There's a line from The Simpsons Movie that has stuck with me for a long time. Springfield has become critically polluted, and the US government is going to erase it from the map. To sell this idea to the masses, they enlist Tom Hanks to produce an advertisement. The line goes, "Hello, I'm Tom Hanks. The US Government has lost its credibility, so it's borrowing some of mine."

I see this as the fundamental problem. Advertising is, at its core, a transaction in which people with people with credibility and influence are paid to lie. It is a pollution of public discourse and intellect, and what we're seeing right now is the analog of runaway global warming.

People blame ads all the time, but the blame is surface level: they dislike ads because they are unpleasant. But this is blaming a symptom of the real problem.

The real problem is tough to solve.

Ads themselves, intrinsically, are not bad. Ever tried to launch a better product? It turns out people rarely flock to it. Information about products seeps slowly through a population who would benefit from it. So, at its core, marketing helps increase the rate of information propagation.

But that's not all that marketing does, of course. Marketing has value as a signal, also: if a company is spending a lot of money on marketing, economists say it is 'posting a bond', meaning they put a lot of money into some asset (the brand) that will lose value if their product fails to deliver on its promises. That's not always true, of course, but brands with big budgets more often than not tend to more consistently deliver than those with no budget, so there's some signal there.

But still, humans are imperfect, so a portion of marketing is spent convincing people of things that aren't true, and it works some portion of the time, so it continues. And that's where marketing walks across the line separating its value as economic utility to its recipients into psychological manipulation.

Why do people put up with manipulation? Some say it's forced on them, that they have no choice.

But they do, broadly, have a choice. And their choice is, in aggregate, to be cheap. People are not willing to pay enough for content to allow that content to be delivered without the sort of marketing that goes beyond informational and bond-making and into intrusive and obtrusive.

So then content makers have a choice: do we not make content (or social platforms, or search engines, etc) at all, or do we make content and post ads?

That's not really a choice. The only option is to sell ads. And it is because consumers consistently choose to spend less money, and pay for their consumption not in immediate dollars but by offering up their attention to those who wish to change consumers' spending allocations. We can blame advertisers for this, but until consumers become willing to pony up - and they almost certainly will not - we will continue getting ads all the time, and continue blaming ads for a crappy web experience.

None of these points seem correct to me. For instance, the "launch a better product" argument. Most of the time, the thing preventing a better product from entering is that they have to overcome their competition's advertising budget. If no one was allowed to advertise, evaluations of products would necessarily be more honest, and I expect that products would be better, not worse, for it.

As a value signal to investors, I don't know how you could possibly disentangle the benefits from the economies of scale from either of the effects that you're talking about, both the attraction of investors in the first place, or the relative bloat of their advertising budgets. Seems like a non-argument to me, but maybe "some economists" are right.

If you are convincing people of things that are true, it's done through a combination of science and democracy. If you perform a (preregistered) study and then accept the results, that's not lying, and if people review your products autonously, you haven't paid them at all.

And as far as internet content creators are concerned, Building up a following expressly so that you can cash out on your credibility with them is a huge manifestation of the problem. If anything, the ability to do this has almost completely depleted the internet of new good content. Basically what you've described is a pay to play model, where the only way that people can make content is if they can get paid to make it. Which means that the only content that exists is content that an advertiser wants to see. These are just independent contractor advertisers. Content is completely incidental to the model.

You've clearly put a lot of thought into why you should not have to admit that advertising is bad, but you haven't gone so far as to actually deny the statement that advertising is lying for money, or that a society built on lying for money is bad.

I agree, I think ads are a scourge on society and the source of a great number of problems we have today. The problem is that the incentives are very strong for selling ads, but I think it can be corrected through regulation or taxation. If you decrease the profit margins, the amount of effort being expelled to manipulating people's attention will decrease drastically and big tech might go back to creating new technology instead of manipulating people.