Research

Quotes from this book:

I don't like this essay, and it feels as if it's very "progress is a linear progression." It isn't. Progress has cycles, and they overlap.

One might suggest an even darker possibility. A case could be made that even the shift into R&D on information technologies and medicine was not so much a reorientation towards market-driven consumer imperatives, but part of an all-out effort to follow the technological humbling of the Soviet Union with total victory in the global class war: not only the imposition of absolute U.S. military dominance overseas, but the utter rout of social movements back home. The technologies that emerged were in almost every case the kind that proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman or Guy Debord imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. Information technology has allowed a financialization of capital that has driven workers ever more desperately into debt, while, at the same time, allowed employers to create new “flexible” work regimes that have destroyed traditional job security and led to a massive increase in overall working hours for almost all segments of the population. Along with the export of traditional factory jobs, this has put the union movement to rout and thus destroyed any real possibility of effective working-class politics. Meanwhile, despite unprecedented investment in research on medicine and life sciences, we still await cures for cancer or even of the common cold; instead, the most dramatic medical breakthroughs we have seen have taken the form of drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, or Ritalin—tailor-made, one might say, to ensure that these new professional demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally, crazy.

As always, I'm not fond of people talking disparagingly with regards to medications that help with mental health issues and/or cognitive disabilities. While Ritalin certainly does not work for me, I also know that other ADHD medications still make it possible for me to do the things I want to do even when I don't have to actively be engaged in "the system."

I don't think most people understand what it's like to sit down and try to read books, any and all, and not even be able to focus on the words in front of your face because your brain simply won't let you with everything else happening around you (and not because you're thinking about other things, though that is a form of distraction most people can resonate with). I don't think most people understand what it is to have your whole life halted by pondering whether or not you should even be alive. We should be more careful about the narratives that we launder into left spaces, even if our so-called "greats" did it for us.

Are there discussions to have about how psychiatry is used and abused in order to punish people? Yes, but that argument rests within similar conversations to the medical system as a whole and the prison industrial complex. So that final line in this section really annoys me, especially coming from someone as lauded as Graeber has been.

ANYWAY, I think there is something to the bolded part. This part, which I do think has some merit, is also why I find the final line to be nonsensical and absurd. Are those things used to control? Certainly, they have been.

But he should've spent more time focusing on the things that he had already brought up, as he had a stronger point there. Almost everything that we've seen developed in many of our lifetimes has come to be part of a surveillance system.

Here, I think our collective fascination with the mythic origins of Silicon Valley and the Internet have blinded us to what’s really going on. It has allowed us imagine that research and development is now driven, primarily, by small teams of plucky entrepreneurs, or the sort of decentralized cooperation that creates open-source software. It isn’t. These are just the sort of research teams most likely to produce results. If anything, research has been moving in the opposite direction. It is still driven by giant, bureaucratic projects; what has changed is the bureaucratic culture. The increasing interpenetration of government, university, and private firms has led all parties to adopt language, sensibilities, and organizational forms that originated in the corporate world. While this might have helped somewhat in speeding up the creation of immediately marketable products—as this is what corporate bureaucracies are designed to do—in terms of fostering original research, the results have been catastrophic.

The laundering of corporate sensibilities is a topic that I wish he would've spent more time on here. He really could've written multiple essays. Perhaps others can take up that mantle because there are a dozen or so topics here that would've done better with depth.

However, there's also the connections to things like the philanthropic foundations that I would've liked to see covered here, too. Certainly these 'titans of industry' who set up nonprofits to launder their images (people who it's clear Gates got his inspiration from) had an impact on how those structures inserted themselves into places they certainly should never have been (particularly outside the United States).

Here I can speak from experience. My own knowledge comes largely from universities, both in the United States and the UK. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative paperwork, at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for instance, we have not only more administrative staff than faculty, but the faculty, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administrative responsibilities as on teaching and research combined. This is more or less par for the course for universities worldwide. The explosion of paperwork, in turn, is a direct result of the introduction of corporate management techniques, which are always justified as ways of increasing efficiency, by introducing competition at every level. What these management techniques invariably end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell each other things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of our students’ job and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors, institutes, conference workshops, and universities themselves, which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors. Marketing and PR thus come to engulf every aspect of university life.

It's also worth considering how this has funneled downward in the education industry, how it has become commonplace among K-12 teachers and has been introduced in numerous ways (purchasing corporate services, the development of charters and academies, hiring corporate outsiders, etc). PR and marketing are core to a lot of schools, including public ones.

The result is a sea of documents about the fostering of “imagination” and “creativity,” set in an environment that might as well have been designed to strangle any actual manifestations of imagination and creativity in the cradle. I am not a scientist. I work in social theory. But I have seen the results in my own field of endeavor. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. We have, instead, been largely reduced to the equivalent of Medieval scholastics, scribbling endless annotations on French theory from the 1970s, despite the guilty awareness that if contemporary incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or even Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the U.S. academy, they would be unlikely to even make it through grad school, and if they somehow did make it, they would almost certainly be denied tenure.

Why is it that everyone looks at these people as being so great when a lot of their work was definitely on the backs of people far more vulnerable than they ever would've been? And also for their relationships to harmful individuals (like pederasts)? It's perplexing.

Also perplexing is this idea of one person who will come up with these ideas in the way that Graeber talks about. Perhaps his time in academia got to him, but he often focuses in on one person when he should've been more aware of the collective endeavour.

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.

And who was allowed to be eccentric, brilliant, and impractical? Because it really feels, as always, your work aims to recognise your position within whiteness and patriarchy and suddenly drops those balls during analysis.

In the natural sciences, to the tyranny of managerialism we can also add the creeping privatization of research results. As the British economist David Harvie has recently reminded us, “open source” research is not new. Scholarly research has always been open-source in the sense that scholars share materials and results. There is competition, certainly, but it is, as he nicely puts it, “convivial”:

Convivial for whom? I feel like I might lose my mind asking this because we know that it wasn't "convivial" for people who were overtly harmed by academia and the competition of scientific discovery in the past. Was it "convivial" for Rosalind Franklin, whose work went largely unrecognised while the men who stole it from here was recognised? Was it "convivial" for the many Black women who were NASA computers and mathematicians when their work was obscured for all the white people (usually men)?

Who was this field convivial for? And how dare you even claim that. You should have known better by the time you published this piece.

Not only that, the person he quoted in this piece said this:

Convivial competition is where I (or my team) wish to be the first to prove a particular conjecture, to explain a particular phenomenon, to discover a particular species, star or particle, in the same way that if I race my bike against my friend I wish to win. But convivial competition does not exclude cooperation, in that rival researchers (or research teams) will share preliminary results, experience of techniques and so on … Of course, the shared knowledge, accessible through books, articles, computer software and directly, through dialogue with other scientists, forms an intellectual commons.

