I feel the same way (and viscerally detest ads, and go to very great lengths to avoid exposure to them), but I’m not sure whether I actually agree.
Having an advertiser attempt to manipulate your brain so that you do a thing you otherwise wouldn’t have done is, for sure, bad for you. But so is having less money, and at present the only available ways of getting Nice Things On The Internet that no one is choosing to supply out of sheer benevolence[1] are (a) that you pay them money and (b) that someone pays them for showing you ads.
So, how do the harm of being manipulated and the harm of being charged money compare? Suppose it costs you ($1 times number of viewers) to make something nice, and you can get that back either by charging everyone $1 or by showing everyone ads that pay you $1. Presumably the people making the ads think they’re getting more than $1 of value in exchange, on average; probably not much more, else the prices would be lower since I think these markets are quite competitive. Let’s say it’s $2. That means that they think that on average they can bamboozle me into spending enough money on their stuff to bring them $2 of profit, which at typical margins might mean that I’m spending $20. (Again, on average; it probably means that there’s a small chance that I spend a lot more than that.) In the cases where the ad successfully bamboozles me, I can’t have been very far from spending the money to begin with (unless advertisements have evolved to the point of outright mind control, which so far as I know they haven’t). Maybe I was already going to buy whatever-it-was and the ad persuaded me to buy it from X instead of Y. Maybe I was on the fence and the ad gave me just enough of a nudge to make me buy. Maybe I’d never thought of buying whatever-it-was, but once the ad mentioned it I genuinely realised that it would be worth the money. In these cases, it’s hard to see that the ad has done me much harm (again, on average, and according to my own values before I saw the ad), because in all these cases those pre-ad-exposure values had me very nearly judging the thing worth the money already. Despite the concrete numbers at the start of this paragraph, I don’t know how to make any of this quantitative in a form that actually means anything, but ir seems unlikely that viewing ads on a webpage is going to do me much financial harm.
What about other kinds of harm? I can think of three. (1) Ads are distracting and therefore, in effect, cost me a little bit of time. This is definitely bad, but also definitely small per ad. If some ads are the price for reading something that gives me 5 minutes of enjoyment, or takes 5 minutes of my time but provides information I value more than that, it’s hard to believe that the few seconds the ads cost me are more than a small fraction of the benefit I’m getting. In general I should be willing to pay a price of the same order of magnitude as the benefit I’m getting, so this doesn’t seem like it can be enough to make ads worse than paying money. (2) Ads often don’t just try to make you take a particular action (buy our cola!); rather, they try to change your attitude so that you’re more likely to take such actions in the future (think of our cola as refreshing and as indicating high social status!). So they’re very slightly changing who you are, and that’s super-creepy. I agree that this is pretty horrifying, and that’s one reason why I am fairly obsessive about avoiding ads. But, empirically, it doesn’t seem that most people mind this very much. And it’s not as if ads are the only things that are slightly changing who we are; for instance, when you spend time with another person you typically become a little more like them, and when you listen to a song with a catchy tune it may embed its words in your memory (as well as the tune itself, but the words are more likely to influence your mind). For me, this is enough to make ads a price I’m unwilling to pay, but I am not convinced that that’s so for many other people. (3) Every time ads are used for anything, it helps to normalize a culture where ads are everywhere, and that’s an ugly manipulative sort of culture. This is probably true, but I’m fairly sure the size of the effect is small in each individual case, and it also helps to normalize a culture where everyone can find tons of interesting and useful things for “free” on the internet, and maybe that counterbalances it.
[1] Or other purposes that for our purposes resemble sheer benevolence.
None of the above maunderings do much to reduce my visceral hatred of advertising. But I am not convinced that the actual harm done is enough to justify that hatred.
I feel the same way (and viscerally detest ads, and go to very great lengths to avoid exposure to them), but I’m not sure whether I actually agree.
Having an advertiser attempt to manipulate your brain so that you do a thing you otherwise wouldn’t have done is, for sure, bad for you. But so is having less money, and at present the only available ways of getting Nice Things On The Internet that no one is choosing to supply out of sheer benevolence[1] are (a) that you pay them money and (b) that someone pays them for showing you ads.
So, how do the harm of being manipulated and the harm of being charged money compare? Suppose it costs you ($1 times number of viewers) to make something nice, and you can get that back either by charging everyone $1 or by showing everyone ads that pay you $1. Presumably the people making the ads think they’re getting more than $1 of value in exchange, on average; probably not much more, else the prices would be lower since I think these markets are quite competitive. Let’s say it’s $2. That means that they think that on average they can bamboozle me into spending enough money on their stuff to bring them $2 of profit, which at typical margins might mean that I’m spending $20. (Again, on average; it probably means that there’s a small chance that I spend a lot more than that.) In the cases where the ad successfully bamboozles me, I can’t have been very far from spending the money to begin with (unless advertisements have evolved to the point of outright mind control, which so far as I know they haven’t). Maybe I was already going to buy whatever-it-was and the ad persuaded me to buy it from X instead of Y. Maybe I was on the fence and the ad gave me just enough of a nudge to make me buy. Maybe I’d never thought of buying whatever-it-was, but once the ad mentioned it I genuinely realised that it would be worth the money. In these cases, it’s hard to see that the ad has done me much harm (again, on average, and according to my own values before I saw the ad), because in all these cases those pre-ad-exposure values had me very nearly judging the thing worth the money already. Despite the concrete numbers at the start of this paragraph, I don’t know how to make any of this quantitative in a form that actually means anything, but ir seems unlikely that viewing ads on a webpage is going to do me much financial harm.
What about other kinds of harm? I can think of three. (1) Ads are distracting and therefore, in effect, cost me a little bit of time. This is definitely bad, but also definitely small per ad. If some ads are the price for reading something that gives me 5 minutes of enjoyment, or takes 5 minutes of my time but provides information I value more than that, it’s hard to believe that the few seconds the ads cost me are more than a small fraction of the benefit I’m getting. In general I should be willing to pay a price of the same order of magnitude as the benefit I’m getting, so this doesn’t seem like it can be enough to make ads worse than paying money. (2) Ads often don’t just try to make you take a particular action (buy our cola!); rather, they try to change your attitude so that you’re more likely to take such actions in the future (think of our cola as refreshing and as indicating high social status!). So they’re very slightly changing who you are, and that’s super-creepy. I agree that this is pretty horrifying, and that’s one reason why I am fairly obsessive about avoiding ads. But, empirically, it doesn’t seem that most people mind this very much. And it’s not as if ads are the only things that are slightly changing who we are; for instance, when you spend time with another person you typically become a little more like them, and when you listen to a song with a catchy tune it may embed its words in your memory (as well as the tune itself, but the words are more likely to influence your mind). For me, this is enough to make ads a price I’m unwilling to pay, but I am not convinced that that’s so for many other people. (3) Every time ads are used for anything, it helps to normalize a culture where ads are everywhere, and that’s an ugly manipulative sort of culture. This is probably true, but I’m fairly sure the size of the effect is small in each individual case, and it also helps to normalize a culture where everyone can find tons of interesting and useful things for “free” on the internet, and maybe that counterbalances it.
[1] Or other purposes that for our purposes resemble sheer benevolence.
None of the above maunderings do much to reduce my visceral hatred of advertising. But I am not convinced that the actual harm done is enough to justify that hatred.
+1 for making the case for a side that’s not the one your personal feelings lean towards.