Thanks for all the discussion y’all, this is really evolving my thinking further - hope it’s useful for all of you too!
@NSaikiwiki I agree - I am also one who believes that bad design is a major culprit here. I think in order to fix that, we need good design. Good as in effective, but also good as in ethical. I work as a designer, and the incentives behind these orgs are not going to reward the right thing unless we rethink these structures, along with the technology. But I agree, a better system is possible technically. The question is, how do we either structure orgs to care, or change the culture enough that people vote differently with their attention. We probably need to do both, and that’s interaction of many societal systems.
I think @wolftune’s perspective is lacking the nuance I intended to explore in the article. I actually chose to write this article because I was going down that path, starting to brand entire disciplines as evil when terms like “technology” and “advertising” are too broad for that to make any sense. Don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely critical of the manipulation going on in our world using tech and ads - but if we’re going to do something about it, we have to get beyond this blunt understanding and address them with clarity. What is leading advertising to become an evil force in our society, when obviously it can be used for good too? Same can be asked of tech. We need to find the core of the issue - the “advertising is evil” position is naive - @wolftune - you reveal this yourself at the end when you point out there are some kinds of advertising you don’t think are evil (classifieds) - I point to several other examples in the article and articulate this case a lot more clearly there - would be really curious to hear your thoughts if you have time to check it out.
Love @NSaikiwiki’s description of brand-as-predator. This in itself could be an interesting framing for this, that there are potentially brands, people, advertisers, businesses, executives, etc. that are “predators” because they abuse the public trust and dive guiltlessly into outright manipulation and abuse. Fascinating to think about how we would identify these agents and reject them from our systems. A correctional system for the web.
@wolverdude pointing to “I know it when I see it” is really aligned. That’s why I felt it was so hard in the article to draw a clear line between ethical and unethical advertising… I can paint the extremes because it feels obvious to me. But as @NSaikiwiki said - we need to suggest solutions, and I’m at a loss at how to draw hard and fast ethical rules for this stuff. I just know it when I see it. If there’s any solution I’m really advocating in writing and sharing this article, it’s that the humane tech community needs get over the blunt nonsense that these tools are somehow inherently evil, and think clearly about what we’re trying to do here as a community and as a movement.