Contents
Advertising
Australia
Meta Data ends privacy
Constant Manipulation
Farts are still funny
Journalists Comply
Toyota Calling
Land Fill Leaking
CBC Diversity
Bansky
Advertising
Corporations use advertising to control; you, your thinking, your media, your space, everything. Like a dog trained to sit on command journalists are conditioned like everyone is conditioned by the often spoken, and always implied rule of “Do not spit into the wind”. There is no seven syllable word to describe it, its just that simple. That is the short answer, the longer answer is how advertising controls us and the journalists simultaneously.
“Selling things you don’t need and can’t afford, that are overpriced and don’t work.And they do it by exploiting your fears and insecurities, and if you don’t have any they’ll be glad to give you a few by showing you a nice picture of a woman with big tits. That’s the essence of advertising: big tits. Threateningly big tits.”
Threateningly big tits.” George Carlin (1997), “40 Years of Comedy”.
In recent years with the advent of close monitoring and categorization of individuals thru their use of social media the “exploiting your fears and insecurities” has gone to outrageous levels. For more, read “Monitored and Manipulative Media.”
Australia
“So, recently…there were negotiations with Australia to establish what’s called a free trade agreement…. The negotiations were held up for some time because the United States was objecting to Australia’s highly efficient health care system. … the Australian system is evidence-based… They have to provide evidence that the drug actually does something, that it is better than some cheaper thing that’s already on the market. That evidence-based approach, the U.S. negotiators argued, is interference with free markets, because corporations must have the right to deceive… The claim itself is kind of amusing, I mean, even if you believe the free market rhetoric for a moment. The main purpose of advertising is to undermine markets. If you go to graduate school and you take a course in economics, you learn that markets are systems in which informed consumers make rational choices. That’s what’s so wonderful about it. But that’s the last thing that the state corporate system wants. It is spending huge sums to prevent that.”
Noam Chomsky advertisements affect international policy Noam Chomsky, Interviewed at 25th anniversary of the International Relations Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, January 26, 2005
Meta Data ends privacy
Advertising not only creates insecurities, altering our laws, but today advertising is extremely well targeted, they know exactly who they are targeting. They have studied you and know your personal vulnerabilities.
The Facebook, Google, Twitter algorithm collates, evaluates and categorizes every search, post, view, email, any activity and scores and arranges users in order of interest for each individual user. This process happens every time a user clicks. On facebook every day there are billions of users fine tuning the analysis of themselves. This constantly refined profile creates generalized and very detailed observation, and it’s a crucial one. It is crucial because the product is you. A finely categorized view of you.
“Quitting social media is the best way to resist the insanity of our times. Lanier uses the term BUMMER. This stands for “Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent”.
Reason 2 of Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now here
Meta does not really care where your fat ass is. They can predict where it will go a few days ahead of it arriving, before it occurs to you they can predict your behavior based upon your past behavior and your profile. What they care about is how they can sell you. They need 25,000 people to buy the latest {insert latest container load fad from china} and they can order, not the product, but the consumer. They know who will buy what on command. Need voters in a close riding or poll to swing the vote, they can target you, liberal, conservative, green, anarchist or family coalition by postal code.
The point is you are grouped with people like you and sold as a block. The real transaction isn’t you receiving enjoyment in the form of a free temporary distraction created by a media company at great expense, but rather, that media company sells you eyeballs to its advertisers. which is what all advertising have always been paying for. What is different today is the detailed information about you, your wants, desires, fears, ambitions, your psychological profile is sold.
There are fewer more efficient ways to grab customers’ attention than knowing them inside and out. And sadly Facebook,Twitter, Google, Amazon and Apple are more interested in pleasing the advertiser before they please you.
Constant Manipulation
Being constantly manipulated thru your fears has an effect on children. Gen X and their offspring Gen Z are a social experiment and its easy to see the psychological effect of being constantly monitored and receiving daily targeted advertising and instant feedback on social media. It is impossible to escape the assault of stimulation. These generations have no escape, from the moment their cell phones wake them up in morning till midnight when lulled to sleep with the absurdity of a mindfulness app.
The result is that every popular prejudice and narcissistic pride is played upon and pandered to in the interests of conformity to an advertisers norm. This is the cumulative effect of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter.
Everywhere herd opinion are strengthened at the expense of rationality and personal independence. The tendency has become to think and speak for likes and re-tweets rather than from reflection and calm that can only come from disconnecting and having an inner life.
Farts are still funny
Why the decline of humour? Why is everyone offended all the time, why so much hostility and division. It goes along with conformity and compliance, constantly connected means a decline in being able to play with ideas, to imagine.
As goes the desire to do things for anything other than the approval of others so goes the decline of creative risk taking, the norms that create civilization become rigid, fascist. This Monitoring and Manipulation, the extensions of and perfection of advertising has created a tribe of digital natives, a tribe Born on Reddit and Google, the B.O.R.G.. But unlike the star trek series Resistance is not futile, but you do have to pull the plug if you even want, or if you are still capable of being able to resist.
The electronic nipple sadly in most cases creates a cripple; oops; cripple that’s insensitive, I should have said “a digitally enhanced person of incredible potential yet suffering from an intersectionality of bullying, gender normative aggression and an inability to swaddled in a safe space.”
