Sacha Baron Cohen on the state of society

I say all advertisement is made illegal and billboards and bus station posters are used to give educational PSAs

If people want information about products they can consult advertisement-oriented media rather than having it mixed in with everything else.  this will require ending "free" content but it will make us better off since the positive economic effects of throwing off the chains of mass corporate brainwashing will eclipse the economic losses of having to actually pay for news and social media services

unrequested advertisement should be considered a form of vandalism of the commons

This thread has reminded me why politics is a waste of time.  I’m not about to spend years of my life arguing about petty details that will only end up making the world even worse than it already is.  Forgive me for causing this mess.

If you stop thinking about politics, your quality of life will improve massively, by the way.  I strongly recommend it.

why think about anything tbh

Unfortunately, completely ignoring politics is a surefire way to destroy a democracy. 

It's easy to get disillusioned, but covering your eyes won't help...

  On 12/3/2019 at 5:07 PM, drillkicker said:

If you stop thinking about politics, your quality of life will improve massively, by the way.  I strongly recommend it.

That will lead you down a one way road to genocide my friend. Don't wanna go there.

  On 12/3/2019 at 12:41 PM, auxien said:

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I assume you're referencing my soundcloud page advertisement being vandalism of WATMM.  I'd say it's relevant content for one to put in one's signature and not unrequested advertisement, since this is literally a website oriented around sharing music you made.  Regardless, if I'm wrong I'd happily remove it

  On 12/3/2019 at 8:37 AM, Zeffolia said:

I say all advertisement is made illegal and billboards and bus station posters are used to give educational PSAs

If people want information about products they can consult advertisement-oriented media rather than having it mixed in with everything else.  this will require ending "free" content but it will make us better off since the positive economic effects of throwing off the chains of mass corporate brainwashing will eclipse the economic losses of having to actually pay for news and social media services

unrequested advertisement should be considered a form of vandalism of the commons

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I agree with all of this

  On 12/3/2019 at 10:04 PM, user said:

 

That will lead you down a one way road to genocide my friend. Don't wanna go there.

Not to mention chaos, dragons, and the occasional shrill harpy. 

  On 12/3/2019 at 8:37 AM, Zeffolia said:

I say all advertisement is made illegal and billboards and bus station posters are used to give educational PSAs

If people want information about products they can consult advertisement-oriented media rather than having it mixed in with everything else.  this will require ending "free" content but it will make us better off since the positive economic effects of throwing off the chains of mass corporate brainwashing will eclipse the economic losses of having to actually pay for news and social media services

unrequested advertisement should be considered a form of vandalism of the commons

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And people call me a fascist. 

A better approach I think would be to ban the monetization of user data through selling it to advertisers. 
If advertisers want to pay to place their advertisements on websites or social media platforms they should be allowed to do so, but they also need to be clearly labeled as advertisements regardless of their nature (political or business). 
A platform would likely emerge in which you had the ability to pay to avoid seeing advertisements, while the other one would be free but with advertisements. There would be no targeted ads though, as privacy by design would be mandated. 

^the targeted advertising ban, yes please. burn Google to the ground. the free w/ ads vs pay for no ads is basically the way many places online already are tho of course

One might argue that could cause a divide between people who are able to afford to pay for all kinds of ad free services that won't have their personal data collected and sold and people that are not able to afford such things and are already vulnerable and be even worse off because they are now the sole target group. This is just a thought that occurred to me and I am not at all able to back this up with any kind of knowledge or authority or whatever.

  On 12/4/2019 at 8:35 PM, chenGOD said:

And people call me a fascist. 

A better approach I think would be to ban the monetization of user data through selling it to advertisers. 
If advertisers want to pay to place their advertisements on websites or social media platforms they should be allowed to do so, but they also need to be clearly labeled as advertisements regardless of their nature (political or business). 
A platform would likely emerge in which you had the ability to pay to avoid seeing advertisements, while the other one would be free but with advertisements. There would be no targeted ads though, as privacy by design would be mandated. 

What exactly did I say that suggests fascism in any way?  Removing corporate influence over public commons, which are a means of life and therefore subsistence and therefore production, is much closer to communism than fascism.

No public advertisement removes choice from corporations and gives it to the people because the people can choose to look at advertisements whenever they want and are never forced to.

Public advertisements removes choice from the people and gives it to the corporations because the people can be forced to look at advertisements regardless of whether they want to.

Don't confuse communist prioritization of the public commons to remove advertisements with fascist prioritization of state authority to remove advertisements, because the lack of public advertisements could be enforced not just through state authority but rather anarchically through a shared cultural value of destruction of advertisements as praxis

  On 12/4/2019 at 10:49 PM, user said:

One might argue that could cause a divide between people who are able to afford to pay for all kinds of ad free services that won't have their personal data collected and sold and people that are not able to afford such things and are already vulnerable and be even worse off because they are now the sole target group. This is just a thought that occurred to me and I am not at all able to back this up with any kind of knowledge or authority or whatever.

It doesn't really need backing - it's a given that charging for something lets rich people do it more than it lets poor people do it, in this case "it" is "avoiding your personal data being collected".  And since when someone owns your personal data they have power over you, this still gives more power to the rich which they can leverage to get richer.

