There are lots of cultural opposition movements online, like against work exploitation, consumerism, car culture, surveillance, intellectual property, etc. I can find communities on lemmy for all those topics. But regarding a more general opposition to advertisements and marketing, other than the occasional person telling others to use adblockers online (what about ads in every day life?), I fail to see organized attempts to challenge advertisements. There is a lot that can be scrutinized. Ethical concerns such as manipulation, lack of consent and just the simple fact your attention is for sale. The effects range from damage to environment, to our mental health, to harming industries themselves, lowering product quality and maintaining monopolies.
It was a thing back in the late 1990s as part of the antiglobalization movement. Look up old issues of the Adbusters magazine or Naomi Klein’s book ‘No Logo’
Adblocking is my movement
I think if such a movement ever does arise (independent of a generally sympathetic unrelated movement such as a communist one) it will only be after things get a whole lot worse. Like they’re going to have to be projecting ads on the moon, filling every inch of public space with ads, replacing all music at stores with nonstop ads, etc before people will start saying “hey, this is seriously too much” and then that may eventually lead to the public perception emerging that almost any advertising is too much.
I’d join. Ads do nothing but damage to society. How much? Well they manipulate people to make suboptimal choices and waste at least as much as the advertisers budget (on average), or they would stop doing it. So it’s at least 775 billion dollars per year. Rising annually. Enough to end world hunger and homelessness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outdoor_advertising#Regulations billboards are banned in several cities and, surprisingly, in four entire states of the US.
Here people regularly smash those stupid add posters everywhere or replace them with militant ones.
Ads are just the tools of propaganda turned inward for the benefit of the market, right? I think we’d need more consciousness on just how much propaganda there is, and how much of society / our world is shaped by it, before there’s a strong anti-ad backlash in general.
how would you spread the word about it
the browser thing is pretty organic, it’s another level to get people defacing billboards and shit. there’s a little bit of that, i think mostly at bus stops.
you’re better off doing something with local government to get stuff banned for spoiling the area’s natural beauty like some US states do on the claim that it’s better for tourism not to have ads everywhere.
Advertisements are a thing where you can turn them off and basically suffer none of the negative externalities (escaping the tracking is a LOT harder). There’s no real reason to form a movement over a basically solved issue.
Depends. Fediverse challenges advertisement. Adblockers challenge advertisement. People switching to piracy after amazon and netflix pushing for more adds challenges advertisements.
Is there a united movement? No. But that’s partly because those that do care have an adblocker and rarely see ads.
It depends what you mean by movement, and where you mean.
There are already some direct action movements on the ground, like Subvertisers International, Adbusters and historically B.U.G.A.U.P to name some famous Western ones.
I fail to see organized attempts to challenge advertisements.
I think lot of that is embedded in the privacy communities/movement, so it gets easily overlooked as a separate part, even though most of the time it actually is the cause of the disease. Many times it’s just easier to treat the symptoms (“just install adblocker, bro”) because the real cure is to topple the entire system and challenge our late stage capitalism. That tends to be a bit too much for a “normie” who doesn’t necessarily even see the constant flow of ads as a problem and even if they do, installing a browser plugin tends to be “lol, too much work”
