Fuck Advertising

[The Good Reverend Roger]

How about this, Roger: No DESIRE.

Okay.  And when they come and chip your kids prior to drafting them for some godforsaken war in North Africa, you can take solace in the fact that at least you TRIED to stop them, by selling kitsch on the internets.

Don't be too hard on her. The Establishment is almost impossible to avoid, much less defeat. The best thing to do is play along, be quiet, never rock the boat, and hope to God they don't notice you have children. Selling kitsch makes you look harmless, and the stormtroopers only bother with people who look dangerous, so it makes you safe. After all, if you have nothing to hide, there's no reason to fear them.

Besides, war isn't so bad if you're White.

Har har...remember this?

Litany for Dictatorships
A poem by Stephen Vincent Benet

     For all those beaten, for the broken heads,
    The fosterless, the simple, the oppressed,
    The ghosts in the burning city of our time...

    For those taken in rapid cars to the house and beaten
    By the skillful boys with the rubber fists,
    -Held down and beaten, the table cutting the loins
    Or kicked in the groin and left, with the muscles jerking
    Like a headless hen's on the floor of the slaughter-house
    While they brought the next man in with his white eyes staring.
    For those who still said "Red Front" or "God save the Crown!"
    And for those who were not courageous
    But were beaten nevertheless.
    For those who spit out the bloody stumps of their teeth
          Quietly in the hall,
    Sleep well on stone or iron, watch for the time
    And kill the guard in the privy before they die,
    Those with the deep-socketed eyes and the lamp burning.

    For those who carry the scars, who walk lame - for those
    Whose nameless graves are made in the prison-yard
    And the earth smoothed back before the morning and the lime scattered.

    For those slain at once.
    For those living through the months and years
    Enduring, watching, hoping, going each day
    To the work or the queue for meat or the secret club,
    Living meanwhile, begetting children, smuggling guns,
    And found and killed at the end like rats in a drain.

    For those escaping
    Incredibly into exile and wandering there.
    For those who live in the small rooms of foreign cities
    And who yet think of the country, the long green grass,
    The childhood voices, the language, the way wind smelt then,
    The shape of rooms, the coffee drunk at the table,
    The talk with friends, the loved city, the waiter's face,
    The gravestones, with the name, where they will not lie
    Nor in any of that earth.
    Their children are strangers.

    For those who planned and were leaders and were beaten
    And for those, humble and stupid, who had no plan
    But were denounced, but were angry, but told a joke,
    But could not explain, but were sent away to the camp,
    But had their bodies shipped back in the sealed coffins,
    "Died of pneumonia." "Died trying to escape."

    For those growers of wheat who were shot by their own wheat-stacks,
    For those growers of bread who were sent to the ice-locked wastes.
    And their flesh remembers the fields.

    For those denounced by their smug, horrible children
    For a peppermint-star and the praise of the Perfect State,
    For all those strangled, gelded or merely starved
    To make perfect states; for the priest hanged in his cassock,
    The Jew with his chest crushed in and his eyes dying,
    The revolutionist lynched by the private guards
    To make perfect states, in the names of the perfect states.

    For those betrayed by the neigbours they shook hands with
    And for the traitors, sitting in the hard chair
    With the loose sweat crawling their hair and their fingers restless
    As they tell the street and the house and the man's name.
    And for those sitting at the table in the house
    With the lamp lit and the plates and the smell of food,
    Talking so quietly; when they hear the cars
    And the knock at the door, and they look at each other quickly
    And the woman goes to the door with a stiff face,
          Smoothing her dress.
    "We are all good citizens here. We believe in the Perfect State."

    And that was the last time Tony or Karl or Shorty came to the house
    And the family was liquidated later.
    It was the last time.
    We heard the shots in the night
    But nobody knew next day what the trouble was
    And a man must go to his work.
    So I didn't see him
    For three days, then, and me near out of my mind
    And all the patrols on the streets with their dirty guns
    And when he came back, he looked drunk, and the blood was on him.

