Me: Cars
Advertising.
The only correct answer in this thread.
It’s the biggest industry in the world by a very large margin and the most destructive one on a global scale.
Even advertising isn’t necessarily bad, having people telling you about things you might like used to be a good thing.
I personally think it’s people like Edward Bernays who had the idea of, I guess, ‘Malicious Advertising’. They really solidified the idea of applying propaganda techniques to advertising strategies and that just kind of become expected and the norm.
More people need to know about Bernays. Literally wrote the book, Propaganda in 1928. Went on to found the industry of Public Relations. He is the reason advertisers target your subconscious, make you feel bad, an use their products as a salve for the pain they inflict.
Adam Curtis covers the effects well in The Century of the Self. Watch out, it clocks in at just under 4 hours.
Some level of advertising is surely okay, right?
If I open a bakery and put a sign out front that says “Baked good for sale!” I don’t think anyone would complain but that IS advertising.
This begs the question: What level of advertising is okay?
This begs the question
Nope. It just raises the question.
I miss the days of requesting big thick catalogues be sent to you in the mail from companies you’d want to do business with. They’d send you a catalogue once or twice a year and then stop if you don’t buy anything for a while. I think that was a good method, the same way I don’t mind seeing other things available on websites I’m buying from.
I also don’t mind stuff like local coupon/advert mailers that come once a month or whatever, but those tend to all just be big companies advertising “sales” that always run these days, rather than anyone I’d want to try to support. But I like the idea of packaging up all the ads they want to send out and delivering them in one go. Maybe with an opt-out. All other junk mail, stuff you didn’t request, should be banned.
And I think signage on store windows and stuff is fine, as long as it’s not an eyesore, but billboards and rooftop signage should definitely be banned. Protruding signs like that hang off the side of buildings should also go.
Meatspace advertisements are the worst imo, because there’s very little you can do to avoid them.
I can’t specify a threshold, but it really comes down to the level of invasiveness.
A level that does’t require selling people’s data
Religion. So many of today’s issues stem from the magical thinking inherent in religion.
It’s easily disprovable, but even in the face of countless arguments against it, people still willingly throw themselves into it by the millions. They’re too fearful of the unknown, they’re fearful of belonging somewhere when we die and religion is the prime example of how easily controllable people are when they’re fearful.
Amen
nuclear weapons, too feckin dangerous to have
I’m in mixed mind about them because you’re right, they’re too destructive, but for the time being their existence has prevented conflicts from breaking out, and since wars are typically only waged with the promise of financing it afterwards via looting or expansion, nobody is really willing to render land unusable in the process of conquering it.
This is a good point I never considered before.
That comment is the first time you’ve considered MAD? I mean, congrats on being one of today’s lucky 10,000, but I’m surprised you didn’t learn about it in school.
When it’s presented in school, it is presented as thing of the past and localised to how Russia and America treated/still treat one another, rather than threading the needle by explaining that it still applies today. I’m pretty sure I only picked up on it after reading online explanations/justifications of nukes.
Or in other words people focus on the panic of it so much that they don’t stop to think of it as a good thing
TBF I think even without Nukes we wouldn’t have war between big countries. Because the UN would discourage it. Ukraine being a big exception to that
Except the part where we have exhaustive evidence that nukes do not always render land unusable.
Nagasaki and Hiroshima are entirely fine. The radiation levels were back at safe levels in days. Yes, we definitely fucked up a lot of land with nuclear testing and power plant overloads, but the actual nukes humans have dropped on other humans? They’re most effective when used in an air burst, and they clear up within days.
The power generation and medical applications of nuclear science cannot be overlooked based on warmongering, especially when the part youre concerned about isnt even an issue in that application of the field.
So far crypto currencies. So far they seem to expend a huge amount of electricity and used mostly for speculation.
A financial system that breeds billionaires
Capitalism.
Slavery. Even after banning it pretty much everywhere, people still find ways to treat others as disposable property.
24 hour news networks.
News used to just be the news when there was a half hour of local, half hour of national twice per night with a morning show for fluff, weather, and brief news updates. 24 hour news needed to fill the whole 24 hours and also pay for itself by getting eyeballs on advertisers. That’s when all of the sensationalist stuff started taking over.
Shareholders.
Head on! Apply directly to the forehead
https://youtu.be/Is3icfcbmbsNever actually did anything and never actually claimed to. Most people assumed it was a headache relief but the company never said that. They just said to put the shit on your forehead
Disposable vapes come to mind, although the real answer is probably some extremely depraved torture device.
Religion
It’s likely LLMs in their current corporate circular funding form and cryptocurrency.
The wheel. Everything went downhill from there.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
What, you expected gravity to take it uphill?
Well, gravity wasn’t discovered until much later…
Either leaded gasoline or pfas
Leaded gasoline is an Amazing answer. Fuck. Take my UpDoot.