Did you ask your friend if they wanted to race you? Similarly, did you ask anyone if they wanted to compete with you in these "convivial competitions?" Or did you just do them? And for what purpose? It's absolute horse shit to ever talk like this, and it's even worse when the person doing so just outright uses this quote as if that's how everyone felt. Truly, it feels like only people who have structural power over everyone else feel this way.

It is worth discussing what "convivial competition" looks like, but it's also worth figuring out if it's consensual. If everyone has agreed to it (e.g., friendly ribbing between two people), fine. But often times, people (usually cis white men) perceive their "friendly" and "convivial" competition without considering the realities of the non-white people and non-cis men they're competing with. Many of us do not agree to those terms and have a different understanding of the world. It's necessary to consider that.

Quotes from this article:

Before I get started, here's a thing I don't like about Matt's work thus far: He conflates too much with everything else. He does not critique events, he derides them inherently; he does not recognise that most people do not follow the beliefs he claims and builds strawmen to knock down (or talks about the few examples that exist while ignoring the many who aren't examples of what he's discussing).

It must be nice to do that from one of the places with some of the less serious anarchists, with those who fail to even consider people outside of hegemonic power (in any capacity) until they need solidarity (and refuse to give it in return). For it's not their opinions that are ever addressed; they are seen as unworthy until they can be used as baton.

But if we are not struggling as an organised class at work, where should such affinity groups be engaged in struggle? Insurrectionists have typically advocated a politics of ‘constant attack’. They relish in the images of street fights with police, the lighting of fires, and looting of stores.

I'm sorry, what are you talking about? This is not how all insurrectionary anarchists even talk or think, nor is it constant the world over. And it's not that they relish in those images. I mean, you reference Alfredo Bonanno. He deliberates about whether it would've been better to shoot Montanelli in the face than the legs ("Why on earth did these dear children shoot Montanelli in the legs? Wouldn’t it have been better to have shot him in the mouth?" in Armed Joy).

He's not relishing in that image, he's discussing about which tactic was better, what happened subsequent to him being shot in the legs, what would've happened had they shot him in the head, and how heavy of a decision it would've been to do that. He then ends that part by saying: "Revolutionaries are pious folk. The revolution is not a pious event." I cannot see any form of relishing going on here, and it feels insulting to say that insurrectionary anarchists would think this way.

The people you're talking about? Are those who glorify violence as much as they do military action.

Even many anarcha-feminists, who often talk about the theory around Kill Your Local Rapist, do not want to hurt people. They think about the consequences of doing so, and that includes the consequences to themselves and their consciences.

It’s obviously a good thing to feed someone who is hungry and we have no objections to breaking the law, but this is a strange idea of freedom. It assumes the insurmountable permanence of a society based on the existence of bosses, governments, and commodities. It proposes that we act as if capital and the State can never really be overthrown through a concrete transformation of social relations in production. Things can’t be changed, they can only be subverted or defied.

No, it doesn't. The overwhelming majority of insurrectionists I have read or talked to have seen themselves as a line of defense, not the end-all-be-all of getting to an anarchistic world. This includes the very one you fucking cite and the very fucking passage you choose to cite him in: "We have seen that a specific minority must take charge of the initial attack, surprising power and determining a situation of confusion which could put the forces of repression into difficulty and make the exploited masses reflect upon whether to intervene or not."

Not everyone has to intervene in that manner. And he even defines what is meant by 'specific minority', which he says isn't all anarchists or the whole revolution. It's right there.

With the George Flloyd Rebellion the politics of insurrectionary anarchism was put to a serious test.

It really wasn't.

The insurrectionists were presented with a nation-wide uprising which broke from legality and the control of any organisation.

Let's go back to that "specific minority" of people Bonanno mentions. Does this sentence make sense with that part of insurrectionist theory? I don't think so. Because not everyone in the street wants to participate in insurrectionary actions.

The ‘CHAZ’ (which, in reality, was never able to develop beyond a cop-free block-party) quickly stagnated, with no clear aims other than maintaining the occupation. The affinity groups attempted to maintain the rage, but were unable to encourage the rebellion in a revolutionary direction.

He cites an article from CrimethInc that talks about this and still walks away with that basic ass understanding? How do you walk away with that limited critique after you read this part (and the bits after): "At the same time, when the police are still so powerful and the ruling class that they serve is scrambling to legitimize them in the public eye, establishing a cop-free zone involves challenges and risks."

CrimethInc even mentions how these tactics have been used against Exarchia in Greece (which, for the record, goes unmentioned). The same applies to anything else outside the United States.

And even if you read Black Rose's critique and discussion, they don't refer to anyone as insurrectionary anarchists. Because I don't think many, if any, of those people aligned themselves to that theory. They also highlight really big issues (e.g., "no decision making process" and "failure of white ally politics"). It's a brutal misreading and misunderstanding of a theory if you're basing it on one thing in the United States.

All manner of cranks and adventurists were attracted to the project.

That's because this wasn't insurrectionary anarchism in action. I do not know how hard this is to understand, but it feels willful at this point.

Ultimately, a few armed individuals (having appointed themselves as a ‘patrol’) fired on and killed a few black teenagers speeding by in their car. Amidst the fog of uncertainty, vague reports spread on social media, exciting those who equate the use of arms with militancy. The killings were initially lauded in some insurrectionist corners of the internet as a successful case of ‘revolutionary self-defence’ against ‘right-wing infiltrators’.

Is there a point where we actually discuss these things? Instead of tossing them around to play gotcha points and neglecting that, while these are examples of right-wing and/or white supremacy in action, it doesn't fit into what is actually described by insurrectionary anarchism? And again, still requires people to actually align themselves with it?

Along with addressing the points as stated? Because the CrimethInc article he links says that DeJuan Young described experiencing attacks from white supremacists and others who infiltrated (not discussed in this article). It also fails to engage with this element of the Black Rose article, reading: "One of the most disturbing and important lessons from the CHOP is the need to develop well-organized and effective collective self-defense. On the night of Juneteenth, there were literally thousands of people in the space, many of them tourists and party goers."

The same article continues, "The first shooting was not the result of vigilante anti-protest political violence but violence that sprang from sources internal to the CHOP zone. In the days that followed, several more shootings took place in and around the zone. Though the shooters and motives are largely still unknown, it appears likely that a majority of the shootings were the result of interpersonal violence and gang retaliation."

And if we look back to Bonanno, he states: "It is precisely the comrades that are available for action who make up the specific minority. They will be the ones to prepare and realize the insurrection in the ways and forms which the experience of the revolutionary struggle as a whole has transmitted to us, taking into consideration the recent modifications of the State and the bosses. The method cannot fail to take account of minimal organizational forms of the base which will have to solve the various problems that will arise during the insurrectional preparation. In these organizational forms the responsibility for the work to be done must obviously fall on the revolutionary anarchist comrades and cannot be left to goodwill or improvisation. At this stage the very rules of survival impose the indispensable conditions of security and caution. The urgency of action puts an end to pointless chatter."

