The internet runs on ads.

Ad companies pay for all the “free” popular social media we use. Ad companies dictate to social media what their clients want their ads to be associated with, not associated with, and drive media of all kinds to push inflammatory and click-bait content that drives engagement and views. It’s why you indirectly can’t swear, talk about suicide, drugs, death, or violence. Sure, you technically can unless ToS prohibits it, but if companies tell their ad hosts they don’t want to be associated with someone talking about guns, the content discussing guns gets fewer ads, fewer ads = less revenue, low-revenue gets pushed to the bottom.

So lowbrow political rage bait, science denialism, and fake conspiracies drives people to interact and then gets pushed to the top because it gets ad revenue. Content that delves into critical thought and requires introspection or contemplation languishes.

Ads are destroying society because stupid and rage sells views.

Agree. Which is why I get so irrationally annoyed when sharing a good piece of journalism that's not catering to ad-clicks and the peanut gallery here grabs their torches and pitchforks while shouting "PaYwALL!" despite me posting the gist of the article in the post body (enough to get the gist but not the full article for copyright reasons). It's one of several reasons why I don't even bother anymore.

Like, good journalism costs money. That money's gotta come from somewhere if you want good journalists to be able to eat and keep doing what they do.

People interested in storytelling have been obsessed with the "Hero's Journey" for decades, which a fantastically sexist man hacked together as a concept from a poor interpretation of James Joyce and of cherry picked anthropological evidence.

What pisses me off is that the idea has taken such complete hold of artist's imagination that it makes people only want to talk about "Narrative" with respect to storytelling, and it misses the most essential aspect of storytelling in that good stories are always inherently plural in their nature. A good story is a cacophony of potentially true narratives all vying for your soul on stage with no easy answer, not a simple list of plot points delivered to convince you of a particular belief and singular structure through which to see a set of events.

This leads to a massive learned blindspot about advertisement in that artists lose sight of the fact that Advertisement is the annihilation of Storytelling where the natural human invitation for the audience to interpret and construct their own unique Narrative is buried in an avalanche by an overwhelming reifying force that simplifies a complex reality down to a single corporate produced Narrative. People who do sports wear Nike.

Advertisement is the attempt to annihilate art, it can be seen no other way no matter how many artists the advertisement industry employs in the process.

Many people will be shocked, however, to learn that academic folklorists and scholars of ancient literature almost universally reject Campbell’s theories as nonsense—and for good reason. Campbell’s outline of the “hero’s journey” is so hopelessly vague that it is essentially useless for analyzing stories across cultures. It also displays ethnocentric, sexist, heteronormative, and cisnormative biases and it encourages people to ignore the ways in which stories are fundamentally shaped by the cultures and time periods in which they are produced.

...

Campbell starts out with the assumption that every great story must be focused on a single hero, whom he generally assumes to be a heterosexual man. According to Campbell, the “hero’s journey” begins with the hero living in a state of normality, which is disrupted by some kind of “call to adventure,” which takes the hero into the realm of the “unknown,” which “is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, super human deeds, and impossible delight.

https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/

For those who disagree, can you not see how directly this imposed definition of what a Story is slots perfectly into rationalizing Advertising and focusing on it as the true purpose of an Artist?

That’s an interesting thought, and I would like to add a few things to it.

The whole idea of having ad funded things is fundamentally flawed. It has also become too dominant, and difficult to compete with. Ads are the tool used in this business model, but are they really the root cause of the problems you mentioned? I would say no.

Theoretically, you could still have ads without ruining everything. When other business models aren’t competitive enough, the whole system naturally gravitates to the mess we’re currently in.

I think cheap mobile games have showed that you can charge a small amount of money, and people will be willing to pay up. That way, everything doesn’t have to be ad funded. It’s just that this business model doesn’t appear to be appealing enough in other arenas, and that’s a real problem.

That's an interesting take. Have an article or blog post or paper anywhere that gives into it more? Not sure I agree or disagree but it's an interesting thought

Somebody watches too much Maggie Mae Fish.

How can I tell they’re good journalists without reading their stuff first?

