&gt; not to mention that actual function of advertising in society.<p>Which is? Are you denying manipulation being an objective?<p>&gt; unless you&#x27;d like to dismantle all television networks, newspapers, magazines, Google, Facebook, and put a huge dent in the earnings of every company that gets a return on its advertising investment<p>I said &quot;advertisement in the way it&#x27;s employed most of the time&quot;. Admittedly this is vague, and I&#x27;ve have to think more about it to be precise, but I didn&#x27;t say &quot;advertisting, period&quot; on purpose, because I do acknowledge the general idea to get honest information out to potential customers. But let&#x27;s not use that as a fig leaf.<p>Television, newspapers and magazines get destroyed and become destructive anyway to the degree they are beholden to advertisers. It might reduce the variety of products peddling the same things worded slightly differently, but since there IS a demand for information and entertainment, the remaining ones providing value might be able to live from, you know, getting paid for the work they do by the people they do it for. Are you for example saying there have been no newspapers in the US before 1840? ( <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;library.duke.edu&#x2F;digitalcollections&#x2F;eaa&#x2F;timeline&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;library.duke.edu&#x2F;digitalcollections&#x2F;eaa&#x2F;timeline&#x2F;</a> )<p>And Google and Facebook are so new, my response is &quot;maybe, so what?&quot; You&#x27;re talking about a business model, not technology. Besides, I think the web really needs to ponder some form of micropayments or subscriptions again, either way. Advertisement allows the situation that there are readers for something, but no advertisers. So in a way it&#x27;s a middleman, that often enough is as manipulative as it can get away with. It&#x27;s not a sustainable situation IMHO.<p>&gt; put a huge dent in the earnings of every company that gets a return on its advertising investment<p>Again, so? If there is a &quot;huge dent&quot; across the board, it ends up as no dent at all. And maybe it wouldn&#x27;t be across the board, maybe it would be a huge dent for those who live on manipulation of emotions, people identifying with brands and so on, and a huge boon for those who make the better products...? Who knows?