I wonder why he might say this. Could there have been any historical context for the development of his thought? Maybe some overtly authoritarian organisations in the 70s who kept pushing the working class out? Or any kind of heavy military shit going on in the 80s? Context matters for what people say and think.

Gilet Jaunes (Yellow Vest) movement in France

Can someone tell me what the ideology of the Yellow Vests was? And what happened to them over time? Because it takes only a few minutes to find out that, while anti-government, they weren't inherently a movement of anarchists. Or insurrectionary anarchists, at that.

Oh, and bonus because this is hidden in a citation:

One can’t help but recall the uncritical enthusiasm demonstrated by many insurrectionary anarchists during the 2014 Euromaidan uprising in Ukraine. Not only was there little interest in the political character of the struggle, but even in the influential presence of far-right elements. People were in the streets, in violent conflict with the brutality of the State… Molotovs were being thrown! ‘What else is there to a revolution?’ This is how an ‘anarchist’ thinks when they are not concerned with class struggle and the need to transform the structures of production and distribution.

Which ones? Because guess what, that shit wasn't true for where I am. Most anarchists of all ilks in Eastern Europe knew better. So let's try again: Who are you criticising here? Because I'm noticing a theme, and it's often for English-speaking anarchists (and some Western ones) to grab hold of movements that they don't understand and to support them uncritically.

Wanna guess what? I can do that with the Anarchist Federation and their uncritical support of the Trucker Convoy in Canada (something suspiciously missing, which I suppose is perhaps because of how overtly right-wing that was and how nonsensical it was that someone in London thought it was at all a left-wing protest), but that doesn't mean it applies to all anarchists. Just like other left-wing groups have held onto the Dutch farmers or have decided to be anti-Ukraine. There are moments where, yes, we need to criticise people for grabbing onto any right-wing movement as if it's a fucking lifesaver (it isn't); it's also worth recognising who is actually involved.

Should I blanket all anarchists for uncritically supporting things we definitely shouldn't? Or should I make examples of the ones who do that, which proves the point that not all of us uncritically support shit? I think the latter proves more useful.

The pamphlet is notable, however, in that – when not simply reducing our class struggle politics to either a strawman of conservative syndicalism, or an opportunistic tailing of social movements – it concedes so much to the mass-anarchist analysis.

So do most insurrectionary anarchists, if you'd bother to spend any time talking to them at all.

... And I can't continue commenting because it turns into something devoid of context and substance, focusing on who Bonanno quotes and how right the author might be about the position he's taken.

Quotes from here:

Neo-anarchism is a modern conception of anarchism largely informed by the feminist and peace movements of the 70s, the environmental movement of the 80s, the alter-globalisation movement of the 90s, and the Argentinian uprising of 2001; which coined the term horizontalidad (‘horizontalism’) to describe the movement’s rejection of representative democracy, the use of general assemblies to coordinate activity, and converting abandoned or bankrupt factories into cooperative businesses.

Reading to the end of the article, I'm confused. Why is he singling out these specific movements when talking about 'neo-anarchism'? And why is 'neo-anarchism' the chosen term, rather than being something that actually would linguistically make sense (as in, something that has changed and is different from classical anarchism)? What is he meaning by this?

Because there are... multiple definitions that I've encountered for 'neo-anarchism', and I don't know which one he's trying to choose. (And all of them, I find deeply inadequate and unnecessarily confusing.) If you're detailing 'lifestyle anarchism', then say that; that's at least clear and unlikely to cause confusion.

But again, why these movements? By choosing to highlight these movements, you're showing quite a bit of your ass here: Classical anarchism rarely, if ever, engaged in feminism (whole hosts of anarchists thought women didn't belong anywhere in the movement; people quote James Guillaume as if he was so valuable to the movement, but he thought anyone feminine didn't belong). Classical anarchism barely touched on the environment and was responding largely to industrialisation, when it did talk about it, and it often neglected the impacts on a lot of people with regards to the other movements (or simply was out of date to deal with events happening in the 90s, 2000s, and so on).

I would also highlight that classical anarchism really struggled considering its lack of care and consideration for any of these concepts, particularly with regards to race (which was left out here, as race-focused Civil Rights Movements also informed modern anarchism). It's also worth pointing out that queer liberation was part of this, which was also tied into disability justice movements. Some people mentioned it, but there was a lot of eugenics in classical anarchism (which hit a lot of people in all three of these groups).

I know there's limited space to consider these things, but they are all really important to include in how modern anarchism is being developed as we go along. It's also worth recognising how often a lot of people get written out of anarchism for focus on certain topics, and this is no different.

And it's also important to not simply denigrate these movements when there are others that a lot of lifestylists tend to refer back to, like communes.

Anarchists have generally agreed that the appropriate form of decision making depends on the circumstances concerned, and frequently endorsed variations of majoritarian voting; particularly in mass organisations based on commonalities other than close-ideological affinity, such as unions. The focus for anarchists has generally not been the form of decision-making, but instead the principles of free association and solidarity. Furthermore, though anarchists have always stressed the right of the minority to be free of the majority’s coercion, it is even more important that the great majority be free of minoritarian rule or sabotage.

True, many of our ideas are based around how decisions are made and our relationships to those decisions (and what we can do in response to them).

The fundamental limitations of the ‘public occupation’ or ‘autonomous zone’ , and the defeats which have followed from these limitations, have led some former advocates of the strategy to make a notable transition from neo-anarchism to parliamentary politics. Though inexplicable to some outside observers, the change is easily understood when we consider neo-anarchism’s peculiar view of ‘direct democracy’, or ‘horizontally organised spaces’, as the defining characteristic of anarchism, and not a theory of libertarian revolution against the State and capital.

Where, though? And what kind of public occupations are you talking about?

The EZLN (who do not describe themselves as anarchists but are people who many anarchists look toward for inspiration) have been largely successful in configuring occupation of space, even though they may often have to protect themselves from the government and other outside forces. This is, often, one of the ideas that people have when they think about these spaces.

However, when we look at examples in the United States, there are... problems. And many of them stem from a failure of people to unlearn the toxicity that resides within their own skulls. These examples tend to end in a handful of ways: with the fatal deaths of people (often people of colour, particularly Black people) at the hands of people (frequently white men) "protecting" the community or with some form of legal recognition (e.g., legalised squats).

Legalising squats often happens in Europe, too. However, a more common tactic is that people here tend to lose their squat because the government finds a "legitimate" reason to bulldoze it (see: ROG in Ljubljana).

And here's some more fun pieces of information for you to add to this context: I saw no one outside of Eastern Europe even talk about Slovenia. No one. Internationalism doesn't happen with the US, with Canada, with Australia or New Zealand, or with Western Europe. So again, I have to ask: Where? Which ones? And why don't these occupations succeed?

And why is so much solidarity expected from people outside of those named locations, who ask for international solidarity and are met with silence or hostility? It's telling.

If we accept the idea of anarchism as proposed by the neo-anarchists, there is no fundamental contradiction between anarchism and involvement in parliamentary politics.