You're right overall, but the mechanism you listed about advertising only appearing near safe content is not that big of a deal compared to other mechanisms at play:

1. psychological manipulation vs competition - the way that a capitalist economy is supposed to work is that a bunch of firms compete to sell you a good or service, you pick the best one for your situation and buy it, then the firm that produces the best good or service gets more resources (money) to grow, rewarding the best product maker.

Advertising breaks this. It lets you spend money on psychological manipulation to get people to buy your product, instead of just trying to produce a better product. True conservative capitalists should fucking hate advertising for distorting the economy, and letting big companies pay advertising money to drown innovative competition, but there are very few of those left these days.

1. engagement driven algorithms - because advertising operates on the basis of psychological manipulation rather than actually informing you, it means that its effectiveness always scales with volume.

i.e. I can read everything there is to learn about two different laptops, watch YouTube videos, read all the specs and reviews, and after about two hours of research I'll know everything there is to know. A company can try and provide me with more information about their product to sway me, but at that point it's probably ineffective because I know everything about them already. However if they bombard me with slick fun ads that evoke certain emotions in me over and over and over and over and over again, it will create an emotional bias towards one over the other.

This distinction is super important because it is what leads to most of advertising's ills: most specifically engagement driven algorithms, which social media uses to keep you scrolling and are what are truly destroying society. The amount of human time and effort wasted to them is incalculable, the amount of languished relationships, neglected kids, over tired and angry people etc. is truly jaw droppingly damaging, and it is fundamentally because advertising is a cheap way to manipulate you into buying something, and unlike true education, it's effectiveness keeps scaling with volume.

That is a difficult question to answer, I am not the first person to think this by any means but finding people who put it into simple terms and connect the dots is difficult.

This is a great example of the species of brainworms I am talking about though.

People fall in love with the story arc and the characters in these hero’s journey examples because they see themselves in the “before” phase—feeling stuck, small, and unseen.

They crave a transformation.

If you want to get better at selling your product or service, you have to understand that people don’t buy products or services.

They buy transformations.

Your customer is trying to get from point A to point B, but they don’t know how to do it on their own. If you want to sell to them, make your product or service the bridge between where they are and where they want to be.

That’s why this storytelling structure works so well in marketing. Your customer is the protagonist, and your product/service is what helps them answer their call to adventure.

I’m reminded of this quote:

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” —Henry David Thoreau

https://thevectorimpact.com/heros-journey-examples/

The thought terminating logic goes good advertising is storytelling --> all good storytelling is the Hero's Journey.

Which... I think the advertisement people are right, Hero's Journeys are a perfect description of advertisements, they have a precise structure meant to influence you to see things a certain way. The problem is it is a suffocating regime to impose upon Storytelling as a pursuit of art and self-expression and it is killing our communal spaces at a deep level because of it. Artists are trained to only tell stories that contain the same genetic structure as advertisements because how the hell else do you earn money and respect as an artist these days but utterly optimize every aspect of your artistry to trying desperately to make some money?

Follow the money. Advertisement exists because businesses demand it.

Your post is literally shooting the messenger.

I disagree. James Campbell was not a perfect man, but he did coalesce what humans like to see in a story most of the time. It's not a perfect scenario like he claimed, but more of a guide to most cultures. If you look at boring structures of story, it's usually because it doesn't follow western structure (the hero's journey). Joseph Campbell hated Noh from Japanese culture because he couldn't follow it as a hero's journey. Even if he didn't speak the language, he could usually tell when they followed it. I'm assuming that's what you're talking about when cherry picking. He's right in that to a westerner, it will be hard to understand and may be boring. To the Japanese though, it's been around a long time.

He’s right in that to a westerner, it will be hard to understand and may be boring.

Ok, but he is wrong in believing that says anything meaningful about Storytelling, it is just a shitty mirror to our own failings as a culture to point out this repetitive structure, encourage people to repeat it more and then idolize it as "universal" when it isn't.

Over the last few decades, this structure has come to dominate much of popular storytelling, and Hollywood cinema in particular. With so many bestselling novels and international blockbusters using the Hero’s Journey to great success, it would seem at first glance that Campbell was right—that most or all great stories can be distilled down to a formula, which is universally applicable across time and place.

