1. experience in tech has mostly been that everyone is insanely focused on actually selling stuff, probably because we see direct results from online channels
i guess i havent done much "brand" advertising work (vs conversion ad analysis) tho
you earn a living and you give people stories about the stuff their buying that makes them not only get the stuff, but feel better as a person for having bought it
this is huge value add
people are way too down on capitalism
often the best thing you can do for someone is to show them how to tell a better story about themselves
but what am i saying. look at this soulless capitalist. ha ha
@ryanpbradymedia practically every communication is in a sense manipulation. this is not _necessarily_ malign.
if i tell you that a hostile army is on the way, and my hope is to cause you to flee that army: ive manipulated you, but for a good and honest purpose
@ryanpbradymedia if i pay you a compliment, i am trying to change the way you view yourself for the better; this is usually a kind act, although of course it might be wicked if i am lying or if my objective is to do you harm for my own benefit
@ryanpbradymedia advertising is dicey because it's communication done explicitly for ones own financial benefit.
this demands a high level of integrity but if you can convince someone to buy something that they'd benefit from, and cause them to /feel good/ about doing so, it seems win-win to me
@ryanpbradymedia related :)
anyway, i hope ive . . . sold you on the upside of marketing. and if i havent, some consolation: i did not study ads, and what i did in my early "meaningful" work was unbelievably heinous. so you couldve done much worse.
i have no opinion about the object level discussion except that the company in question used marketing to make its customers feel BAD, and i expect probably made no one else feel good
as I've written before--I can't find the thread--pseudonymy is easily defended. it has had a substantial tradition in american discourse since the founding
and there are very good reasons for maintaining it, even--*especially*--in a political context
the thought foremost in my mind is, education is going to become much more important for our children. not as a means of earning a living but as a means of becoming realized and independent humans in a dehumanizing age
the notion of education in the latter 20th century being wholly a matter of practical knowledge rather than of personal development has always been exaggerated
but set aside practicality; imagine a world where bodily survival and provision are not dependent on such learned skill
there is still a purpose to education in conveying to children the ways of living, thinking and acting and speaking, that we have found worthy
that is, the point of such education is guiding a child to becoming the kind of person who it is worth being for a lifetime
i was curious if or how they might justify any such moves
explicitly calling it "compelled speech" in a public statement is much more assertive than I'd expected
i wonder where this new respect for speech freedom is coming from ha ha
but fr i hadn't expected this and it feels like a big deal
it's the first meaningful rollback of Awokening policy, and MIT doing it in these terms gives significant elite cover to other schools that might _want_ do it
this isnt just netflix or doritos this is every product
the main reason it tends to be more pronounced in tech products is that tech products have vastly better and cheaper telemetry than legacy industries and it's easy to run sufficiently-powered A/B tests on consumers
facebook in particular was when i was there incredibly well-developed in this kind of measurement; their internal tooling and organizational practices in product analytics were afaik the best in the world
it was an exquisite organizational and technical accomplishment
i won't get into details although I don't think it's much of an industrial secret
but basically, the impact of every feature change and every product team could be rigorously measured and tracked and usually were
there was a ton of upside to this but perhaps one major downside