I definitely consume too much dystopian content to be a fair dystopian barometer, but the sheer amount of ads being pushed my way is starting to make me feel legitimately anxious. It feels like a techno-dystopia where all of the neat and artistic elements have been extracted and then ground into dust for our corporate overlords. Even the ‘regular’ people are just trying to sell themselves. The streamers, the funny videos, the pet videos, the porn, the reposts of all of those, so much of it is just monetizing my attention.

Do ads even influence people that much? Does anyone even eat Church’s Chicken?! Do people consider switching their car insurance? I though the postmoderns were jumping the gun a little with the pictures they painted of a future with corporate logos and other advertisements spread across every visible surface, but now I have to see 5 ads and a cookie consent pop up to look up a quick definition. Watching a friend’s youtube video? 30 seconds of rapidfire ads from 15 brands. It’s starting to feel absurd. Are we going to be okay?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I remember when I started hating ads.

HEAD-ON: APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD

I genuinely have fond memories of some ads before this time that I'll occasionally reference, https://youtu.be/R7vNn-utP8Q for example, which I didn't remember was a chuck e cheese ad before just rewatching it, and whose pizza was objectively criminally poorly made.

And now I've essentially cut them out of my life entirely, but I'll occasionally hear them during podcasts and such and they come across as so bleak, like who the fuck are you selling this Chumba Casino thing to? Did the directors for these ads tell their VA's to sound as dried up and worn out as possible? Is that the market they're aiming for?

I think advertisement is a part of commerce that isn't going away till we get that luxury gay space communism, but it would be nice if there was some kind of panel of artists who your ad had to pass in order to be displayed in markets of a certain size. But then the creatives who threw their lives away learning the most fundamental aspects of how we leave our mark on reality would have some aspect of control over the people who wisely and sagely learned the intricacies of how line go up.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/R7vNn-utP8Q

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.