Both ads and capitalism are messy and have some externalized harms, but are better than the alternatives.
In the "advertising led" model of customer discovery, businesses advertise to essentially tell the market that they exist and provide a service. They do so by paying for advertising space across various mediums. This includes everything from their store signage to Craigslist ads, to TV and sophisticated digital advertising.
Most modern advertising is an auction where businesses compete to serve their message to customers the algorithms think are most likely to be interested.
This function - of matching users that might be interested in products to businesses providing products - is at this point hugely scaled.
People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category. That, they say, would be the ideal method of product discovery, along with word of mouth.
However, that runs immediately into the same problem that communism has historically. Who actually controls these directories, which would be a huge source of power for society? I posit that that it is impossible to centralize this effectively, and that the most likely most effective method for idea and product dispersal is something close to modern marketing and advertising.
JohnFen•7h ago
Some is doing an awful lot of work there. Both ads and capitalism have become so degenerate and abusive that I'm no longer confident that either are better than the alternatives. Even phrasing it as "better than the alternatives" is a symptom of one aspect of the overall decline: seeing everything as an either-or choice.
chairmansteve•6h ago
Capitalism works very well within boundaries. When those boundaries expand too much, capitalism becomes degenerate.
The ideal is a strong state which polices capitalism so that we get the benefits but not the harms.
cm2012•1h ago