Language offers the same risks. People can talk stuff to me without my consent. That alone doesn't make it evil.
The goal of separating, conceptually, the vector from the virus, is to better understand how the virus works.
The greed and manipulation that took over the advertisement industry was not born from it and will not die with it. It's a thing that uses it, I want to make this thing more visible.
Well you have to draw a line somewhere. It's not evil to share your opinion to somebody who hasn't asked for it but there's a certain degree of amplification beyond which it's a problem.
The circumstances of evolution and the laws of physics have placed limits on how many people you can influence without help, so there's a handy line already drawn. The simplest way forward is to just use that line to define advertising.
Sure, the willingness to coerce transcends advertising, and I agree that exposing it in all it's forms is worth doing, but I'm a hacker not a priest or a politician, so I'm just trying to direct my efforts where they have a shot at being effective.
> The circumstances of evolution and the laws of physics have placed limits on how many people you can influence without help, so there's a handy line already drawn.
That line drawn by "nature" also place limits on a lot more stuff humans do, good stuff. I wouldn't want to go back to the laws of the wilderness. Unless we're being selective on what can cross the line or not, but that's would be an arbitrary line as much as any other.
You can fight advertisement all you want, I encourage it. I sometimes do it too. However, I am fully aware that it won't solve the issue of systematic greed and manipulation.
If you allow me to be cheesy for a moment, I would say that the fight against advertisement does not work as previously advertised.
I too would not want to accept nature's constraints in all cases, it's just the "get the word out" case where I think it's a well placed boundary.
One could still put a lot of work into crafting their message, but if propagation beyond earshot could only be achieved with the unpaidfor consent of the propagator... I think we'd find that the human way of doing it for a million years actually outperforms the internet in most areas that matter (that is, supposing that once the issue authentically had your attention you could then use the internet to confirm/correct whatever memetic mutations accrued and get the story straight--word of mouth for notification, computers for replication).
I don't expect it to solve greed, I just want to be able to hear myself think so that I can more clearly think about how I'll interfere with greed in non-advertising dimensions.
Illusionism is also intended to manipulate, but it is very explicit about it. "This is a trick", and we humans enjoy the trick very much. Not inherently evil. The same techniques can be evil, and we humans do not enjoy when that's the case.
I want some of the stuff from advertisement. I want healthy competition between producers, I want information, and I don't mind innocent tricks.
What does healthy competition between producers have to do with advertising? If anything advertising is a way to withdraw from competition because building a great product is harder than telling stories to the market segment that your competition is ignoring.
I'm not against information, I just want to have gone looking for it rather than it having gone looking for me.
The goal of separating, conceptually, the vector from the virus, is to better understand how the virus works.
The greed and manipulation that took over the advertisement industry was not born from it and will not die with it. It's a thing that uses it, I want to make this thing more visible.