Advertising, Memes and Social Engineering

In the younger people of today, those with conditions one might derisively refer to as internet brain, one can observe a particular sense of humor. Articles like to pretend it's something unique to those generations that have grown up around computers, referring to it as zoomer humor, and while that's not technically correct, the influences of the internet compound these phenomena. Centrally, there is an idea of memetics, ideas that proliferate through iteration and abstraction. I, of course, didn't really grow up with memes, and I never really thought they were particularly funny - I suspect I would have had to actively engage with them to be more "in" on the joke. But I need an example, so I'm going to pick something old that's arguably dead.

In cases like these, I really wish I could have a page-turn. Of course people that know their memes (get it?) are very well familiar with this odd little assembly of lines. It's of course in reference to CAD's infamous Loss comic, in which the self-insert protagonist's girlfriend suffers a miscarriage, which I suppose is something people should discuss, but maybe a comedy gaming webcomic might not be the best place to do that (see somebody with a more interesting body of work than mine's take here). It got played for laughs, mainly because it had no business being part of the narrative that it appeared in. There's of course countless iterations of this, before it became this way. First, the comic itself had to be everywhere - possibly because of the discourse around it - then, the characters had to morph into blobs, then into colored sticks and other characters, and eventually everybody who was in the know, could recognize the panel layout by where the characters were indicated in the quadrants. I wasn't there, so the order might be wrong, but in essence those were the steps taken, and the details are beside the point anyway. In order to see a depiction of visceral loss in a setting where it arguably doesn't belong, depicted by somebody who probably shouldn't be talking about it in the extent that they're doing, in a couple of lines, somebody needs to have seen the source material and its derivatives countless times. Memes live off repetition and iteration. So do brands.

A Highly Abridged History of Ads

Convincing somebody to fork over their hard-earned money for something you don't want is an age-old art that grew at almost exactly the pace that methods of communications did. Somebody standing on a soap-box and shouting about the "best apples south of London" might already count as advertising. At the beginning it was about as simple as it could get. Seeing as the capacities for production wasn't poised for rampant over-production anyway, the most important step of advertising was to find the place, where the people interested in the product might gather naturally, and weigh it against the number of potential competitors there. Ads really only first got going with the advent of printing. It became possible to sneak a few cheeky ones in between the lines of newspapers, printing and distributing fliers, and even the design of posters. Something like a circus poster illustrate the function nicely.

The circus is not really a commodity that's always available, nor is it something strictly speaking necessary to survive. Advertising it then is an exercise of informing (or reminding, this one will be important) the public that the commodity is available, and trying to generate enough interest. Of course if coercing somebody into buying stuff was this simple, ads would look more or less identical to one another, and there wouldn't be ads for some products or services at all. The real crux showed up later, well into the times of radio and television ads.

Under capitalism, consumption of goods is deeply interconnected with identity. In both world wars, advertising partially took up the roles of propaganda, which is old news, I suppose. Where there is war, there is propaganda. However, the assumption here is also that the demographics that the ads were trying to sell to, identified themselves against the enemy, and with patriotic duties. This type of advertising can still be found in ads for military recruitment or some of the more hardline political advertising. The same went for the regular ads, but they had the tendency to market towards less tangible aspects of identity (or rather: more highly constructed ones). Gender politics, even before the times of women's suffrage were a favourite. Marketing towards pictures of ideal housewives or the business-savvy heads of a nuclear family were easy targets. These trends of course changed with the time, as what was en vogue did. Marketing struggled a little to adapt to the internet, when suddenly what was mainstream was a multitude that was difficult to market towards. It distilled marketing down to being inoffensive, but memorable. In a word: weird. Until brand twitter happened.

Ads on the internet have been dealt bad cards from the get-go. Part of it is the limited space on the screen means that having an ad appear is an active interruption in the internet-using-experience. It's made them a nuisance every way you slice it, and they've never really figured out how to not make it that. The closest they arguably managed to get was the brand twitter phenomenon, where the advertisement becomes part of the content. It doesn't get around the icky feeling that somebody is trying to sell something, but it's at least less of an interruption, and it's usually possible to filter out that kind of content. It got the ball rolling in using internet content itself as ads. This is not anything surprising or especially sinister, but it does raise the question of how one is supposed to interact with content on the internet, if all the avenues for interaction can be co-opted and instrumentalized to sell something.

Many Data, Much Wow

Things get recycled on the internet. That's just how things go, and as people who spend a lot of time there, that tendency begins bleeding over into the business circles that they move in. That includes advertising. Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency that lived rent-free on the doge-meme and not much else. As one of the cryptocurrencies with the longest staying power and the most notoriety, it's been carried far by the image. Many of its biggest adopters have been open about enjoying the meme having taken in influence in their backing, even if it was initially a comparatively small sum. This instance has luckily remained the general outlier when it came to memecoins, but what's striking is not that a cryptocurrency chose to sell itself on nostalgia, but how well memes are designed to bandwagon. Elon Musk has had his hands in almost every of the massive spikes that Dogecoin value has experienced in recent years, and it's been done using the language of memes.

