“Online communities” are great, but how do you stop them from being infiltrated by corporate astroturfers within five minutes of creation? Doesn’t every major brand have a low-overhead keyboard farm posting social media and forum comments to make them look good?
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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As I sat down this morning to enjoy my warm and full-flavored Folger's coffee, it got me thinking: traditional advertising might disappear, but something sneakier would inevitably fill the void: product placement.
Ads are an odd concept—it’s someone paying money to toot their own horn, which most of the civilized world looks down upon. In fact, the best way to sell me your product is to have the humility to tell me its downsides or give me a nuanced explanation of when to buy your product vs. a competitor. Otherwise, it’s always much better to let someone else sing your praises. I do find documentation, videos, and other factual information about a product to be the best possible sales pitch—give me an accurate picture of it, and if it’s really any good, I might just buy it. If I think you’re trying to bullshit me, I’ll assume your product has to be shit, or otherwise you’d just tell me the facts.
OTA tv would no longer be possible, nor radio AM or FM.
Newspapers (what is left of them) would no longer be possible, neither wouild magazines.
A good deal of the internet is supported by ads too.
If you are willing to give up everything that is supported by ads, I suppose it could work.
There is state funded news media called European Broadcasting Union, which can do whatever without ads.
Well, then broadcasters might be beholden to the whims of the government. Certain content might be promoted, and other content suppressed.
either governments and/or individuals would need to support them, it's hardly impossible
They’re getting way more money from stealing and selling data than ads anyway and really, TV and Radio only need to exist over the air for emergency or government stations so no income is needed. We shut off 3G, freeing up those radio and TV bands would be no problem.
Large corporate owned would be impossible. What you would see are more locally small businesses that get more customers. However things would be more expensive overall at a glance. But I bet we would see general living go up for all.
Well yeah, less money leaving local economies.
It's not a bad point, and also highlights how we're simultaneously spoiled for "free" platforms, while we're surveilled for content and metrics, and bombarded by general and targeted advertising.
It's like, imagine a world where there was a water fountain at the corner of every street, every parking lot, and every bus stop. How convenient that would be! But every time you walked near one they would squawk out a little ad.
Sure without the ads, you wouldn't have the water fountains. But given the choice, I'd rather put up with the inconvenience of having to carry a water bottle when I'm out for a long time.
To me the choice seems obvious. Maybe to some people the ads don't feel like such a intrusion, though?
Just making billboards ads illegal. It would make every city and the places in-between instantly better
We have this in Maine and it’s wonderful. Any time I drive through another state, the gross billboards are such a jolting sight (and blight).
I've been saying that for a long time about MI, were a tourist state for its natural beauty but it's ruined by all the billboards fucking up our views.
but where's the line between giant TVs on buildings and billboards?
Even with an adblock and the best privacy controls available, you cannot escape the effects of advertising. Article headlines will still be clickbait. Online recipes will still have long, unnecessary stories at the start. Companies will still want your email for trivial things so they can spam you. There are a hundred ways that advertising affects culture, and it's not something that can change based on individual effort.
Online recipes will still have long, unnecessary stories at the start.
This is less because of that and more copyright. You can't copyright a recipe as such, so the framing and layout and bullshit narrative are there to fix that.
You don't need a very long blurb for that. A short paragraph would do fine. Tons of cookbooks have figured this out.
You have a long blog post because Google's SEO favors that, and that's tied into advertising.
You also can't escape the society affected by advertising. And it would be reasonable to assume that advertising not just increases consumerism, leading to pollution and worse climate change and genocide, but also must have an effect on the mind.
I would assume that people conditioned with advertising are less able to make rational decisions for e.g. voting. Advertising might have similar adverse effects on developing brains to lead in drinking water. But I doubt there is much academic research on this.
Another thing I always thought about this is how beautiful our cities and world could look if there was no advertising everywhere.
PS: Really good article. There is a sci-fi movie "Branded (2012)" which dramatizes this idea.
It's necessary for monopoly capitalism to induce demand. It's part of the planned economy.
You know there’s advertising in every single form of sociopolitical government, right?
Communism has advertising. As does socialism.
Cool idea but we live under the violent imposition of capitalism.
I would argue that what this article is advocating for isn't a definitive end to advertisement per se. Truthfully that would be impossible.
What we truly need are iron clad privacy laws that impose unbreakable regulations with destructive fines when violated by companies and organizations.
Adding “destructive fines” to my list
If fines aren't a percentage of quarterly or annual earnings they don't matter. Ten million to a company earning billions isn't even a rounding error. But 30% of their gross. They'd respect that. They'd have to.
"We need a large group of ideologically committed bureaucrats willing to impose policy in the face of a defiant, intractable established opposition" is simultaneously true and not terribly helpful, unless you can show where these people are coming from.
Like, we've seen instances of this happen before. Elon's DOGE is a great current example of a group of ideologically dedicated barn burners. The OG FBI was another great example of a department effectively founded to militantly oppose a well-financed and popular opposition. FDR's court appointees (and his arm-twisting with the threat to further pack the courts) could be considered another.
But who in the modern political system wants to go head-to-head with multinational corporations (other than the Trump Tariff goons, I guess)? Dems are Pro-Business. Republicans are Pro-Fascist Business. There is no leadership, outside of a handful of die-hards like AOC and Bernie - who could conceivably be both willing and able to execute on these kinds of reforms.
I wish there was. But this is just pie-in-the-sky dreaming until you can find a municipal or state government with the kind of people engaged enough to rally for it and seek promotion to the federal level on this kind of platform.
But who in the modern political system wants to go head-to-head with multinational corporations
Very few people currently in the modern political system could or would be willing to take them on, true. But we have 2026 to start filling the next House and a third of the Senate with people who would be up to the challenge. We need to primary strong candidates and we need to platform third-party candidates wherever they can actually win.
To those who say "there will be no more elections" - yes, that's what they wanted, but what they have actually done was dismantle the government and set the US careening towards economic collapse. With Trump's brain failing and his administration making idiotic mistakes left and right, we shouldn't assume they're going to get everything they wanted exactly how they wanted it.
These are unprecedented times, but the 1930s were unprecedented times too.
Progressive government by its very terms must be a living and growing thing, that the battle for it is never-ending and that if we let up for one single moment or one single year, not merely do we stand still but we fall back in the march of civilization.
Then-governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, May 1930
FDR also came into the presidency after a devastating economical collapse which we are just one ecological disaster away from experiencing.
Lets try it and see what happens. No advertising seems like a reasonable response to advertising everywhere all the time.
YEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSS!
This feels like I wrote it. I've hated advertising for about as long I have been aware of it but I've been telling people we should ban it since the first time I saw one of those articles about how everything was becoming clickbait because of advertising. In all that time, the ONLY thing I have ever thought of which would be a negative effect from a ban is the difficulty of getting the word out about a small business. Any other arguments are just dumb. Advertising is inherently harmful to everyone exposed to it, even the advertisers, who have to burn money to make it happen.
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