There are lots of cultural opposition movements online, like against work exploitation, consummerism, car culture, surveillance, intellectual property, etc. I can find communities on lemmy for all those topics. But regarding a more general opposition to advertisements and marketing, other than the occasional person telling others to use adblockers online (what about ads in every day life?), I fail to see organized attempts to challenge advertisements. There is a lot that can be scrutinized. Ethical concerns such as manipulation, lack of consent and just the simple fact your attention is for sale. The effects range from damage to environment, to our mental health, to harming industries and lowering product quality.

I’d join. Ads do nothing but damage to society. How much? Well they manipulate people to make suboptimal choices and waste at least as much as the advertisers budget (on average), or they would stop doing it. Do it’s at least 775 billion dollars per year. Rising annually. Enough to end world hunger and homelessness.

My eyes opened when a videogame in a company I worked for (I worked on another title) was made under hard conditions, polished, pushed under almost burnout conditions to be finished “in time”, and the budget for commercials was 4x the dev budget…

Im here to remind you that someone is wasting untold millions marketing GTA6. Rockstar could literally say nothing, preview nothing, zero demos, zero screenshots and drop GTA6 randomly one weekend and make a billion dollars. Yet the money is wasted.