Oh, "neo-anarchists" are referring to those who go to more liberal directions of politicking. I don't agree with this at all and think that this is a useless conflation of terminology and tactics. It also feels strangely as if it's denigrating whole hosts of ideas that classical anarchism left out, that have been pushing their way into a largely patriarchal anarchism that has refused to see us, and now we're being denigrated by someone trying to play with words and conflate positions.

More recently we have witnessed the absurdity of a self-proclaimed ‘libertarian socialist’, Gabriel Boric (who touts his association with Chile’s radical student movement), ascending to the presidency in the aftermath of a militant popular uprising.

Instead of ceding or handing over ways of talking about things (or creating confusing and conflicting terminology), why not call these people for what they are? Liberals. They are not any form of anarchist, new or otherwise. They are people who drape themselves in radical movements (even if they were there) to gain access to the power they seek. They're grifters or co-opters.

They are not anarchists. We can denounce them without giving them a title that confuses people.

The reality is that there is no way to fully ‘prefigure’ anarchy and communism through ‘directly democratic’ spaces of ‘autonomy’. Anarchism requires a specific anarchist movement and anarchist practice. Though we must certainly organise ourselves from the bottom up, with a consistent federalist structure, we can not simply bring about our ideal by ‘living anarchisticly’ or relating to one another as ‘horizontally’ as possible. Similarly, the content of anarchism can not be limited to the structure of our movement – its content of revolutionary class struggle must be maintained.

I think there's a balance to be struck, and we need to strike it. Not that we need to concede to party politics, but we need to recognise that some people can only 'live anarchistically', and many of you aren't doing shit to make it easier for us to go beyond that.

I've said this before: As a migrant, I don't have the stability to do a lot of outward anarchist stuff because I can be deported or have my visa denied for my views. Tell me, what are my fellow anarchists doing to prevent that? And not just for me, but for others.

Once again, there are a lot of conflicting variables that a lot of Western anarchists refuse to engage with because honestly? Most of us never have to deal with them, so we do fucking nothing to actually make it possible for people beyond the simple actions of engaging with each other through horizontal methods or doing what little we can.

All quotes come from this report (archive):

The central argument of this report is that this changed advertising environment should not happen by stealth; instead it should be discussed in the open and ultimately be up to society to decide what is advertised, when, where and how.

I agree with this central argument (though I have a feeling I will not agree on strategy). Advertising should be something that we all have deep conversations about, especially considering the ways in which it shapes our radical movements and the ways that we claim we want to live. I think it's actually subverting our stated goals, especially when we rely upon that of the status quo.

Because of its powers of persuasion and influence, governments have long since determined that it is in the public interest to legislate to restrict and limit advertising. From the earliest standards on accuracy, to bans on most advertisements for tobacco and now alcohol, from lines drawn in the sand about the advertising of medicines and watersheds for children’s TV, governments have always had to intervene on behalf of society.

I see their point but disagree with the analysis. They did not have to "intervene on behalf of society." They intervened because they saw where the tipping point was and wanted to maintain control by giving in somewhat. It enabled them to pretend they cared and shared the values we had, and this is particularly true with regards to tobacco and alcohol.

At the time of writing, the people in question might not have known what companies like Philip Morris were up to with things like the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World.

• In a free society we should be able to decide when and where we are subjected to advertising. If we as individuals decide to read a magazine or watch a commercial TV channel then we are accepting the adverts that come with them.

I disagree and think there is much to learn about the differences between "tolerate the existence of" and "accept the existence of." I do not accept that there are commercials and advertisements anywhere; I merely tolerate it because I have little control.

So the report calls for a ban on all advertising in public spaces, a limit to be placed on shopfront marketing, a ban on buzz marketing (public viral marketing techniques that are contrived to look authentic) and continuing restrictions on product placement on television.

I think we all need to get better about recognising this, especially as it happens in the virality of social media.

• The advertising industry increasingly uses children’s vulnerability to its persuasive powers to unlock their parents’ purse strings. Studies show that children under 12 do not have the cognitive ability to know whether they are being sold to, let alone make decisions on what they like, or choose to ignore the marketing altogether. The government recently called for the provision of improved education for children to deal with the growth in adverts they face. But as this report shows, many of these adverts are aimed at securing an emotional rather a rational response and therefore cannot be filtered out through education alone.

"Does not have the cognitive ability" is very strong wording here that I do not approve of.

Whether children recognise things as advertisements should also be part of the lessons they learn from older people in their lives. Often, we can't recognise advertisements (see: Marvel movies, which are literally advertisements we pay to go watch that then promote the next movie in the pipeline). It's also why product placement works on us, too (e.g., KFC sponsors a program and everyone in it is eating KFC). It would benefit us all to learn the mechanics of these things and pay more active attention and try to decrease our passive reception of them.

Also "make decisions on what they like." This sounds like the same kind of research that says that children don't know who they are. It would behoof these people to find sources that actually engage with children and their perceptions of the world, rather than the adult-centric models we've been enmeshed in.

This is also why I wouldn't want a government-sponsored curriculum around advertising and its impacts. I would not trust them to do any of that, particularly because their goals are entwined with those of the advertisers.

So the report calls for a ban on all television advertising to children under the age of 12. It also calls for an open debate on a ban on all alcohol marketing, recognising that teenage alcoholism can have a damaging effect on young people’s health. Banning advertising of alcohol could help reduce this. The government should follow the example now set by Spain, which outlaws 'cult of the body' adverts before the watershed; these are linked to the rise in anorexia and bulimia in young people.

I'm curious to learn something about Spain's laws outlawing "cult of the body" advertisements. What even qualifies? And how does that look 12 years later? (There's also apparently this thing about toy manufacturers having a 'self-regulatory code' to not use gender stereotypes in their advertising, but I wonder how successful that will even be.)

It's also really odd that it's only children under 12 that would receive this? Why not everyone? This isn't about striking a balance; this is literally about outlining acceptable advertising and unacceptable advertising. Why is it okay to bombard me but not a child? (It's not okay to bombard anyone.)

• Third, the advertising industry is increasingly working online and capturing the Internet by surveying and storing every click of information we make. This information is then used to target adverts directly at us. The Internet should be a socially valued ‘common good’ and its commercialisation for private gain should be resisted. So the report calls for Ofcom to review introducing new regulations to limit the amount of information being gathered, stored and used without our expressed permission.

This is fun, considering the GDPR and all the nonsensical ways this is currently being handled.

• Excessive advertising turns a never ending series of new needs into new wants, and crowds out the space for other visions of the good society, where time and relationships matter more than what we buy. Advertising encourages us to run ever faster on the treadmill of modern consumer life; in so doing it contributes to growing consumer debt, a number of social problems which this report discusses, and to the very real prospect of climate change beyond our ability to manage. So the report calls for a tax on all advertising that encourages greater consumption to limit its scope and slow the pace of growth for the good of society and the future of the planet.

