Internal emails highlight how an advertising company can use its in-house resources to oppose public policy proposals.
Internal emails highlight how an advertising company can use its in-house resources to oppose public policy proposals.
One of the world’s largest advertising firms is crafting a campaign to thwart a California bill intended to enhance people’s control over the data that companies collect on them.
According to emails obtained by POLITICO, the Interpublic Group is coordinating an effort against a bill that would make it easier for people to request that data brokers — firms that collect and sell personal information — delete their dossiers.
Advertising and marketing are mind poison and everyone hates them and we should retaliate against them politically and economically. Destroying the advertising market is something global society should do.
You say everyone hates then but honestly it's really not true. Plenty of people are annoyed by ads, others tolerate them, sometimes people even enjoy them (see Superbowl shit or people sharing meme ads and commercials) and honestly that's part of the problem. Ads have been a part of so many people lives for so long they can't even imagine a world where they aren't constantly bombarded by ads and having them privacy exploited for corporate gains.
Personally I'm vehemently opposed to ads and go out of my way to block them in every way I can, but fundamentally many people don't see them as an issue or are too attached to the corporate teat to try voting with their wallet to suppress the problem.
Ads themselves are just annoying but tolerable. But we're talking about targeted marketing. Ad companies keep data on you, the user, so they can squeeze out a bit more money from avertisers. That requires the users' consent in many parts of the world and ad companies still try to weasel around that. When you don't want them to have your data, a word from you should be enough. No hidden options, no clicking through a dozen pages, no ifs and whens.
Respectfully but strongly disagree. If people's survival requires constantly competing in scenarios that favor sociopathic actions and outright sociopaths while also repeatedly discarding kindness and devaluing communal activity in general the outcome is the same.
While you are right that the people at their cores might not be sociopathic and may be very uncomfortable and unhappy with the way they've become required to live their lives, the resulting society becomes as if it were entirely inhabited by sociopaths.
You can definitely condition people into acting entirely in their own self interest in the public sphere. And, unfettered capitalism is undeniably very effective at doing this. In fact, it's arguable that governments worldwide have been trying to regulate against this with almost no effect. I think the global climate emergency is an excellent example, though far from the only one. It's more the sum total of all humanities failures at this very thing.
Not a technical sociopath, no, but it does a damn good job of of getting people to mimic those tendencies. It just means those with the barest amount of empathy aren't successful capitalists, they just end up exploited and happy about it.