seems to be bursting, I’m going to take that as a glimmer of hope. And until then, VPN maximus, ads be gone!

I remember a video bit on Cracked about how marketers are perpetually losing the advertising war (since the 1950s, they spend more on advertising for a decreasing effect on consumers. One hypothesis was that as they are drawing adults in with more common, more intense advertising, they’re also indoctrinating the younger generations, who grow up used to everything trying to get their attention for ulterior reasons.

A recent video by Wisecrack also posited this position where in 2023, all media is lousy with product placement and messaging specific to marketing to sponsors, and the viewing audience is learning to be less credulous and more skeptical with every passing year. This might inform how religious ministries are bleeding members, losing attendance and tithes even as they try to hit us with smooth He Gets Us spots on the Superbowl.

We humans are credulous and manipulable, but we also get abused and hurt when they realize their Trump gold is useless, or their rare Funko Pop figurine loses value the instant you open the box, or your religious ministry doesn’t really care about you once you’re no longer able to afford collections. And once bitten, we learn to be twice shy.

They exist because they subsidize other activity. As much as people complain about advertising, people complain about paying for things more.

Literally everything that Boomer kids rode out needs to be dismantled or improved.