Episode Details

In 2020 I wrote a list of flavors of badness generally represented by advertising. The one I thought about most later on was probably #4:

Cultural poison: Culture and the common consciousness are an organic dance of the multitude of voices and experiences in society. In the name of advertising, huge amounts of effort and money flow into amplifying fake voices, designed to warp perceptions–and therefore the shared world–to ready them for exploitation. Advertising can be a large fraction of the voices a person hears. It can draw social creatures into its thin world. And in this way, it goes beyond manipulating the minds of those who listen to it. Through those minds it can warp the whole shared world, even for those who don’t listen firsthand. Advertising shifts your conception of what you can do, and what other people are doing, and what you should pay attention to. It presents role models, designed entirely for someone else's profit. It saturates the central gathering places with inanity, as long as that might sell something.

This is a somewhat poetic account, but I think my central thesis was that we are social creatures who live in communities with systems of [...]

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First published:
September 1st, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/74cFxpLjqgpjC3TsX/fake-voices-warping-the-social-world

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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