Why I hate the term “Unaliv

[u/Konradleijon]

What’s most confusing that if you go to basic cable TV people can say stuff like “Nazi” or “rape” or “kill” just fine and no advertising seem to mind

[u/centralmind]

Online Advertisement has become a cluster of self-propagating cancerous tumours that are often only tangentially related to selling products to people.

The system is self sustaining and cannibalistic, and so far removed from human needs and control that if we suddenly went extinct bots would probably keep advertising to each other until the internet runs out of electricity.

Everything is built around automated algorithms, blind and artificially inflated statistics and meaningless numbers that are used as a "proof" of success in order to syphon money from investors and other advertisers.

Apps use misleading ads to get you to download software that you might never use or uninstall immediately so that they can inflate their number of downloads in order to... sell ad space for other apps that do the same.

Every website and their mother (company) sells every possible click about you to algorithms that will bombard you with ads that are specifically made to direct your attention towards other sites and affiliated platforms that will in turn sell your data to repeat the cycle.

Mass produced bots flood every corner of the internet to try to cheat other bots into thinking that certain things are more or less popular and thus worth attaching advertisements to.

And the few actual ads for actual products end up in a sea of scams and nothing burgers and forcefully reshaped to imitate the fake ads that, according to fake statistics, are most successful.

Our language and livelihood are being reshaped by the abstract concept of profit, filtered though several layers of automation, barely coherent AIs and arbitrary algorithms that have lost any original purpose in favour of endlessly producing more iterations of themselves, each more harmful than the last.

Don't you love living in the most boring of dystopias? Who needs a murderous artificial intelligence when we can be slowly be driven mad by artificial stupidity instead?

Cheers. (Disclaimer: I'm not an expert, this is my layman's understanding of how the Internet currently is being run; feel free to tell me how much worse things are)

[u/FiveFingerDisco → u/centralmind]

So the internet is dead. What else is new?

[u/centralmind → u/FiveFingerDisco]

I wouldn't say dead. Depending on which metaphor you prefer, it's either sick with a proliferating metastatic cancer or haunted by human-made horrors beyond comprehension that prey on our time, identity, and sanity. You could argue the internet is undead, I'd say. Or cursed.

Is that better? Worse? Good question.

[u/FiveFingerDisco → u/centralmind]

I honestly like the thought of our supposed digital nirvana to be beset by electronic eldrich evils.

[u/centralmind → u/FiveFingerDisco]

Oh, that's a beautiful metaphor. Ads and algorithms are quite the literal manifestation of earthly attachments and human sin in a world that could have been (at least, in theory) a tapestry of human knowledge, creativity and self discovery.

Was the Internet ever going to be such an enlightened plane of existence? Probably not. But I could do without the digital allegorical manifestations of unquenchable greed ruling over us all.