What would happen if all advertising was made illegal?
What If We Made Advertising Illegal?
https://simone.org/advertising/
If all advertising were made illegal, 'the financial incentive to create addictive digital content would immediately disappear, and therefore the mechanism that allows commercial and political actors to create bubbles that distort personalized reality,' Simone argues.
Specifically, Simone speculated that the following phenomena would occur:
Clickbait , listicles , and affiliate marketing will become worthless overnight.
Algorithm-driven platforms like Instagram and TikTok that capture, monetize, and destroy youth will lose their economic base.
-Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Google, and YouTube will all no longer exist in their current form.
'Look at what's happened since 2016.
Simone continued, 'Outlawing advertising can protect and revitalize the human spirit and democracy. As an advertiser, I believe banning advertising is the best thing we can do for the world right now. It will be more effective than gun control, more effective than tackling climate change, more effective than lowering egg prices.'
Simone described advertising as a 'sophisticated tool of manipulation' and argued that eliminating it would 'bring everyone, including politicians, back to reality. By banning advertising, the machinery of mass delusion would lose its most addictive and harmful fuel.'
He also said, 'The traditional defense of advertising that 'advertising provides consumers with the information they need' has been around for decades, but it is no longer valid. In our information-saturated world, advertising is no longer useful for informing, but for manipulating. 'Modern advertising exists to circumvent rational thinking and provoke emotional responses that lead to purchasing decisions,' he said, pointing out that modern advertising has morphed into something different from the original advertising.
Some people argue that advertising is protected by freedom of speech, so they can post whatever they want, but Simone says, 'That's bullshit. No one has the right to shout to their dopamine in their bedroom, 'The underwear I glanced at yesterday is 20% off!' And no one has the right to track 90% of your life to know when and how you say it. That's not freedom of speech, it's harassment.' He points out that modern targeted advertising goes beyond the realm of freedom of speech.
However, Simone pointed out that imagining the absence of advertising in modern times is like saying 'ban gravity.'
Simone's claims have generated a variety of opinions on the social news bulletin board Hacker News.
What if we made advertising illegal? | Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
One user pointed out that the author did a good job of documenting the bad parts of the advertising industry, saying , 'I worked in the ad tech industry for a long time, and I think the author does a good job of expressing why I left it.' Another user said that it was difficult to imagine a world without ads, saying , 'Imagining a world without ads is like asking whether you can actually believe in a magical, peaceful world.'
On the other hand, other users say, 'Of all prejudices, the intense hatred of advertising is one of the most misguided,' and 'Advertising roughly puts a price on a scarce commodity: attention. Generally, but not always, the messages that are most valuable to both viewers and advertisers in a given situation tend to be seen more than those that are less valuable.' 'Like any market, advertising should be regulated to make sure it doesn't get out of control, but a total ban would require a wholesale crackdown on all speech at all levels of society.'
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