Advertising is natural. Most plants and animals advertise either positively or negatively. Plants create colors and smells and electrostatic fields to attract pollinators. Male animals use color and smell and sound to attract females and scare off competitors. Some are false advertisers, disguising themselves as poisonous or attractive or big.
Basing a business on advertising instead of customers is NOT natural. We’ve come to treat it as normal, ONLY in the realm of media, because newspapers have been doing it for hundreds of years. Radio and TV and web media carried on the practice.
Advertising breaks up the natural feedback loop between customers and employees. This happens even in media. Newspapers and websites that solely serve advertisers AUTOMATICALLY treat their customers with contempt, and AUTOMATICALLY distort the function of their employees. A real reporter wants to report honestly and fairly. It’s a natural talent. Real reporters don’t last long in an advertising-based business where every article must be shaped to please the billionaire monsters who don’t actually need or want the product.
And here we get into verb vs noun again. Monsters don’t read facts, they write commands. Normal people want to hear what’s happening in areas they consider important. They need to know the weather, the crime situation, and the current mood of the monsters, so they can equip and armor themselves accordingly.
Ad-driven media no longer reports any of those facts accurately. Weather is distorted by GLOBAL WARMING panic because the billionaires need GLOBAL WARMING to cheapen farms and beaches. Crime is distorted by DIVERSITY panic because the billionaires need DIVERSITY to create riots, destroy small competitors, and cheapen downtown real estate. And of course we can’t know what the billionaires are doing, because we might be able to protect our jobs and bodies from their destruction.
This absurd way of doing business seemed to succeed when there were no competitors using the correct and normal pay-for-value structure. A few hobby magazines and “insider” newsletters have always skipped advertising, but the normal model was rare until a few years ago.
Polistra's Mill 