"A tax on all advertising that encourages greater consumption" would be... literally all advertising. That would've been fewer words, but ("left-leaning") liberals always try to pretend they're saying something else.

• In recognition of the enormous creative skills in the industry and the potential to use their powers of persuasion for good social and environmental causes, and not just profit, the report calls for a time and resources levy to be placed on the advertising companies themselves, so that a small percentage of their workers’ time is used for constructive social purposes – not always for commercial interests. People could then be better persuaded to recycle, donate or volunteer.

This is weird to me. They want to decrease commercial advertising (good) but then want to prompt people to work on campaigns without a critical eye to what those campaigns promote. Why not let the workers have... time to themselves to be creative? To work on things that would improve their own local communities, not just in creating NGO advertising? This is a weird balance.

Also, what if the "volunteering" they want to do an advertising campaign for is... for a transphobic group? Or eugenicists disguising themselves as people who help autistics folks? Did anyone stop to consider the potential for harm here? Probably not.

• This report argues that the industry should be held to account for the adverts it creates. Companies are responsible for the products they make and we believe that advertising should be no exception. So we are calling for regulations to stipulate that advertising agencies have their name or logo on all the adverts they are responsible for creating. Transparency is important; advertising agencies should be recognised for their contribution to good causes as well as held to account for any work deemed to be harmful.

I don't really disagree here with pushing agencies to put their name on their projects. I've always thought it strange that I can't track back most advertisements to an advertising agency; I can only link it to the company it's advertising. And that makes sense, since they okayed it. But why shouldn't we know who also helped develop it?

• The bulk of advertising is still ‘regulated’ voluntarily through the Advertising Standards Authority. Given the importance of the industry and its reach and impact on so much of our lives, this is no longer acceptable. This report calls for the Advertising Standards Authority to be put on a statutory basis, setting out criteria on what types of adverts are unacceptable. It should:
  
• strengthen local authorities’ powers to restrict outdoor advertising;
• introduce in some circumstances a right of reply by charities etc to claims made in TV advertising;
• ban advertising on mobile phones.

I think making a list of 'acceptable' advertisements is a problem and will lead to further issues, so I wouldn't support this. I also think local authorities receive too much power to decide what is allowed on 'their' streets, ignoring what residents want.

I think everyone has the right to reply to claims made in advertisement, so I don't know why it should be limited. But I'm fine with keeping people out of my goddamned phone.

We are still coming out of the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s; the advertising industry and the big corporations they serve want not just to get us back on the treadmill of consumption as soon as possible, but for us to buy more than ever, using new techniques, technology and science. This puts us at a turning point: we either go back to where we left off on the route to the world of consumption or we decide to live a better and more balanced life in which we take more collective and democratic control over the world and in particular the market, which should exist to serve our interests – rather than us serving those of the market. To do that we must address the advertising effect.

Almost wonder what these people would make of what would happen a mere seven years later, compounding an economic crisis that hadn't actually rebounded in any meaningful way.

Introduction: advertising and the good society

The goal of advertising then is not the creation of happiness and consumer fulfilment. Instead the purpose and consequence seems to be the creation of a mood of restless dissatisfaction with what we have got and who we are so that we go out and buy more. Advertising is no longer there to inform about the advantages of one product over a rival. Society, in an age of relative abundance, has long since gone past the point of rational decision making when it comes to purchasing. Everything is about emotion and in particular the ability to tap into our deepest needs and insecurities to get us to buy more. Today happiness can only be fleeting, and must last little longer than the time it takes to carry the latest purchase home; then the process of wanting more and needing more must be started again.

Was this ever the true goal of advertising? Look back at the history prior to Bernays. Con artists advertised nonsense all the time in the hopes of hooking buyers into their phony products or projects. Advertising has never really been about informing, unless you count "informing people about its existence." It has always hidden problematic elements, even in its oldest stages.

For now we should reflect on a world where everyone is on a consumer treadmill, spurred on in large part by the role of advertising in creating ever more new things to need. Others have it, so we want it. In this way advertising takes the form of a collective action problem. Driven on by the seductive images of success and aspiration we compete with each other for status, but simply make ourselves feel like failures as we out bid each other for the latest car, gadget or holiday. We cannot win this race because there is no finishing line as an endless stream of new things to desire are created and sold to us. In the crowd, if the person at the front stands on tip toes then we all have to; and everyone is worse off.

I have some questions: What is the impact of advertising on communities who actively discuss these things and actively discourage competition and material status? Because there are people within our own communities who don't engage in this nearly as much. How do they exist? And why don't we look at what they may do to help curb what these advertisements drive? I'm genuinely interested and feel like not enough is done to consider what our own actions do in combination with those of advertisers and large corporations or governments.

In suggesting this we are not saying that people should stop buying or advertisers should stop advertising altogether. Buying things is important to us as an expression of identity, sense of belonging and difference, but many of us buy too much.

Excuse me, what. Buying things is important to us as an expression of identity? How? Cultural creation and the development of items is one thing, but the act of buying them isn't an expression of identity. I could very easily have another brand of monitor, a different computer, and so on; my life wouldn't be different. Perhaps my choices lead me to choose the brands I do because the brands I choose accommodate the things I need.

I don't particularly care about Gigabyte as a company, but I like that their existence in certain areas where I live makes it easier to obtain a laptop with a keyboard layout that doesn't confuse me and force me to relearn what it looks like (when I need to look at it). It wouldn't matter to me if Dell, Lenovo, or Microsoft decided to start selling laptops with the keyboard layout I prefer; as long as I could find one, that's enough for me.

My choice is less on brand and more on what I need. Is that an expression of identity? Kind of. It at least highlights what language I use most often. But is it a necessary one? Not really. I could relearn keyboard layouts.

I also don't find the 'buying' of things to be related to my identity. I'm not the one making decisions about what is available, how, where, etc. When I buy clothes, perhaps they match some of my style preferences... but they are not perfect because that's the whole thing with fast fashion. When I make them, they are closer to perfect or more tolerable. When I have someone else make them for me, the same applies. (Except the latter is something I can't really afford.)

Money makes some things easier – it means you don’t have to worry about a big gas bill, or how to pay for the next school trip – but happiness is elusive and can’t be bought.

Mate, "happiness" is a shitty goal. Being happy, wanting to be happy... that's all fine. Making that your goal in life? Ridiculous. And not because this world is harsh or hard or difficult or whatever, but because our lives can't always be happy. We can't always be happy, and sometimes we need to not be happy. (Toxic positivity helps no one.)

That said, I hate this framing. In a capitalist society, everyone knows that having money makes it easier for people to be happy because they have less time worrying. So this framing is nonsense from the jump.

Advertising recognises this – which is why Nokia, the phone manufacturer, has the catch line ‘connecting people’, and there is a range of snacks called Friendchips. Volvo tells us that ‘Life is better if lived together’ and Orange that ‘Without others I am nothing’. Advertising tries to convince us that we need to purchase to experience fulfilling social relationships. But in attempting to purchase the relationships we need we degrade and damage them.

