> Ogilvy, Saatchi et al are the Goebbels' of our age.
Sorry, but that is waaay over the top. It makes you sound a bit nutty. A "Truther" of sorts, that dangerously believes too profoundly in his own ideology.
I understand that, and agree from a conventional point of view the comment does look nutty.
However the notion that the current so-called 'growth' oriented global order threatens the very fabric of our living planet, while not yet quite mainstream in corporate media, is gaining currency fast. It's well inside the fringe in academia and on the streets.
And the notion that marketing's most fundamental aim is to create desires for more consumption (hence more fake 'growth' aka ecosystem destruction) isn't a conspiracy theory (contra your 'Truther' jibe). It's quite open: philosophically-inclined marketers have understood this for a long time. They even used the term 'consumer engineering' in the early 20th C.
Have you considered that maybe GP has a better intuition about the systems effects of advertising, that you haven't fully considered?
- Advertising is a major driver of material consumption, much of which is unnecessary.
- Material consumption drives economic growth. There's also intellectual property, and there's the service industry, but even those contribute indirectly to material consumption.
- Economic growth and socioeconomic growth are unquestioned foundations of virtually every "civilized" society, but they make no sense. Growth works great... until at some point it doesn't.
Obligatory Eric Weinstein video segment, focusing more on what he calls "EGO"s... embedded [unacknowledged] growth obligations. (Ignore the other three people in the video... even Jordan Peterson is completely out of his league in this "discussion".)
The only criticism I'd make against GP's claim is that the advertising industry is just one spoke in the global wheel of impossible growth and consumption. GP's claim is not nutty, it's too narrow and limited. Ogilvy and Saatchi are only footsoldiers.
The only way this game of musical chairs ends without tears is if we luck into some awesome technology that leads to post-scarcity economics. That doesn't seem very likely from my perspective, except if we create AGI and AGI figures it out, but then AGI is an existential risk while economic collapse is just at worst a 100-200 year setback.
> The only criticism I'd make against GP's claim is that the advertising industry is just one spoke in the global wheel of impossible growth and consumption. GP's claim is not nutty, it's too narrow and limited. Ogilvy and Saatchi are only footsoldiers.
Sure - guilty as charged. I was making a pretty limited somewhat rhetorical gesture.
> The only way this game of musical chairs ends without tears is if we luck into some awesome technology that leads to post-scarcity economics.
I don't believe this to be possible, because the global ecological crisis (of which economic crashes are minor phenotypical efflorescences) doesn't have the kind of simple single causes that short-term big-bang technological innovation can fix. It's the progressive erosion of hundreds of complex evolved systems whose components are being broken at multiple levels. The kind of technology required to 'fix' this would have to have similar types of complexities at multiple scales as are found in those complex evolved systems. That may be achievable, but given the crudeness of our current technology, surely over a timescale of centuries, not the decades we have available.
The one possibility would be to slow so-called 'growth' down dramatically enough to allow evolved systems to recover, and in the meantime develop complex technologies on a slow, centuries-scale, burn. But obviously that's politically infeasible, so global ecological collapse it will be.
Sorry, but that is waaay over the top. It makes you sound a bit nutty. A "Truther" of sorts, that dangerously believes too profoundly in his own ideology.