alt Hacker NewsAdvertising is, quite simply, a form of abuse. It is psychic violence that leaves no outward mark but diminishes its target by attempting to replace their perceptions, judgments, intentions with its own. A society with a pragmatic regard for its own survival would ban it outright.
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The conclusion that every government came to after Bernays' "Crystallizing Public Opinion" is that the society who can be arbitrarily manipulated by propaganda is better because it's something like adding a rudder to a rudderless ship.
There are two kinds of advertising. I will call them "scarcity advertising" and "abundance advertising".
Scarcity advertising is, for example, "Joe's grocery now has cantaloupes" (back in the day when cantaloupes were not available all year). It's information - something is now available that wasn't available before.
Abundance advertising is, for example, "The Chevrolet SomeHotCar will give you an exciting life like the people in this ad. Don't you want that?" As someone put it (wish I remember who, I would give credit): "[This kind of] advertising attempts to make the person you are envy the person you could be with their product. In other words, it attempts to steal your satisfaction and then offers to sell it back to you."
The first kind of advertising is useful. The second is abusive.
By what other means would people with a product or service to provide reach other people who are interested in obtaining that product or service?
> A society with a pragmatic regard for its own survival would ban it outright
Western society would cease to exist if it didn't continue its diabolical lies, falsehoods and abuse. The lies are not optional.
It is because of pragmatic regard for survival of the status quo that the lies do continue. That word 'pragmatic' is what keeps diabolical people from seeing themselves for what they are.
Advertising is just a subset of a larger medium. It's a fully generic channel. Psychological manipulation is abusive and is often the tactic used by advertisers in order to see a return on their advertising spending.
I feel this means you can have ads, but, you really do need a large scale entity intelligently policing them or the tendency will constantly be towards abuse. On the balance, it is probably more efficient to just ban them, but many nations recognize the right to free speech and have arrived at the conclusion that advertising is included under that umbrella.
So, we probably need to make ads prohibitively expensive, and legally risky, such that the volume of them decreases dramatically.