Have we considered that advertising is making use of alienation in society? Also, I wonder if this belief has changed in the past decade because it feels... so... out of date and out of touch. Or perhaps it just always did for me because it was never a thing I grew up hearing. Yes, the advertisements tried to sell us togetherness, but they... never met that. And the things that did are things that have almost ensured that people don't interact (e.g., video games).

Microsoft is currently spending millions trying to tell us that we invented Windows 7. If we think we built it then they think we will buy more of it.

Again, how effective is this campaign? Because we all knew in 2013, just as we do now, that there are effectively three operating systems with two being the major stakeholders: Windows and Mac (with Linux being behind those). We're all well aware that if we buy new computers, they are unlikely to come with anything else.

So what is the goal of such a campaign? Because, as an advertising one that plans to make us consume more, I can't imagine that it's really very effective. What is it doing to us? That should be what you're addressing in this report and any others in the future.

For a better society we need to get the balance right between decisions made as consumers and as citizens. Too much advertising that encourages too much consumerism undermines the chances of a good society and a good, well-balanced life.

I do not find this at all useful because we shouldn't be focusing on anything "as consumers." We should be focusing on the kind of world we want, full stop. Being a consumer should be part of that world, and we should be discussing the role of the consumer and what we want that role to mean.

Personally, I want to delete all elements of capitalist consumption.

Advertising can be an important part of the good society but it should be about providing information to us as consumers and citizens.

Please, tell me more about how advertising "can be an important part" or ever provided information. (The thing is that it hasn't. Ever. The goal is to obscure a lot of information in service if selling something, ergo you cannot have useful advertising.)

No one wants a world in which we don’t all share the enjoyment of funny adverts.

I would be very fine without "funny adverts" because we could start putting humour somewhere else.

And in times of crisis, like wars or natural disasters, public adverts can play a critical role in mobilising shared effort.

And spreading propaganda for people involved in those spaces to make them seem more friendly than they really are. For example, it's not surprising that during LGBTQ+ Pride there is an uptick in companies trying to rainbow wash themselves to "support" us. It's particularly fun when Raytheon does it, trying to make themselves look fantastic and wonderful! Same goes for the literal CIA. Both of these institutions participate in war crimes, but they're made to look nicer during that time because they're being supportive. They do not care that they are also responsible for murdering queer people outside of the United States and Western Europe.

Public adverts can easily be replaced with anything else. We do not need them. Sloganeering has done us very little good.

The first is the issue of choice and place. People should have the freedom to choose when they are exposed to advertising: when to look at product information and when not to. If we decide to buy a newspaper or magazine, or to subscribe to a television channel, then we are making the choice to look at the adverts that come with it.

No, we are not. I do not subscribe to cable television anywhere and opt-in to the advertisements; the advertisements come as part of the package, and I don't get a choice on what they are for. I also do not get a choice about which shows they choose to advertise on, so companies are able to buy slots to support shows that I find incredibly insidious.

I do not get to choose who buys ad space in newspapers or in magazines. I do not get to choose anything other than my own subscriptions, which does not influence the advertisements at all.

Here we should be free from private and commercial interest, and billboards and shop signs should not be allowed to disfigure our towns and roadsides.

Here's where I have mixed feelings. I absolutely think that advertising? Needs to stop. But there have been so many interesting signs that were artfully done as part of shops, which people in places like Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and North America absolutely do not get to see. There were nail salons with amazing shop signs that were just so interesting to me when I lived in Taiwan; there were shop signs that were actually really funny. There were cute ones in China.

Perhaps it's also the fact that we don't look at our shop spaces as places for art and showing people what we do in an artistic manner. This isn't to glorify China and Taiwan (they have so much light pollution that, if you're photosensitive, it can quite literally make you sick), but it is to say that there's a bizarre refusal to recognise what makes one interesting and the other obnoxious.

Which is funny for a "middle of the road, let's find some balance" kind of report.

Second, our civil liberties demand that the Internet should be a site for common good and not commercial practice without our permission. What we look at and search for should not be recorded without our expressed permission so that it can be used to compile data to sell us more.

I think if you actually mixed with people who focused more on what happens with our data, beyond advertising, you'd have a better argument. I don't disagree with this; I find it intrusive for services to sell me IVF because of my age and (wrongly) perceived gender, along with an (incorrect) assumption that all people owning uteruses want to give birth. I find the sales practices of raising prices based on how many times I've looked at something obscene.

But I really think this argument would be so much better if paired with what data tracking actually does beyond the realm of advertisement.

Third, children should be better protected. Children cannot deal with the increasing blitz of advertising they are exposed to; they do not understand its purpose and are at risk of exploitation. Armies of psychologists and child developments experts are recruited to work out how to sell more to children at an age when they don’t even understand the concept of being sold to. They need our protection.

This rhetoric is harmful. We need to work with children to both help them navigate something that is, unfortunately, not going to stop any time soon and to help them decrease their interaction with it. However, this "increasing blitz of advertising" doesn't only impact kids. Why focus on children when it impacts all of us?

And again, the protection thing rings hollow. What children need is for adults to stop inserting ourselves into their lives; they need those "armies of psychologists and child development experts" to quit, pure and simple. We need to give them an incentive to quit, to stop their harmful behaviours.

A study by the Children’s Society found that hyper consumption is causing a range of problems for children, including high family break-up, teenage unkindness and pressures towards premature sexualisation.

This feels like a really shoddy description of whatever that study found, particularly because it makes it sound like children are responsible for their families breaking up due to their own hyper-consumption. It's also not even referenced in the notes for this report beyond this, which is very strange.

I believe the reference is to a 2008 study (news article), which I could only find on the Internet Archive because the page no longer exists.

Fun to note some of the things in that report that should've been excluded, such as use of obesity as a metric (obesity does not measure health). It also politely demonises mothers who leave fathers, and the people writing the Compass report keep attributing that to financial stability as a result of advertisements. The study they use does not state that and doesn't even make that assumption. (It doesn't discuss how women having more financial independence lets them leave abusive husbands, so... Whoops.)

Anyway, there's a weird belief written throughout this paper that middle-aged people are better at reading advertisements, and I feel like that's just bias because most of these reports are written by people who are neither children nor the elderly. (And honestly, so many of us have bought into shit like "hustle culture" and capitalist programming. So how are we less susceptible?)

Fourth, society as a whole, working through government, should decide what constitutes the good society and what role advertising should play in it.

If our current governments refuse to participate in creating 'good' societies, why should we bother doing anything through them and not through more local measures? Genuine question, especially considering I have the current knowledge of how we're ignoring pandemics and fatal illnesses for the sake of economy.

Fifth, the advertising industry, because of the leading role it plays in the creation of a consumer society, has a responsibility to provide at least some help for ‘good causes’ free of charge and should be praised for the good campaigns it runs and held to account for those that are socially or environmentally damaging.

