A rant against Marketing

I truly despise marketing.

The very goal of marketing is to manipulate people. The existence of this is antithetical to my construction of reality through free-will (see https://listed.to/@vt/33768/free-will). For a business to engage in marketing is for them to act against the free-market. The core premise of a free-market is that consumers as individuals will be selfish and always seek to purchase the best product. This is turn drives businesses to provide the best product, leading to innovation. However, by businesses using advertising to gain profits, they are reducing the consumer's ability to choose the best product, thereby reducing the need for businesses to innovate. This is very similar to the Moloch arguments: here businesses sacrifice the value of consumer choice to make short-term profits, but the mass adoptance of this by other businesses renders it in the long-term worthless. The even worse part of it is that businesses use resources to make ads. Thus they are using money that they could use to innovate on controlling consumers. In addition, the power of ads is only going to grow as artificial intelligence, data collection/databases, and understanding of the human mind grows. I know that psychology has already been used successfully in the advertising field, and considering the massive growth psychology has had in the past decades, psychology's use is probably only going to increase. AI is already an obvious factor in this, so I won't explain it further. The data set factor is also likely to grow. If we look at recent political news on data privacy, they only seem to be getting worse. Politicians in many, many countries continue to try and sometimes do implement anti-encryption laws. Examples include the Patriot Act, EARN IT act, and Australia's Assistance and Access Act 2018.

Furthermore, marketing isn't just used by businesses, politicians use them. By using ads they are able to sway global politics, weakening democracy. Marketing is also used by the state to increase nationalism. It is my belief that nationalism is bad as it separates people into in and out groups based on identity and birth location. In addition, as the world becomes increasingly globalized, we as a species will need more unity, and nationalism will simply get in the way. I will probably make a post expanding my ideas on this later.

It is the intrinsic nature of ads to obfuscate the truth: there is objectively one best choice, but by using ads organizations waste money on ads. Obviously ads try to get the audience to favor what that organization wants. Thus any organization using ads can't be the best, but they hide that truth away.

Unfortunately, marketing will likely be here to stay. No individual business will likely choose to not engage in marketing for they need the profits. And the government is unlikely to enforce it, for marketing is very loose and bills and enforcement are likely to be too weak and politicians rely on marketing too. Thus no politician in office will want to give up an advantage that they have (they likely used ads to gain office). Thus the problem of Moloch appears once again. Therefore, if we ever have a benevolent dictator, the first thing they should do is ban marketing.