The idea feels like sci-fi because you’re so used to it, imagining ads gone feels like asking to outlaw gravity. But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.
The traditional argument pro-advertising—that it provides consumers with necessary information—hasn’t been valid for decades.
Lmao, this is absolute defeatist nonsense.
“You’ve gotta help us doc, we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”.
Because here’s the thing, you literally just can ban advertising. Ban billboards, ban tv Ads, ban social media advertising.
You can still have companies publish information about their product, but that’s not what advertising is in the context of this discussion.
Right there are plenty of ways for businesses to get consumers to choose to use their product other than advertising which are far more conducive to consumers being able to make an informed purchase decision without being manipulated. But doing so would upend the existing power structures of who gets to sell more product, so disturbing the status quo just requires more political will than anybody really has.
You can find ads for products in Roman republic era graffiti. We have had ads for thousands of years.
Graffiti, you say? So it was probably illegal.
I know the rule of law is in sad shape right now, but companies still avoid doing illegal shit right out in the open, and that’s all that’s needed to cut back dramatically on advertising.
no it wasn’t illegal. Grafitti wasn’t always a crime.
People who think they have a right to deface other people’s property say the weirdest shit.
Again graffiti was not always seen as a crime. Remember many paints weren’t super permanent when applied to things like brickface for most of our history.
Yeah, and it used to be legal to dump your industrial waste in the river, now it’s not.
Laws change.
That’s a false equivalence though.
In both situation you make it illegal for corporations to do something, and punish them with fines and criminal sentences for executives if they’re caught doing so, leading to a decrease in that behaviour.
So what about the situations do you see as different that makes it a false equivalency?
Painting graffiti and dumping hazardous waste in rivers are not equivalent crimes hence the false equivalence. Did you really need that clarified?
Yes, we’re talking about making advertising illegal, which would change advertising to be illegal, similar to how pollution is illegal.
You seem to be arguing that it would be impossible to make advertising illegal because you wouldn’t pass laws to make advertising illegal…
That’s not a false equivalency, that’s you just insisting that advertising’s not that bad and shouldn’t be illegal. Nothing about your feelings on whether or not it should be illegal changes whether or not we could make it illegal.
That does not make equating graffiti and dumping hazardous waste equivalent. The false equivalence was you comparing graffiti to illegal river dumping. There’s no amount of sophistry that will make your claim logically valid.
I’m not being sophisticated, I’m trying to keep you on track.
If you want to have a different argument about whether or not advertising is deserving of jail sentences, steep GDPR level fines, slaps on the wrist, or nothing, that’s fine, we can have that one.
But this reply chain was about whether or not it’s possible to make advertising illegal, which it is.