Honestly, at this point in our hyperpartisan world, I expect monsterous FUD about pretty much anything. There was just a small scale war in my city about a proposal to slightly modify the way our library is funded. If that gets people riled up, then one can only imagine what multi trillion dollar industries can stir up.
Public Relations won. Advertising won.
Weaponized Infighting is winning.
Say the first thing that comes to mind when you think “Coca Cola.” Say it out loud, don’t edit.
If you said something about nostalgia or polar bears you would be like most humans around the globe for the past 50+ years. I submit that as my evidence that PR and Advertising are remarkably potent.
If you really said something to the effect of “depraved multinational corporation” you’ve eluded their attempts to seer their brand onto your brain 50 times a day. You have steel wit, perhaps your neurophysiology measures a few SD from norms. You have an important role in the solution.
Advertising & PR ought to be illegal, especially with AI driving it. I came from that space and love the creativity, but fear it’s power. Usually where advertising is illegal it just means the state has a monopoly on marketing. It’s not an enforceable policy, and is a meaningful degradation of liberty.
What I think would work is making it unprofitable. Revoke the tax deduction for it. Then make some licensure and oversight for influence operations (my new umbrella term). Register professional services agreements and require quarterly reports. Target ad exchanges like crypto, with a set of standards and Treasury authority.
Frankly, online ad exchanges have been one of the highest volume means of international money laundering and global exchange, and Google et al skimming huge % cuts of 2-5 parts of the transaction. Not regulating it will allow a loophole for continued fraudulent transactions at scale.
Parcels of human “mindshare” are auctioned off with every advertising transaction. Your 5 seconds on YouTube can be worth $5 to the right advertiser. Often that means the highest profit, most coercive players win your attention the most. On web publisher sites, the auction happens in 100ms often in the client at the expense of performance. Always. You can’t fire off 700 requests and not impact performance. It’s for bids to a dozen ad networks and all of their trackers and the winning ad’s trackers and then then do it again every 30 seconds and on scroll listeners, for 6-12 ads plus a video player or two and an exit pop.
Is it just cool that human attention is auctioned off like chattel slavery? Am I wrong to be scared of what billionaires can and have been doing with free reign?
_Citizens United_ really did a number on democracy. Such an ironic name, isn’t it?
>Say the first thing that comes to mind when you think “Coca Cola.” Say it out loud, don’t edit.
Shit company. Or maybe "red metallic can", which is the first thing I pictured when I read "coca cola". TBH I didn't think of anything in particular when I read "coca cola", I didn't have a particular reaction.
As an older fairly conservative friend of mine said when I was trying to talk him into some new tech thing - I just don't want anything to change. Seems a lot of people are like that, and just knee jerk to any change.
When folks get older, a lot of things stop working as well as they did, including old learned behaviors and physical things too, so it happens more easily and more often.
But this isn’t just an old person thing right now.
I've long figured that a lot of political tensions stem from the perceived pace of change: in technology, social norms, etc. It must be hard going from feeling like the master of your domain to frustrated that you don't know how to watch streaming TV or might put your foot in it saying something that was unremarkable 20 years ago (e.g., joke books in the 80s were full of stereotypes).
Its more of a generational divide with the hyperpartisan gibberish. I always laughed when they said "voting for the lessor of two brain-dead illiterates stuck in the 18th century".
It looks like the indoctrinated offspring from that rabid environment just make a 3rd and 4th party easier to implement... To square up the 3 sides to every story and the fourth to make it interesting (FORE is a cool number in golf too).
A ho-nest days pay for a ho-nest days work is loaded with innuendos :)
And regarding renewables, diversification is a beautiful thing in the 1st world :)