I have little love for memes, as I've already mentioned. I gave it an honest shot a few years ago, but it just never felt like the humor that I like to interact with. Maybe that's because I like to see things that move at the moment to moment pace of internet humor (too fast to construct, too slow to punch back with a timing I like) as less of a toy to interact with, and more like a timeline, in retrospect. However, what I can't deny is that it brings people closer, just by the simple virtue of sharing knowledge of a joke and being able to appreciate it as a community. Leveraging this dynamic for sales (or general profit) might feel familiar to somebody who has read the likes of 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene). In a way, this has become a mask-off moment for marketing as an industry that can't afford to be cagey about what the core of their business is anymore. It's not selling a product on the merits of it, nor the values of the company and/or user community, it's social engineering.

Users leave a lot of tracks when they use the internet, whether they want to or not. To most users, the internet is the primary space to interact with people, and it's something that flashes information at them in short bursts of waiting time, often without leaving the space to properly filter what information is worth retaining. In that playing field, having what is effectively a tailored marketing campaign blasted at somebody can make ads or sponsored content take up free real-estate in a user's active habits. Especially on platforms where the users curate their own content by leaving likes and replying to comments, they effectively build a roadmap for advertisers. Targeted advertisement has become a hot-button issue on recently on many different accounts, as something that might be harmful to people without the money to spend on the products that they are being made to believe are essential for participation within their chosen niches, to the calculated use of misinformation. After all, they are effectively mitigating one of the central challenges in marketing: The stochastic element. If an ad is tailored, the chance that it's relevant to the target is much higher than if it were just tossed out into the world for anybody to stumble across. Similarly, the ad that is tailored is much more effective at getting the target to buy something, whether they actually have a a use for it or not. There are rules for ads that can somewhat mitigate some select cases of those bugs in the system, but in sponsored content, this problem gains a new dimension.

Freedom of Speech

I distinctly remember saying once that I disliked talking about freedom of speech. That is founded in the wildly differing interpretations on the praxis of freedom. I assume that most people can cite the liberal definition of freedom when it's about physical action. For speech, something much more natural and transient, consequences are often forgotten. Maybe this is because they're not immediately observable after the words have left ones mouth, at least not in polite society. In a way that makes me advocate for abolishing it on the debate stage and in parliament, so next time anybody says something fascist the opponent is free to throw hands. In more sensible considerations, we know that the consequences of speech on the individual does indeed have tangible effects. They might not be immediately observable, but they can have real adverse effects.

Hate-speech is, at least theoretically, banned for a reason. The term stochastic terrorism has been cropping up in places where state powers have failed to enforce this ban. Now, I'm very much in favour of using this term, while we have to acknowledge that it has its roots in a refusal of the western media sphere to admit they are in fact looking at propaganda. I'm in favour because of pragmatic reasons in this case, as stochastic terrorism tells people very directly what it does, while propaganda as a term has been muddled beyond recognition. It's still a useful term, but maybe it is better to keep it in academic circles from now on, seeing as public discourse tends to only bring it up, whenever the effects are allegedly very hazardous and as a catch-all argument to dismiss local voices.

I bring this up because propaganda and social engineering are not that different mechanically. The connotation in which they show up are usually quite different, but in essence it's a form of "self expression" that is designed to drive a particular action that the target might not otherwise have considered. In short: Both are a form of coercion, considered somewhat invasive. Of course one could argue that one is a form of indoctrination, which sticks around quite a while longer than that of a decision to spend money, although under capitalism, monetary transaction are never just that. After all, a myriad of factors can contribute to a decision to purchase one specific product or brand over the other available ones, and almost more importantly, there are a number of factors that keep customers returning. It might be about the moral virtues the company supposedly upholds, or the superiority of the product above its competitors, the trust in the make or design, or the sentimental attachment. A single person can't be made to avoid propaganda, nor can they be made to avoid advertising, however there then should be mechanisms in place to minimize the access that companies have to advertisements.

To Abolish or Not To Abolish

Ads are not fully protected under freedom of speech, and that is for a good reason. Keep in mind that until recently they enjoyed a much larger platform than regular speech. Only with the advent of social media have individual voices started to accumulate a similarly large audience as the TV and radio channels. Even as they did so, companies and their advertisements quickly pivoted to accommodate the change, piggy-backing off the content itself in the form of sponsorship deals, even sponsored content directly. As of time of writing, a bill has been in discussion recently, which would ban colourful ads for sugary products aimed at children, as they're considered very easy to influence. Regulation for sponsored content is difficult. In effect, only the payment of creators by brands can be controlled, and that will invariably eliminate the financial basis of many of these creators. Whether I like them personally or not, I still think it's a profession that we should at least respect that much. Besides, payment by industry has a long standing tradition in circles much more influential that the media sphere. Abolishing these modern forms of advertising (or advertising as a whole) will make lobbyists either special edge-cases with rights exclusively available to them again. An alternative worth considering might be what forms advertising might be allowed to take.

Under capitalism, new arrivals on the market especially are very dependent on their ability to advertise. A movie is considered as having broken even, when they have made twice their production cost back. That is because as a rule of thumb, the marketing will cost about as much as production. In that sense, no single portion of the film-making process is as expensive as advertising. To keep around capitalism is to accept having to live with advertising, or for the industry hierarchies to calcify so badly, that only market catastrophes will be able to shake them loose again. I, for one, would be totally receptive to kicking the industry to the curb, considering what it makes its money selling, and if capitalism has to be on the chopping block, then I will part with it "with very heavy heart". The function of advertising will however take a backseat, if the existence of - and need for - global hegemonic corporate structures has been overcome, so will the need for advertising as an industry. Then, advertising will finally return to what it originally started out as: a form of speech, interpersonal and not predatory in only the most obvious of ways.