However, as we’ll be exploring in today’s blog post, Campbell’s theories aren’t always a perfect fit for the needs of storytellers in the real world. The Hero’s Journey is not as universal as Campbell would claim—and the framework is weighed down by Campbell’s own antisemetic and sexist thinking.

....

“projected Anglo-Western storytelling and cultural values onto Indigenous mythic narratives, which in fact have very different storytelling norms and serve a very different purpose to the individualistic striving for self fulfilment which he identified [as the key to all storytelling].”

In other words, Campbell cites superficial similarities between myths of different cultures as evidence for the claim that the stories of all cultures share an underlying purpose, i.e. the dramatic reenactment of the individual’s quest for self fulfillment.

In the process, he ignores overwhelming ethnographic evidence that the very idea of an atomized, individual “self” separated from clan, species, etc. is a relatively new one in the history of human thought, and that such a striving self is not a central feature in stories from many parts of the world.

https://freerange.com/blog/joseph-campbell-history-and-antisemitism-critiquing-the-heros-journey

Do I really need to explicitly connect why this broken conception of stories is advantageous to the Advertising Industry? It encapsulates the full extent of artistry within the bounds of capitalism and subsumes the work of the artist as simply the cherry on top to help a product be sold. EVERYTHING an artist can do is just a manipulation to impose a very particular narrative of a set of events into the minds of the audience.

Somebody doesn't watch enough Maggie Mae Fish

The messenger is delivering poison. The messenger is the problem.

Did you read what I said? I said the same thing as what you quoted from the blog, lol. The other formats are mostly boring to a westerner's ear. It's easy enough to figure out for yourself, watch movies and advertising before Star Wars. Star Wars is when the Hero's Journey became popular and when advertising would have started to switch over too. Check for yourself if the movies followed it in America and Europe before Star Wars. Hint, the acclaimed ones mostly did.

Wait, do you think Hollywood only copies ideas that are good ideas and work well?

Bill Watterson tried to warn us

Wait, do you really think you're right allllll the time? I'm not sure what chip you have on your shoulder, but you're obviously butt hurt about something. Again, Campbell is not perfect, but he did give writers a handy guide to jump off from. You seem like you're trolling or think you're super duper smart or something? Smart people try to see other people's side.

Why do you feel the need to defend Campbell so passionately? Is he your daddy or something?

Also yeah, I am the smartest person here, I am the hero so duh, obviously?

Why do you feel the need to defend Campbell so passionately? Is he your daddy or something?

Ahh, the troll shows it face. Have a wonderful day.

Theoretically, you could still have ads without ruining everything. When other business models aren’t competitive enough, the whole system naturally gravitates to the mess we’re currently in.

There's no such thing as "competitive enough." Corporate greed is literally insatiable, inherently and by design. There's an entire series of Supreme Court decisions -- not just Citizens United -- that would need to be overturned to fix that.

I think the answer always comes down to capitalism

Capitalism does play a part, but it’s more the lack of hard rules to curb it rather than the economic method itself. You want to make an even broader claim, just say “greed.”

Attach the whole article to the post. Copy/paste has been around longer than the author. "Look at what I can read and you can't" isn't good for discussion. Author wants food? Let them eat cake.

By reading the gist that OP provided and deciding if you want to read more.

So you don't think journalists should be paid for their work?

What if I want to read more but not enough to go find my wallet and hand over personal information?

What if you want a cookie, but not enough to go to the grocery store and buy some cookies?

Then you don't get any fucking cookies.

Who’s paying for and giving them the poison? Corporations.

Yeah, corpos pushing products are using ads, but they’re not the ones determining the engagement algorithm that puts the ragebait in front of you.

The difference being that good journalism doesn’t die because I’m too lazy to get a cookie.

There's no curbing capitalism. The very thesis of it requires that the most successful 1, find 2, exploit 3, lobby to lock up enough, so to "pull up the ladder behind themselves", any and all loopholes of the legal system that allows them to get ahead.