    For the women who mourn their dead in the secret night,
    For the children taught to keep quiet, the old children,
    The children spat-on at school.
    For the wrecked laboratory,
    The gutted house, the dunged picture, the pissed-in well
    The naked corpse of Knowledge flung in the square
    And no man lifting a hand and no man speaking.

    For the cold of the pistol-butt and the bullet's heat,
    For the ropes that choke, the manacles that bind,
    The huge voice, metal, that lies from a thousand tubes
    And the stuttering machine-gun that answers all.

    For the man crucified on the crossed machine guns
    Without name, without ressurection, without stars,
    His dark head heavy with death and his flesh long sour
    With the smell of his many prisons - John Smith, John Doe,
    John Nobody - oh, crack your mind for his name!
    Faceless as water, naked as the dust,
    Dishonored as the earth the gas-shells poison
    And barbarous with portent.
          This is he.
    This is the man they ate at the green table
    Putting their gloves on ere they touched the meat.
    This is the fruit of war, the fruit of peace,
    The ripeness of invention, the new lamb,
    The answer to the wisdom of the wise.
    And still he hangs, and still he will not die
    And still, on the steel city of our years
    The light falls and the terrible blood streams down.

    We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong.
    We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
    We thought the long train would run to the end of Time.
    We thought the light would increase.
    Now the long train stands derailed and the bandits loot it.
    Now the boar and the asp have power in our time.
    Now the night rolls back on the West and the night is solid.
    Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth.

    Our children know and suffer the armed men.

[Subtract Eight!]

there are people at work right now trying to present their product in a way that is gonna make us feel like we need it

right now


and by us - that includes you



so
as you go about your business - there is people whose life consists of figuring out ways to shape your decision making



is that bad? not really

it is what it is



it isnt particularly good tho - at least not in the wholesome and nurturing sense of good



you can interpret it as a challenge perhaps?



i agree with the OP that it misrepresents complex emotions

(potentially damaging)

Yeah, I suppose, it is really not that bad but it annoys me to no end.

My biggest peeve is how it desensitizes us to art and complex thought.

[Subtract Eight!]

News:

None of this is news.

didnt
say
it
was

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

How about this, Roger: No DESIRE.

Okay.  And when they come and chip your kids prior to drafting them for some godforsaken war in North Africa, you can take solace in the fact that at least you TRIED to stop them, by selling kitsch on the internets.

As opposed to stopping them by working for Starbucks? 

[Iron Sulfide]

at starbucks, you have a large degree over- for example, how a person's day is going to be. on a relatively large scale. on top of that, there are lots of repeat costumers, so you can observe and select marks for hijinx and fun.

example: you can make a random decent person feel nice just by comping their coffee for some BS reason, which makes a small ripple of other benevolent acts around that person, etc... and the waves usually dissipate in this senario, but it's still cool.

or the opposite:
you can make someone you know is a total asshat feel like shit in a variety of ways, which adds to his attitude, which will overflow to people that will give him backlash.

...you're basically a legal drug dealer...that gives you a lot of leverage over a costumer.

just saying that you can be a wrench in the machine while working at starbucks. i have personal experience in that.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I worked for a coffee company for 5 years. I was a barista for 3 of those years, and the tea/spice blendmaster for 2. I actually really enjoyed that job.

I'm not saying that it's not possible to have a large influence on people at any level of interaction... I'm just questioning the "you can do more damage from the inside" statement, as if somehow I can be more effective (at what? Also a question) doing something I DON'T want to do than I am while doing something I love and am good at.

The notion that we should all work corporate jobs in order to do the most "damage" (???) is a little too lockstep for my tastes. Do what you WANT to do, provided you can get away with it.

