In concurrence with and commentary to
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mniOXxxonB4 and
https://systemdrift.neocities.org/blog/i-dont-care-what-the-haters-are-saying-im-having-a-blast
The whole point of advertising is to get eyes on a thing (information) and make you want it (connotation). That’s it. Definition deployed. You never heard of this cream? Now you have. Also it’s good for skin. That’s the function of advertising. Unlike normal, pure information, the purpose here isn’t for your benefit, but for the seller’s profit.
People I know and like, turn the TV off during ads, or mute the volume. A television is a historical form of mass media. It’s like youtube, but you there’s no adblocker. On youtube, I have never intentionally seen an ad. When I do, because the browser loads extensions slowly after launching, or I’m using some god-forsaken office computer, I make the Paul Rudd face. I have no idea if tiktok or the Instagram or all that other shit has ads, because there’s no reason for me to look at those things. I’ve always felt like participating in that would give me ebola of the eyes.
Marketers recognize that people dislike ads, for a million good reasons. One counter-approach available to them is based in knowledge that people DO want information. People ask friends, family, doctors for advice when they need it. They don’t look for ads to help them choose one product out of a glut of indiscernible options. Surveys showed this. “Normal people’s advice” is what affects people’s choices in the consumer market. Thus advertisers need ads masquerading as “normal people’s advice”. To parasite on the idea of asking your fellow human beings. That’s “influencers”.
The term never received the derision it deserves. Value-wise it’s up there with “officer involved shooting” and “underage Hamas member”. It’s a descriptor of a person performing an activity in the way you understand what a “sludge pipe” does. It could as well be “manipulator”. “Liar”. “Plant”.
Do not act on advertising. Turn it off every time you see it. Use adblock, Also adblock for youtube! They’re super easy to use, manifest v3 is fake. Do not participate in social media. Keep up with your friends, in better ways. Control your machines. Actively avoid products and services you’ve seen advertised.
That video advances to a point of talking about how people are losing connection to reality. The word “authentic” is used in a way that I would replace with “authentic-seeming”. If you make a good forgery of a banknote, that’s not an authentic banknote: it’s an authentic forgery, an authentic-seeming banknote. This is 00’s hipsterism discourse.
It's still worth honing in on because it keeps the viewer grounded in reality. However slopped up AI video “influencers” might appear, they are still emulating something that should be repellent to the viewer in the first place. The freelance advertiser, pretending to be your friend or whatever. It’s a facsimile of a facsimile. It shouldn’t be interesting to you in the “first” place (nor the second). If teens can’t tell if an advertiser is AI or meat, good news; you can ignore either! It’s advertising!
When I taught ESL I dreaded asking kids what they wanted to be when they grow up, because there were age groups that just 50%+ said “influencer” and I couldn’t stomach that. It’s like hearing a child say they want to be an accountant. The world has become so awful that this is what kids see as least odious.
Every generation since the ancient Greeks believed the same 3 things; it used to be better, the kids are all messed up now, and the end of the world is near. Douglas Adams has a quote about how age changes your perception of technology and the zeitgeist. Everyone in history has thought that of course, those are true, but I’m a special boy, and I actually see through the bullshit, man.
I’m in my thirties. I’m not impartial, I have horses in races. Still, I think we are at a particularly pointed historical moment. Ignoring all other parts of his oeuvre, Ed Zitron is unquestionably right about one fundamental concept: there have been no hypergrowth ideas for a decade or more. All my life, the PC, the cell phone, were all things that were so shockingly good at what they did, the benefits in convenience they brought on were both so enormous and so clearly apparent, a true competition existed between manufacturers to improve and the consumer loved it. It took a while before things stalled out, PC game graphics have never improved much beyond crysis, a phone doesn’t need a fifth camera. Another assertion he makes is that the rot economy, no longer able to make something better in a nonlinear fashion, nor even with that fifth camera, must seek profit by squeezing the existing base. Make the phone worse, make the service worse, sell more user data. (I’m surprising myself by writing about something that’s not about so-called AI company cartel market manipulation. That happens, but it’s not the phenomenon that I’m describing here.) (OK I will mention one thing. I don’t think the “AI influencers making millions from deals with Prada” are a real thing in the sense the video suggests. These are circular economy deals, kickbacks, and/or ruling class expenses on class struggle.)
With these “things” becoming worse, I believe that for the first time in my life there’s more in it to focus on “people”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a red, I understand commodity fetishism. What I’m saying is I like staying indoors and being quiet with machines and texts, not around people. The texts are still here but slop is making the fields barren, and I’m reduced to indies and an admittedly inexhaustible library of excellent past works, and a doubly-inexhaustible library of passable art. It may sound harsh, I love my friends, I always valued them as human beings, but there's always also been an instrumentalizing aspect to getting friends to play a game with me, reducing them to interactors, no matter how consensual, mutually beneficial the playing. It was always really easy to step back from interacting with people and focus on the machines. Now, for the first time in my life, the machines feel like they're about to become too boring to put up with.
The guy finishes his video on a note of “I’ve stopped following creators that start making ads”. Good! “Having to decide between money and honor.” Yes! You get it! You must choose not just no money, but death before dishonor! That’s what honor is about! “Permanent reality check fatigue” Yes! Turn off the trash. Look at something you know is good. Make a little something yourself. Show it to the homies, not a social media site owned by a nazi. I have never in my life cared about a “like” but when the boys told me they really liked something I translated, I felt a glow in my body like never before.
If the internet is post-human, then human is post-internet. You're finally free! Like the endgame of petrocapitalist theory, we discovered a miracle tool, we used it all up before figuring out how to get off the planet and find more, and now it's gone and we're going to the way it was before. But what the video man conflates is internet and marketing. If 100% of all advertising on the internet is no longer human, or made by humans, or for humans, if engagement is fake and all (product) discussion is fake, this is great news! This never should have existed in the first place! The bubble will pop, and you and your friends will remain. You know your homies are made of flesh and blood, because they once sent you an audio recording of them doing a Richard Nixon impression. People will always be coming together on forums, and those forums will get invaded by human waste and bot waste and collapse, because that's the cycle of life, and new forums will spring up. A simple "no ads" rule is enforceable, and prevents most problems. The end of the world is happening - for marketing.
I always wondered what it was like in the years between the videogame crash and the rise of Nintendo. I think the collapse of silicon valley under its own fascist death drive will lead to a resurgence of human connection. They’re poisoning the well that they charged us money to drink from. The internet may be an ecosystem, but it's one entirely dependent on real life, not the other way around. If the web, or anything else becomes a net detriment to you, separate yourself from it. There’s a mountain spring, and if you ask someone you know, they can tell you where it is.
Every market economy has advertising. Let’s endeavor to create an economy without a market. No more profit incentive.