You can try regulating it but capitalism will always find a way around your rules.

This is where we disagree. What are the fundemental tenants of capitalism vs say, communism?

(Just doing a thought experiment with you, in good faith)

I think you're giving Campbell way more credit than he is generally given by the writing community at large. Yes, that is one way to write a story, but it's certainly not the only method taught. For example, slice-of-life stories are completely acceptable, however it is harder to get some of the nuance across to new writers. The hero's journey is an easy starting point, that's all. And I really don't think Campbell was trying to say that's how everything should be. He was making observations about what he already saw in popular western media.

I don't understand your seeming conflation of advertising and art, which seems like a separate point from your criticism of Campbell. Advertising does not control art, nor vice versa. It makes more sense to look at things through the lens of money: art can be basically free to create (writing, drawing, street art are all pretty cheap). Anyone can do it. Now, something like making a film is not cheap. It can cost millions of dollars, and not many people have enough lying around to do so without getting a return on that investment. In other words, film has to make money. They know the hero's journey will sell because it is easy for the average Westerner to digest and enjoy. So you see a lot more hero's journey stories on the screen than you do in the wide world of books, which can afford to be more experimental or art-driven. Someone like Banksy isn't worried about finding a rich buyer to recoup the cost of his stencils and paint. Would you agree?

Advertising is a different beast altogether, and I'm not sure why you would criticize it for not being art. It was never supposed to be that.

So you think news should be a privilege for the rich?

They know the hero’s journey will sell because it is easy for the average Westerner to digest and enjoy. So you see a lot more hero’s journey stories on the screen than you do in the wide world of books, which can afford to be more experimental or art-driven. Someone like Banksy isn’t worried about finding a rich buyer to recoup the cost of his stencils and paint. Would you agree?

I think you see this conversation as discussing a serious of fairly innocuous individual elements whereas I see it as part of a broader, irrevocably intersectional problem that must be addressed in a wholistic fashion by integrating all pieces of it. I see advertisement as not separate from art and only harmful in its unintended collisions with it but rather an intentional as well as subconscious colonization and co-opting of the societal values around human artists that has culminated inevitably in AI wrecking havoc on what remains of our curiosity about human creativity.

Campbell’s theories therefore provide justification for white westerners to reject the interpretations that non-western peoples give for their own stories, if those interpretations don’t align with what the white westerners in question think the interpretations should be. Thus, western perspectives are portrayed as universal perspectives and non-western perspectives are dismissed.

...

Thinking about the culturally specific influences behind familiar stories is important because it reveals that many of the assumptions that exist within our own culture that we take for granted are not universal at all, but rather rooted in very culturally specific prejudices. For instance, in the Star Wars movies, darkness and the color black are both closely associated with evil. The evil side of the Force is referred to as the “dark side” and the title darth, which is used by the evil Sith Lords, literally sounds like the word dark. On top of this, Darth Vader wears a black suit and the Emperor wears a black cloak.

This association of darkness and the color black with evil is rooted in Christianity, which has been the dominant religion in the United States for most of modern history. Throughout the writings of the New Testament, darkness is repeatedly equated with evil and Satan, while light is repeatedly associated with goodness and God. For instance, in the Gospel of John 8:12, Jesus is portrayed as saying, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):

“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/

"It's always night, or we wouldn't need light"

having ad funded things

Do you remember those free "newspapers" that used to choke your mailbox once a week, or your favorite club? With like 75% ad content and a few poorly written articles? That's how I learned about the power of advertisment. The internet just put that in hyperdrive. How much of it is driven by ads these days?

And who’s telling/paying them to do that? Corporations.

Both suck, I hear you, but let’s place the blame at the source.

Corporations LOVE that you hate their agencies instead of them. Much like how bands love that people hate Ticketmaster instead of them.

Journalists are being silenced by their work being behind paywalls. I am stretching the meaning of the word "work" here on account of today's LLMs doing the heavy lifting. I have grown skeptical of journalists consistently putting out organic prose.