[Iron Sulfide]

yes, you are who you are.

and so is everyone else.

i'd like to be doing work i enjoy, rather than tolerate.

but the things i enjoy that i could get paid for i do anyway, which is currently in discussion
in another thread.(creativity is free- Think for youtself)

but i can also get paid for more random opportunities to chip my bits out of the gears, and the occasional pleasant encounter i wouldn't have had otherwise (new friend, cohort, recruit, contact, etc..)

and i still have music and pubic art, which i can't be fired from.

as for the question of what you can do better from the inside, exactly-
it's more a matter, i think, of the size-of-demographic you can potentially hold sway over.

what office would you run for, and why? (if you don't mind)

[hunter s.durden]

2. Advertising valuable goods and services is worthwhile, assuming you are not artificially creating the illusion of the need for those goods and services. Call me Stalin, but I think we need a Parasite Law.

OK, Stalin, I'll play.

Who decides what we need and don't need?

[tyrannosaurus vex]

2. Advertising valuable goods and services is worthwhile, assuming you are not artificially creating the illusion of the need for those goods and services. Call me Stalin, but I think we need a Parasite Law.

OK, Stalin, I'll play.

Who decides what we need and don't need?

I do. You primates can't be trusted to decide what's important for yourselves.

P.S. I like Roger's hateshit better, it's more cuddly.

[hunter s.durden]

It's a serious question.

You can't throw out a half-assed blanket statement like that and think everything is solved.

Bottled water. Do we need it? Well, we need water to survive. However, we don't necessarily need it in plastic bottles from a warehouse in Texas. We can go down to the creek, or even our own sinks.

Playstation. I feel Playstation fills my emotional needs where women have failed time after time.

I'm not being a hater for hatings sake, I just don't trust people telling me I need and don't need.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

Okay. General guidelines for sane marketing:

Necessities (food, water, etc) - fine.
Electronics (computers, game consoles, etc) - more important than necessities.

Magic Miracle Potato-Peeling Gloves, The NEXT-GENERATION floor sweeper, color-seal zip-lock baggies, anything advertised on TV between 11 PM and 6 AM, etc - fuck off.

[hunter s.durden]

Okay. General guidelines for sane marketing:

Necessities (food, water, etc) - fine.
Electronics (computers, game consoles, etc) - more important than necessities.

In red- agreed.

What about McDonalds. Is that food? Isn't that detrimental to our health?
Cigarettes can't be advertised on TV because they kill you.
McDonalds can kill you, and make your life shitty because you're fat.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, make anything people "need" except perhaps on some basic magpie level. However, I also don't try to convince them or brainwash them into believing that they "need" beads and marbles. I think that's where the corporate advertising machine crosses the line into evil... when it collaborates with the media of insecurity to brainwash people into believing they "need" things in order to make them happy, rather than merely showing them a product and hoping someone out there wants it.

[Cain]

    "The masters, whether they be priests or kings or capitalists, when they want to exploit you, the first thing they have to do is demoralize you, and they demoralize you very simply by kicking you in the nuts. This is how it's done...This is a principle of the advertising copy writer, that he must stir up discontent in the family. Modern American advertising is aimed at the woman, who is, if not always the buyer at least the pesterer, and it is designed to create sexual discontent....But with the adult, the young married couple, which is the object of almost all advertising, the copy is pitched to stir up insatiable sexual discontent. It provides pictures of women who never existed. A guy gets in bed with his wife and she isn't like that and so he is discontented all the time and is therefore fit material for exploitation."


- Kenneth Rexroth, in an interview on The Social Lie

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Advertising, marketing, schmoozing...

The MARKETING GUYS are assholes, they are willing to do anything to ensure that you buy their product (except make a product you actually need, or make a quality product you actually want).  THEY will try to craft words, phrases, memes and catchy graphics to manipulate the minds of Individuals!! THEY will take their ideas and consider them as Most Important and THEY will try to override any other ideas that may get in their way. THEY are EVIL.

It IS US vs THEM...