What qualifies as a "good cause?" Should we support the major organisations because they're well-known, even though they often engage in harmful rhetoric? And also have more funds than smaller ones? What if an organisation is part of a fascist pipeline but has rhetoric that average people buy into? Because... this sounds damaging, too.

The problems caused by the advertising effect

It is impossible to prove a causal link with the growth in advertising but in his book Affluenza, Oliver James describes this new consumerism as a form of selfish capitalism, intimately intertwined with cyclical consumerism: the more anxious and depressed we are, the more we must consume, the more we consume, the more anxious and depressed we become – unable to break the cycle this will only get worse.

If it's impossible to prove a causal link, perhaps don't try to pretend that there is one everywhere else? Also, is it just me or does everyone who mentions Affluenza have a severe problem around ableism and ageism? Because we're hitting close to the "acceptable" ableism of being shit towards neurodivergent people (who simultaneously are being ignored and manipulated by these reports).

Indeed David Cameron recently spoke out against the ‘harmful and creepy’ sexualisation of children, blaming irresponsible business for its aggressive approach: ‘The marketing and advertising agencies even have a term for it: KGOY “Kids Growing Older Younger”… It may be good for business, but it’s not good for families and it’s not good for society, and we should say so.’

How? I mean, this is something that is true (and can be seen in the ways in which child stars and teenage celebrities are treated), but this is more than just advertising. Also, the creepiest institutions are ones that are enabled by "good causes."

Like the Church.

Also, pretty sure David Cameron is harmful for society... as he has shown even during a global pandemic in the Greensill scandal. And in 2013, he decided to be a dick about immigration... like a lot of Europeans, which negatively impacts children a lot. So I don't know that I'd trust him on doing something to "protect kids."

Advertising is the business of creating discontent and unhappiness, and it is working.

False. Advertising can create discontent and unhappiness, but our whole lives do that, too. Advertising is trying to sell us shit through any means necessary. That also includes things like toxic positivity.

Most people probably won’t get into debt to buy a Jaguar – often it is purchases of more trivial things like clothes and shoes that lead people gradually to creep into greater debt and sometimes it is the basics like rent and food that drive people to borrow more.

Here are a few hints that are unrelated to your report and thus not things you give a shit about:

• Give people free housing.
• Give people free food.
• If we're required to wear clothes and shoes (which we are, especially in winter), make them free, too.

Perhaps your issues lie more with the economic system at hand and less the advertisements.

In the UK as individuals we now owe a collective £1.3 trillion on credit cards, store cards, mortgages and loans. This figure is around 140 per cent of household income and has increased dramatically over the last decade; it stood at 105 per cent just ten years ago.

Do people have mortgages because of advertisements? Or is there another reason? Did students take out student loans because of advertisements? Or is there another reason? Do people buy food and clothes on credit because of advertisements? Or is there another reason?

This is all correlative to the stated goal of this report.

Low income households with debt have the highest level of debt in relation to their income, meaning that their financial insecurity is much greater than those even slightly up the ladder, and this has got worse over the last decade.

Do people have debt because of advertisements?

This level of debt is bad not just for individuals but for economic stability, as the root of the current financial crisis has been traced to the collapse of the sub-prime market and easy credit.

Which can be traced to... greed? Perhaps. The debt conversation feels like an obscured way to say you want to blame individuals.

We are also working harder and longer in order to stay on the treadmill, to make the money necessary to conform to the model of human life that is advertised. This means that we are increasingly time poor.

So, let's also consider the fact that: More work doesn't mean more money. A lot of people work overtime (see: teachers) and not get paid for it. At all. This work-life balance has been in play for... decades. People have been taught that doing this means their performance reviews get better! But they don't. Companies don't care and exploit people who overwork.

So, now let's think about this: How does this relate to advertising?

It largely doesn't. Our lives on the "work-to-spend treadmill" are more out of necessity than desire for stuff. You already acknowledged that we spend more money on necessities that we require to live, which are not things that are generally advertised for. (Lidl may have advertisements, but it often can be the only grocer in the area or have low competition. And if Lidl is all I've got, its advertisements only tell me when its prices increase or when they have sales.)

We need time to be parents, friends, neighbours, volunteers and citizens. But we are constantly rushed and harried, in a long hours, high-spending culture. Working and spending is now prioritised over other social activities, particularly care. There is a finite amount of time and we all have a finite amount of money – if we choose to spend our time and money consuming we lose out on the other things. Advertising contributes to this loss of balance through the pressure it places on us to consume.

How? Genuinely, how? There are elements of it, but you are not talking about it at all. You made some really base criticisms without actually addressing any of the issues.

Also why is work prioritised? Is it because worker protections are bullshit everywhere? Oh. Maybe. Is that the fault of advertising? Not inherently, but there are advertising companies working on propaganda (otherwise known as public relations) to decrease worker protections! But you didn't mention that, did you? Oops.

Almost half of the clothes in British wardrobes go unworn – this is around 2.4 billion items.

Question: How much of this is due to bad fit, online shopping, poor return policies that harm consumers, and poor quality of materials? I don't want this information without the context, and I can say as a fat person that a lot of the clothes I own go unworn for all of these reasons.

900 million items of clothing are sent to landfill each year

Whoever wrote this should've collaborated with someone discussing fast fashion (Ghana, Haiti and Bangladesh, etc). There have been a lot of times they could've addressed this, even in 2013.

We waste 500,000 tons of food per year; it is worth £400 million and disposal costs another £50 million – only a fraction is handed to charitable organisations that could use it.

Are there regulations related to how food waste can be used? Because a lot of places prohibit giving away food waste to homeless people and shelters. Perhaps that might be something to look into beyond advertising.

There are other waste facts listed, and I feel like they need to link up with others to really figure out some of the problems beyond advertising. There are too many interconnected things that they ignore.

Advertising, a profession that should be helping us, is acting to hinder us.

It was never meant to help us, what the whole entire fuck is your deal.

How can we counter the advertising effect?

Ban advertising in public spaces

And leave this decision to whom? Examples listed include the Clean City Law in Sao Paulo, which saw some initial positive impacts. However, it feels like it is encouraging advertisers to simultaneously buy space and co-opt art for their own benefits. They also started reintroducing advertisements in a more controlled manner, so... it's not really ad-free these days, either.

Which goes back to: Who gets to decide how to use that space? Because the State, in the form of small local governments, does not seem to be ideal and often seems to run counter to the needs of the people in that city. Where do the fines go if people break that law? What are they used for? Like. Lots of questions here about how things function, especially if someone is going to say that we should be modeled off of these systems.

Of course the advertising industry and its lobbyists will say that people should have the ‘freedom’ to experience such adverts and that they can choose to ignore them.

I find it ironic this report is going to fight this idea, since they also decided that we "consent" to advertisements by buying magazines or subscribing to services. Which... still isn't how it works.

We should choose as individuals what we want to consume and not have the decision made for us, without our consent.

I agree with this, but it's still funny considering they literally said we accept the advertisements for services we buy when that isn't true.