Are we stealing their lunch by copying a whole article to discuss something in a niche online community? I can get past some paywalls by disabling Javascript for that site and I'll still see ads. I'll gladly steal the toothpick shoved through an olive off the top of their shit sandwich. Subscription paywalls are a cancer growing in the arteries of the information superhighway.

a bunch of firms compete to sell you a good or service, you pick the best one for your situation and buy it, then the firm that produces the best good or service gets more resources (money) to grow, rewarding the best product maker.

Advertising breaks this.

TBF, the original meaning of advertising was just that: spread the word about your product. Sure, praise it, add nice pictures, but that's about it. People need to know that your product is out there, and what it's like.

The systematic psychological manipulation only started in the 20th century, particularly when a relative of Sigmund Freud came to the USA (there's an interesting documentary about it called The Century of the Self).

I largely agree with you though; algorithmic engagement is the worst incarnation so far. To put it simple: "Angry People Click More", see more ads, and are therefore to be targeted.

Respectfully I am not willing to get into this debate. If communism worked, we’d be doing it. Unfortunately so far it seems to have incredibly weak protections against authoritarian takeover despite its overall egalitarian appeal.

E: triggered .ml?

I disagree. Capitalism can be curbed. The failure is greed on humanity’s part always trying to carve out more for themselves. No system of government or economy has proven otherwise over the long term. They all eventually fail.

E: Lol, downvotes seem to indicate some real confident fools here think they have an alternative all figured out that somehow eliminates what humans have been doing forever.

This was an understandable perspective when we had those regulations in the USA, but since FDR's New Deal, the Republicans have walked back practically every law and regulation we had to curb the greed of Capitalism. This is the natural tendency of Capitalism

If communism worked, we’d be doing it.

Oh you sweet summer child.

Respectfully I am not willing to get into this debate.

And this is why you believe that. Head, meet sand.

Props for being polite about it though.

I think ad funded stuff is the only way to get things done in a capitalist economy. There may be other types of economies that could get by without ads, but we'll never know because this is the world we've created.

That is the tendency of people. Any system is open to exploitation and greed. The restrictions on growing exploitation are only as good as the humans enforcing them, and people suck. There’s always people trying to force cracks in a system to benefit themselves, and some tribal influences that will allow them to do it.

The assumption that I lack knowledge of alternate economic and governing systems and left them unconsidered is as insulting as your smug confidence that any other system is immune to corruption and disparity.

Double respectfully back, I have to agree with the other commentor. I dont think you have a good understanding of what communism is. Which is fine. Global North countries, at the behest of the powerful elite, have made it their life's mission to destroy communism (i wonder why). They do that while pushing Neo-Liberal ideas and agendas constantly (curioussssss).

In your post, you have identified a symptom of capitalism. Not the cause of societal failures.

Also, unlike saying "humans beings are naturally greedy" (which isnt true), capitalism as an economic system reinforces and rewards any greed fhat MIGHT appear in A VANISHINGLY SMALL amount of people (true sociopaths). Whereas, under communism or socialism, those sociapaths would not only be unrewarded, their entire ideology would be forsaken from establishing a foothold in power (please extrapolate to the rest of humanity).

That said, if you dont want to talk about it, its all good baby. Thanks for listening to my Ted talk.

(Btw, this was all in good faith. Genuinely not trying to mock or tesse you. Just being silly).

Lmk if you ever feel like talking more

despite me posting the gist of the article in the post body (enough to get the gist but not the full article for copyright reasons)

when you (and others) do that, it is the best thing on the news/science/sharing articles communities. lets me know whether the article is something i'm interested in reading and something i can comment intelligently on or just something i can shitpost about. i really appreciate it, just thought i'd let you know

those of us who can afford to should pay for the news. for those of us who can't afford it, there are a lot of ways around paywalls.

I think cheap mobile games have showed that you can charge a small amount of money, and people will be willing to pay up.

emulation's another thing. i was glad to toss the duckstation devs five bucks so's i could keep it easily updated on my phone (i like the psx generation, it's great for that screen size) and so they could hopefully afford to keep working on it. it's been so long i can't remember if they charged or if it was a patreon thing, but five bucks is five bucks.