I’m sitting in Panera in Yullee, Florida on Sep 2, 2018, 1:32 PM and I’m just listening. I’m listening to the noises. I’m listening to the voices. I can’t hear any individual conversation very clearly, perhaps with the exception of the kind older women sitting next to me. They are passionately discussing religious topics. I would assume that they are just coming from church, as it is Sunday in the south.
There is too much disagreement today. There is not enough understanding. We can disagree, and we should, about many things. However, we’ve lost the pursuit of mutual understanding in lieu of attempting to prove that our viewpoints are correct. We hesitate to let anyone prove to us their levels of correctness. I believe this is directly related to a mechanism we are developing to prevent ourselves from being manipulated. You know that saying, “Money is at the root of all evil?” Our technology strengthens the ability for that maxim to affect us through advertising and through the media we consume on a daily basis.
To summarize that opinion without extra explanation, I’ll put it this way: We know advertising subconsciously manipulates us. Whenever we see an advertisement to get us to purchase something, we know the advertiser is trying to short circuit market based mechanisms that we’ve developed for finding the best products. We also know that we don’t need what’s being advertised to us, and so therefore, it is a necessary condition that advertising is increasing the vanity pursued by society.
The pursuit of vanity, due to the human condition of never being satisfied by acquiring more physical goods, is a never ending game of cat and mouse, where we as humans are the cat and the mouse keeps getting more and more expensive each time we catch it. This effect is exacerbated by the rat race which our culture makes us (and many don’t have enough time as a result to consider the absurdity of the thing) believe is normal and ‘real’.
Advertising serves as a fire under the mouses ass. It keeps it running away from us. Every time we upgrade our social status, we see advertisements for vane goods that are slightly above the reachability of our current class. As a thought experiment, do you think they are showing Lexus commercials in the neighborhoods of Silicon Valley billionaires? No, most certainly not. They are advertising (I imagine — I’m certainly not a multibillionaire living in California) private islands and private jets and things of this sort. Are these ever NEEDS by any individual? NO. Resoundingly, there is no evidence that can be presented to the fact that anyone NEEDS a private island.
People NEED food and water at a minimum and then it can be argued that they NEED to climb Maslow’s hierarchy. Lower classes get frustrated at this fact and say we should redistribute the wealth of the wealthy, but ironically do so through means created by these wealthy in a lot of cases.
Texting a dissenting message on your iPhone? That was made with essentially slave labor at some point. Your computer? Same deal. TV? Buzzer? Pager? Google Home? Electric car battery? Just because the slave process is separated from you by a few orders of magnitude does not mean that it isn’t happening.
Those that want to redistribute the wealth of the rich are both not creative enough to come up with efficient means to solve these issues nor do they possess a large enough scope of understanding of the problem. They are also hypocritical unless they are doing their dissent work in raggedy clothing by writing letters to each other over candlelight. Most of technology is developed unethically, and that should change, but we need to get a LOT more creative to discuss solutions to these problems. It isn’t as simple as saying, “Jeff Bezos has enough money, why can’t we just steal it from him (forced tax) and give it to the people who NEED the money.
The solution actually lies in Blockchain technology. How about we use Capitalism but we strap on some requirements such as the following:
- Ethical and philanthropic pursuits are added to market guidelines
- Nash Equilibriums are reached through run off voting to determine a more complete market analysis of what people consider to be pursuits that will benefit humanity.
- A combining of ethical, humanitarian, religious (not the dogmatic) and economic values.
There is much more to discuss on this topic, but I actually have to get to work. I have tons of more ideas like this that I’m constantly covering in good faith and with lots of explanation on my YouTube channel. My last video was four hours long. (
I’m writing a book about all these ideas and insodoing, am also creating an economic incentive for people to help me consolidate, edit, and perform various algorithmically and transparently verifiable tasks.Here are some of channels you can follow me on. Please feel free to present your best argument as to why my ideas are incorrect and let’s engage in a good faith debate in order to increase our mutual understanding of each other.
It’s time that we begin to right the ship as a collective humanity.
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PS: This started as a first entry in a series called “Ear on the Public” but obviously turned into a tirade on the immorality of advertising and solutions to that problem. That’s how my writing turns out a lot of the time, but I feel it most transparent, honest, and least able to become corrupted to leave it as such in its original form. In the future, I hope to be able to become financially well enough to go back and organize all of my writing in various different forms. For now, it is not worth my time as I have no one reading my content. That’s all my fault, but now I’m just going to begin releasing everything and seeing what sticks.