  On 12/4/2019 at 10:07 PM, auxien said:

^the targeted advertising ban, yes please. burn Google to the ground. the free w/ ads vs pay for no ads is basically the way many places online already are tho of course

If the US cared about the people it would fund the research for and construction of a competing decentralized search engine to obsolete Google, as well as pour money into Free Open Source Software (FOSS) and hardware

Anyone technically knowledgeable can see this clearly, and the fact that they haven't done this is proof that they are irretrievably corrupted and we need a massive political revolution

Anyone should be able to receive subsistence from the government to work on anything that sufficiently improves the public commons, yet we have no such programs

This government is a joke and they will NOT hold Google accountable

  On 12/4/2019 at 10:49 PM, user said:

One might argue that could cause a divide between people who are able to afford to pay for all kinds of ad free services that won't have their personal data collected and sold and people that are not able to afford such things and are already vulnerable and be even worse off because they are now the sole target group. This is just a thought that occurred to me and I am not at all able to back this up with any kind of knowledge or authority or whatever.

Sorry, maybe I wasn’t clear. The services with ads would not be allowed to collect and monetize personal data, but advertising would exist. Think of it like advertising used to be, before it was all “targeted” (if it was really targeted, how come I don’t get spammed with Warp Records ads!)

So yes there would be a divide, but I believe that this provides more choice in the marketplace for both producers and consumers. 

  On 12/5/2019 at 3:41 AM, Zeffolia said:

What exactly did I say that suggests fascism in any way?  Removing corporate influence over public commons, which are a means of life and therefore subsistence and therefore production, is much closer to communism than fascism.

No public advertisement removes choice from corporations and gives it to the people because the people can choose to look at advertisements whenever they want and are never forced to.

Public advertisements removes choice from the people and gives it to the corporations because the people can be forced to look at advertisements regardless of whether they want to.

Don't confuse communist prioritization of the public commons to remove advertisements with fascist prioritization of state authority to remove advertisements, because the lack of public advertisements could be enforced not just through state authority but rather anarchically through a shared cultural value of destruction of advertisements as praxis

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True, it wasn’t fascistic so much as authoritarian. You have removed choice for the producers, as some producers in the system I proposed would still provide content ad-free, with no requirement to pay (and no ability to collect personal data). 
In your system, there is no choice. Some people apparently even like advertisements (as witnessed by the millions of people who eagerly anticipate Super Bowl ads). You argue this is societal conditioning, but it is clear that some segments of society want advertising to be a part of the media norm. 
In the mode I propose, there is an element of choice, including the choice for a segment of the market to exist where advertisement is non-existent as the people located in that segment have indeed put into practice the destruction of advertising. That place used to exist, it was pre-2000s North Korea, but now even there marketing and advertising exist, albeit as nascent industries. Needless to say, pre-2000s North Korea was not a particularly joyous place (not that it’s much better now). China was the same before Deng et al. enacted reforms to liberalize the economy. I obviously never visited China in the 1970s, but it looked particularly grim. 

  On 11/24/2019 at 4:52 PM, very honest said:

i'm not aware of anyone suggesting automated solutions. i think people are suggesting a fact-checking department, like tv stations have, for political ads submitted to them.

These are already in place though. I got flagged for hatespeech by FB's algo for saying of one of my work colleagues "she's probably drunk, bloody Scots" during some #classicbantz

haven't listened to Cohen speech posted yet ^^ given the context of discussion here this documentary seems most relevant to this thread

  On 12/5/2019 at 6:11 AM, chenGOD said:

Sorry, maybe I wasn’t clear. The services with ads would not be allowed to collect and monetize personal data, but advertising would exist. Think of it like advertising used to be, before it was all “targeted” (if it was really targeted, how come I don’t get spammed with Warp Records ads!)

So yes there would be a divide, but I believe that this provides more choice in the marketplace for both producers and consumers. 

Cheers, no you clearly said "ban the monetization of of user data" and I read your post but my brain decided to selectively process it so it could have an idea.

It would have been better if he just walked up to the mic, uttered "it's shit,"  then cut to the entire audience giving a standing ovation.  Much better vid imo.  Plus it's something we could all agree on regardless of where we stand politically.

Sacha is a bit older than me, but we both remember a world pre social media. Pre needing a computer to do anything but write a term paper. We know we can live without it.. But as time moves on a whole world will not be able to see this objectively. 

  On 12/3/2019 at 8:37 AM, Zeffolia said:

I say all advertisement is made illegal and billboards and bus station posters are used to give educational PSAs

If people want information about products they can consult advertisement-oriented media rather than having it mixed in with everything else.  this will require ending "free" content but it will make us better off since the positive economic effects of throwing off the chains of mass corporate brainwashing will eclipse the economic losses of having to actually pay for news and social media services

unrequested advertisement should be considered a form of vandalism of the commons

Expand  

It's interesting to think that, the whole underpinning of our system of economic liberalism is that open market activity is a maximization of free choice. But IMO, free choice as a concept can become a bit shaky in our modern context where several generations have been born and raised in an environment that is saturated with broad spectrum marketing. Are your choices really your own when advertising has influenced your very upbringing? (I assume I've pinched that line of thought from Adam Curtis somewhere)

the dominant paradigm of this era has been, & is marketing  

  On 12/5/2019 at 10:48 AM, hello spiral said:

These are already in place though. I got flagged for hatespeech by FB's algo for saying of one of my work colleagues "she's probably drunk, bloody Scots" during some #classicbantz

This isn't fact checking though, this is just manually making sure content is within the community guidelines or whatever they call them. And I'm not sure that that's even manual, it could be something like if you get 2 reports you're automatically flagged, I know some Facebook used to do something like that(similar to how YouTube allows this sort of thing to protect themselves against copyright)

Anyways, besides the ads side of this discussion I think the algorithms used to serve non ad content on social media sites can also be dangerous, as it just funnels people towards more extreme versions of their views, or views they are prone to believing in. The whole point is to increase user participation in any way possible. It also seems to also create echo boxes as people with similar views are funneled together into the same communities.