A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
Advertising is the reason why privacy is nonexistent now... it is kinda incredible just how much information they gather.
In centuries past when people were writing constitutions and what rights people have they had privacy and warrants and spying and all that shit done based on what evil governments can do to their citizens. I don't think a single one of them ever realized just how fucking massive corporations would be and how much shit they steal from us.
What Bill Hicks said
Say it with me:
"Its Capitalism"
The profit motive is killingbus and the planet.
I think you mean Capitalism
i don't know what happened to us as a society... we seem to have lost all semblance of media literacy.
it feels like in the 90's we were all very ad-aware, and actively opposed the idea of 'selling out'... then the rolling stones sold the rights to Start Me Up to windows and we've been in a race to the bottom ever since. why are we talking about 'monetizing your hobbies'.
what happened to shows like Media Television, magazines like AdBusters? does nobody remember reading Naomi Klein's 'No Logo'??
edit: Remember when Adam Curtis made 'A Century of the Self?
Oh god the "side hustle" hobby culture gets me fuming mad.
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People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
It's that...the reason we are so dissatisfied with our lives? We may not even pay attention to most adverts, but subconsciously, they affect us and make us fell unhappy?
hi. you must be new here. welcome to capitalism, consumerism, and the modern dystopia. what will you be doing to destroy it?
yep, it's a psychological attack (on your subconscious) to create unrealistic expectations and feelings of inadequacy among consumers who do not experience the same outcomes.
whether you pay attention to it or not, it's still a psychic attack
I think that is literally, objectively evil. How can we fight back? I already use adblocks online, that is one way, I think.
I feel the same. Besides what you mentioned, there is also the effect on what news and content will be produced and shown (see Manufacturing Consent). The advertisers who are the customers of shows want the viewers in a buying mood. So while "if it bleeds it leads" works fine but controversial topics that disturbs people or make them think will not be shown.
Best example is youtube - once the demonetization came there must have been significant effects on what topics were discussed and how. Without sponsorings and patreon it would be worse, but this or rule is shaping our global civilization for the worse.
People pay far too much attention to ideology, but it's the rules of a system that lead it to converge to different outcomes. And advertising is a big one.
Advertising, marketing, and the stock market are the worst aspects of capitalism, and the system could be improved dramatically with heavy restrictions on all of those. Yeah it would shrink the economy, but the new steady state would be much better. Less waste, better stuff.
The economy doesn't represent the people, doesn't feed anyone and doesn't reflect their well being.
You have my vote.
Advertising exists to manipulate behavior beneficial to clients, out of target groups. It is propaganda and psychological manipulation. The days of simply informing people of products and services is a fairy tale. Maddison Avenue was built off of Nazi Germany's mass media propaganda strategies.
I loved those old Chevrolet commercials from the 1930s that explained things like how a differential or transmission works in a car and I'm not even a car guy
I only remember the one, but yeah that was an absolute gem
If I had a magic internet/media button I know what it would be.
It would be a brand banish button. If I see an ad, I wanna just have a button to banish them from all my devices…forever. I already have a rule you poss me off with adverts …I defo won’t buy.
So much tech potential that just does not exist!
YouTube ads were only ever advertising to me on what not to entertain purchasing.
I agree. Everything being advertised on YouTube is sketch. Same with all the repeated podcast adverts honestly.
The fact that youtube hits me with an ad for a game that says everyone thinks its fake, with the most bullshit sounding voice over, tells me they are happy to take money for obvious scam products.
They're building the internet for AI now, and were building it for advertisers for years before that, what with SEO choking up search results.
What should have been a wonderfully expressive, collaborative, and unifying medium is just being completely ravaged.
I, unfortunately, work in web development.
Ay they even do Seo for LLM now where their product is recommended more likely by an llm
Yes, but you misspelled "capitalism".
Advertising as a concept is not bad. But given the realities of capitalism, the greedy executive and shareholders can never resist the easy money. As a result anything that implements ads will eventually be completely overrun and ruined by them. Might take a year, might take 10, but once that door is opened it is inevitable.
As a service meant to inform people of things they could benefit from, I see it. Like, we have public service announcements about food banks, giveaway days, and fun events. Honestly, if it was done for something other than profit, I'm not even sure the term "advertising" really applies - at least not how we usually use it.
Very Cyberpunk.
Just another battle ground of the class war that has been waged since ruling class figured out they can dunk on pedons
With modern advertising techniques, adverts mainly work by psychological manipulation - putting a name in your mind, making you associate it with an emotion (for example cars are "freedom", perfume is "lust"), induce fear of a non-existing problem and then sell you a "solution" and so on.
It's like being the focus of a crowd of untiring salesmen who are slick manipulators with training in Psychology and with no ethics at all.
That's how it is every day in every place (even the comfort of your own home) in the advert heavy world we live in if one doesn't fight to keep that shit away.
Also, "problems" that are things capitalism created for itself, and then sells you a solution. Such as services that scrub old subscriptions that you don't use, or companies that get you out of timeshares.
"It's like being the focus of a crowd of untiring salesmen who are slick manipulators with training in Psychology and with no ethics at all."
It's not LIKE that. It IS that. It's literally exactly that.
At least you are an adult so you have the tools, cognitive and cultural, helping you see the problem. Imagine a very young kid, say 5 years old, watching exciting video content. They do not yet possess such ways to protect themselves from for-profit manipulation.
Just few days ago I finished the IMHO excellent "Buy The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence" by Henry A Giroux and Grace Pollock so you can already understand where I'm going with this.
Yes, advertisers are terrible, they make money by manipulating our thoughts, probing our deepest desire, toying with our emotions in order to sell us whatever is made by whomever pay them the most. But... you and I are fully formed human beings in the sense that we are adults. We spend years navigating through the world, getting scamming, learning how to spot lies and marketing pitches. The problem is, as showcased by Disney in that example (a very important example!), the process is not random. It is a very thoughtful and strategical one, namely how to transform a human being to a consumer from the youngest age.
Anyway I won't dig into the obvious but the book ends with a couple of practical links e.g. commercial free childhood (what a name, how can how even imagine that would be needed?) which since then became https://fairplayforkids.org/
If you prefer a video on the topic the 2001 yes still relevant 2001 documentary (52 min) "Mickey Mouse Monopoly - Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power" https://films.mediaed.org/Film/Mickey_Mouse_Monopoly/f56fd530-8724-460b-b2bc-6eba9868f0e7
I personally pulled that thread also thanks to the more recent 2016 article "Teaching Disney Critically in the Age of Perpetual Consumption" https://www.jstor.org/stable/45157190 but, again, the point is that it's systemic.
The advertisers are merely a tool for the investors, the people who own everything. The "haves" as it were. They are always at odds with and trying to squeeze money and labor from the rest of us, you know, the "have nots".
Something something you basically just figured out communism on your own
Every single communist regime ended up operating in this exact same way...
I am not following if OP actually figured anything out beyond that this is a class war.
Online ads can be easily circumvented, I am more annoyed with giant billboards polluting public spaces. Oh well, one more reason to spend more time in nature.
Recently I've become more aware of how intrusive traditional advertising methods are: billboards everywhere, radio commercials interrupting the music, etc. It's incredible how immersed we are in that crap and how most of us don't realize it.
There's a French film called "BigBug" that makes an interesting parody about this.