Advertising

Yet again I find myself sitting in a train, waiting for it to slowly start grinding the gears, telling me through loud noises of metal at work that I am changing my position towards my destination. I did have a few beers celebrating the end of the semester today. The final project has been handed in, and now there is nothing left to do but read up to the exam and enjoy Christmas with my family.

Normally I am not one for traditions, but I do see the merit in handing out smiles to the people that love me, by masking the repulsion I occasionally feel for this holiday that allows the western world to consume more calories in a day than most African children do in a week, if not a month.

Will the rest of this post be a vile spewing of acidic commentary on the festival of hearts? No. It will not. I left that part in this post instead of deleting it, because I do feel there is some merit to trying to reflect opposition towards a highly cherished ideal. Perhaps that is a general driving mechanic for a lot of the things I write.

Yesterday I spoke shortly of the curse of advertisement that has been brought to normalisation through repetition. Grinding those gears apparently turned the creatures formerly known as humans into these biomechanical beings capable of withstanding this constant noise in our environment. Of these beings only few even stop to consider how harmful this presence of mercantile manipulation affect the offspring of this self-consuming generation of pop star commentary wannabes.

In Sao Paulo, Brazil they actually banned outdoor advertisement. They now inhabit a city with a more cleansed self-image. A city that is closer to being as pure as a modern city can be, from the grips of globalised capitalism. At least visually.

Trust me when I say that these corporations have psychologists working on they can effectively break down your resistance toward their brand, and they care not what they destroy inside or outside of you in this process. That is irrelevant to their share holders and it does not figure on the statistics of their next general assembly slides of the quarterly stock improvements.

Advertisement is not there to inform you. It is not there to educate you. It is there to lure you into connecting a certain brand with a certain reward mechanism for you personally. To do this, they must first obstruct your sense of reality to make you slightly more eager to listen to the rest of their message, even if you already have another element associated with this sense of reward.

You might argue that people make up their own minds about what they wish to purchase and that I am therefore attributing way too much power to this industry of advertising. Considering the studies done on conformity and social pressures, I dare say that you would be wrong though. Ask yourself why more than half the people you know own an Apple product, and why half of those people probably own more than one. You would be kidding yourself if your guess was that its because Apple makes the best products. Obviously that is not the case. Even professional advertising agents have admitted that the logical assumption that a company spending money on advertising does so at the expense of higher prices or lower quality products, and/or to over-shadow a competitor.

So why do we continue to accept living in this litter box of self-promotion, done by conservative remnants of a past economy they consider the present. The time is now to start considering proper alternatives to this devouring beast of a society we chose to remain in out of fear of the unknown future scares us.