Control advertising on the Internet

I agree with this to an extent, but they also miss something that really should be discussed with the "unauthorised data collection." The problem is that it is, technically, authorised by our consenting to be on the service; no one reads those terms of services, which we probably should. We don't because they're so excruciatingly long and full of legalese, and most of us don't have the necessary background to really make use of that information.

And even if we did, there are loopholes. And even without loopholes, we've consented to changing rules. And we consent by remaining on those services.

It's a vicious cycle that really should be focused on more than what these superficial arguments do. And it's also worth recognising that they are doing research on us, which actually is unethical and is the direction we should be taking in order to start breaking this shit down. None of us consented to be experimented on, yet these companies have been doing so almost from day one. Why not discuss that?

End the commercialisation of childhood

Children, whose minds aren’t yet ready to know they are being sold something, should be protected from adverts and commercial messages.

I really hate this phrasing. If we, as adults, worked with children to help them learn and also learn from them, we could actually be doing something of value and use. If you, as an adult, sit with a child and discuss advertisements with them and talk through with them about why they want something? Maybe you might also instill some values that would help break this shit down. It's like talking about children as things to be acted upon and for doesn't help anyone at all.

It does, however, make you feel smarter and better about yourselves.

Anyway, I also know a lot of adults who are the same age as me who cannot tell the difference between an advertisement and entertainment. I know a lot of people who are easily scammed. I know a lot of people who think certain behaviours are real and not trolling or viral marketing campaigns. Adults also don't have the capacity you're claiming of children, especially if they aren't reading things critically or trained to ask questions about what they're reading.

Most children under the age of 12 cannot tell when they are being solicited; advertising encourages dissatisfaction, and encourages children to pester the life out of their parents every time they go to the shops. The purpose of advertising aimed at young children is to use them to influence how a proportion of parents’ income is spent. Although the government promises action nothing has yet been done, and it is time to end to the commercialisation of children.

If it is "designed to get kids to pester their parents," perhaps their parents should also be more willing to explain why they cannot or will not buy something. Maybe we should start looking at ways to help adults have more time to work with children, maybe we should stop segregating kids into kids-only spaces where they can only learn from each other (and a handful of adults who are busy with all of them at once).

It's like society's structures are designed to ensure this continues. Perhaps that's our issue, too. And this is addressing a symptom.

In the USA it is currently being argued by a team at the National Bureau of Economic Research that banning fast-food advertising on television in the USA could reduce the number of overweight children by as much as 18 per cent.

Fatness is not an indicator of health. How does this decrease help? Why will it happen? What does being "overweight" (a designation with frequently shifting and unclear boundaries) have to do with any of this? Other than as a scare tactic because people are fatphobic.

The young are awash with messages about drinking alcohol and about the increase in binge drinking and anti-social behaviour brought on by alcohol.

And rather than build a society around clear discussion and explanation of what things can do to people, how they can impact us, and so on? We continually push the regulation into silencing conversations. If children are "awash" in messaging about drinking, perhaps we need to consider broader social structures and how to work with those in order to provide them a healthier environment. Legislating it into a taboo does not do anything. (Also, who the hell is advertising alcohol during children's TV?)

Tax advertising

The polluter should pay – in this case the advertising industry is helping to pollute the planet through the unnecessary creation of wasteful consumer desires.

Questions: How would the money from such taxes be used? Where? For whom? Would companies be able to 'offset' this the way they do for carbon emissions? Where one company buys credits for an 'advertisement' cap from another company? What kind of external markets could this create and would those exacerbate the issue?

The same applies to fines. In some places, that would go to policing. I don't think that's very helpful.

Introduce a time and resources levy

The most persuasive minds in the land should be used occasionally for constructive social and public purposes, not just for commercial interests.

Who gets to define what any of this means? I find that highly suspect, especially considering...

We suggest that 5 per cent of advertising industries’ staff time should be deployed to encourage us to do the right thing rather than just buy the next thing. There would be no need to prescribe what good causes the agencies would work on, the staff and companies could pick for themselves. Then it would be easy to regulate and engender greater commitment for the work carried out. But the list of good causes the company worked for would be published and publicised each year and we are sure their clients would not pick advertising agencies that had not worked for the right people.

So here's a great scenario: An ad agency decides that working on a transphobic campaign is actually a very good thing (the "right thing," you might say) because that's the world they want to create. They want to legislate trans people back into the closet. So you tell them they have to advertise something about volunteering, donation, whatever... and they get to say "We're doing our part in the social landscape," and they're creating a more hostile environment. Using your rules against you.

Also... Out of 100% of a person's time, you want 5% on "doing good." So 95% of their time (very balanced) goes to normal ads as is. Cool.

Put the agencies’ mark on their work

I actually find this to be something that agencies should've been doing for ages. The fact they haven't should indicate their true purpose (which is not, as these people seem to think, informing us).

Introduce statutory regulation of the advertising industry

Who gets to make these choices? Because once again, this is not democratic in nature if it is the decisions of a hierarchical structure that are imposed upon a community. (Voting for representatives does not inherently make their decisions democratic because they do not inherently represent anyone beyond themselves, including the constituents who voted for them.)

All quotes come from this article:

Because forests play a significant role in the Earth’s carbon balance, governments are willing to employ policies that affect forest carbon fluxes as a strategy to combat climate change. This was the case for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). To prevent the costs of compliance from rising inexorably, countries opted for a variety of instruments they could use to meet their self-imposed targets, including forestry activities. With this in mind, this review’s focus is on forest economics and policy as they relate to the role of the forest sector in mitigating climate change.

Feel like there should be a huge red flag on "prevent costs of compliance from rising inexorably," seeing as they only wanted to deal with financial costs and leave the rest of the costs for everyone else (including financial).

Emissions trading occurs when there is an official cap on GHG emissions, and emitters that exceed their individual targets can purchase emission reduction permits in the compliance (mandatory) market from those who are below their emissions target. A carbon offset then refers to an emission reduction or equivalent removal of CO2 from the atmosphere that is realized outside of the compliance market but can be used to counterbalance GHG emissions from the capped entity.

This bit here should highlight the futility of "carbon offsets." Companies can continue emitting at higher rates, as long as someone else sells them their reduction permits so that they can be "on target." The language used here to kind of obscure that there is nothing 'external' to the compliance system is a bit ludicrous. It's technically external, but they are actions that are done in order to mitigate the emissions being done.

There's also the fact that most people and companies are going to look toward the cheapest projects in order to be "carbon neutral." They aren't doing much to cut their emissions or take responsibility for their harmful practices, but they will provide money to people planting trees in order to "offset" their emissions. This is functionally meaningless.

It's also a bit farcical, because due to relationships between governments and NGOs, they can also certify other offset measures and credits. These measures can then be purchased by the very people and companies who are over-emitting. I suspect this is what the feel-good companies and NGOs help with in order to stay open. Carbon offsets still profit on environmental destruction, even if they provide resources for "prevention" and "development."