Journalist comply
So why do journalists comply, why does everyone comply? Why does no one really resist? Why did I not resist? My lesson on free speech in a commercial environment was many years ago between jobs as a tool designer. I wrote a letter to the editor and the editor like my writing style. I was offered a job with very flexible hours, this suited me at the time. The position was writing advertisement editorials for a local advertising magazine.
My payment was I had my own column and 50 dollars an editorial. At the time in my late 20’s early 30’s I was an environmental activist, worked on pesticide awareness issues and this was an opportunity to get my point of view into 80,000 recycle bins every other Wednesday afternoon. It also got my name out there into the community. I was thinking of running municipally with the green party and name awareness I heard was a big thing. Turns out a bigger thing is becoming friendly with the house and road builders in the community and but I was young and did not know better. So off I went writing reviews of restaurant I never ate at, and recommending service that I was unaware of. It was interesting and fun, if it were today I would be writing yelp reviews and amazon reviews but back in the late 80’s this is how it was done.
My columns were often rewrites of a weekly newsletter that came to my mailbox, that box stuck on your front porch, Its funny I never got a cookie with my mail, and upon opening my door no one sorted nor group me for further manipulation, but this was the late 80’s and we did not think or behave quite as uniformly back then, so it all seemed normal.
The flyer was called “Rachel’s Hazardous Waste News”. I would take the content and rewrite it, giving it credit and adding my editorial spin and suitable local content with my own personal brand of indignation and sanctimony. One week I wrote about the automobile and the possibility of global climate change and the change was not portrayed as being for the better.
Toyota Calling
The response from our biggest advertiser did not come the first week, it came the second time as I had written a three part series on the topic. My good friends at the local Toyota dealership called up and said they would pull their advertisements if they saw another article critical of cars.
The publisher gave me a call and politely explained that Toyota regularly bought the back cover and I was to stop my rants against them. And that is how the world works. No one needed to tell me twice, I stopped writing about the automobile. It is a simple and effective system.
Land Fill Leaking
Another time I wrote about the leachate from the Regional Municipal land fill; often called a dump. The dump was originally a gravel pit until one day someone decided to start throwing garbage in the hole. The leachate from the dump, that is the sludge from the totality of what was thrown into a landfill from 1940 to 1980 oozed out of the pit, followed a gravel eskeriii and went into Alice Dells well.
The story was the front cover of the magazine. Shortly after Laid-law, the waste management company that ran the regions dump became a regular advertiser and I stopped writing about Alice Dells well.
The next time, before you read, look at the advertising. The articles will reflect the interests and the bias of the advertisers. I am not a journalist and I had not journalistic integrity, but then neither do writers for any major publisher. They are sorted out long before they get a national column, unless of course their brand of activism suites the needs of the corporate agenda in terms of distraction from issues of taxation or ensuring abundant cheap labour.
There are thousands of people struggling with issues of poverty. The ones that get attention like Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, or Thomas Merton are killed as an example to the rest of us. The useless activists, the ones that do not threaten the rights of today’s corporate kings; will get media attention. The people who challenge the availability of cheap labour (immigration and overpopulation) and the problems of unjust taxation ( international finance, free trade, consolidation of markets) will be ignored.
What actually happens in most cases is that publishers hire true believers, it does not matter if you are of the left right, black, white, blue or red, you hire someone who believes what you do. That way the poor idiot never has a moral dilemma as you always have them writing what they truly believe.
CBC Diversity
Ironically today the CBC has diversity quota’s. But not quotas for diversity of ideas. They will have ethnic diversity but all will tow the company line. People of integrity, representing a diversity of viewpoints would know better than trying to be a journalist for a major media outlet today. Maybe long ago when the press was more diverse in terms of viewpoints, locally owned, one of 10,000 newspapers in the county and the government supported the mail system to deliver the news because they knew free speech was important, maybe then a few good journalists had a chance but not today. Its a comforting myth in any event. The incredible beauty of the system is that it is such an effective form of censorship that it does not even look like censorship. It happens in the minds of everyone in media. As Jim Croce so aptly pointed out
“You don’t tug on Superman’s cape
Jim Croce “Photographs and Memories”
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don’t mess around with (Advertisers)”
Rarely does someone get as far along the line as I did, not that a weekly column in an advertising mag is far along in a journalism carrier, but usually malcontent’s, as in any trade are weeded out in school, the job interview or long before any form of sensational scandal can happen.
Don Lemon is not going to do other than what he truly believes, it just happens he believes exactly what the people who hired him were looking for, in Don Lemons case its about maintaining the status quo. It is what you would expect from the great, great, grand son of a slave owner; Keep Dem boys working in the fields Don.
Bansky
“People are taking the piss out of you every day. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.”
Banksy taken from ‘Brandalism’ in the book ‘Cut It Out’ (inspired by Sean Tejaratchi’s piece in Crap Hound No.6, July 1999.)
Cheers Weird Sly Kip March 2020 A day without TV or radio, clarity of thought. Bake bread and write another page
Update: November 2023
November 22 updated
Don Lemon is not longer with CNN. He was fired.
~Top management at parent company Warner Bros was open about its displeasure with Don Lemons political leanings.
~Lemon engaged in heated on-air clashes about women’s soccer and GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley.
~Jussie Smollett’s false police report about a hate crime attack in Chicago, Lemon covered the story without disclosing Smollett was a friend.