Apr 21 JDN 2460423

Advertising is as old as money—perhaps even older. Scams have likewise been a part of human society since time immemorial.

But I think it’s fair to say that recently, since the dawn of the Internet at least, both advertising and scams have been proliferating, far beyond what they used to be.

We live in an ad-supported world.

News sites are full of ads. Search engines are full of ads. Even shopping sites are full of ads now; we literally came here planning to buy something, but that wasn’t good enough for you; you want us to also buy something else. Most of the ads are for legitimate products; but some are for scams. (And then there’s multi-level marketing, which is somewhere in between: technically not a scam.)

We’re so accustomed to getting spam emails, phone calls, and texts full of ads and scams that we just accept it as a part of our lives. But these are not something people had to live with even 50 years ago. This is a new, fresh Hell we have wrought for ourselves as a civilization.

AI promises to make this problem even worse. AI still isn’t very good at doing anything particularly useful; you can’t actually trust it to drive a truck or diagnose an X-ray. (There are people working on this sort of thing, but they haven’t yet succeeded.) But it’s already pretty good at making spam texts and phone calls. It’s already pretty good at catfishing people. AI isn’t smart enough to really help us, but it is smart enough to hurt us, especially those of us who are most vulnerable.

I think that this causes a great deal more damage to our society than is commonly understood.

It’s not just that ads are annoying (though they are), or that they undermine our attention span (though they do), or that they exploit the vulnerable (though they do).

I believe that an ad-supported world is a world where trust goes to die.

When the vast majority of your interactions with other people involve those people trying to get your money, some of them by outright fraud—but none of them really honestly—you have no choice but to ratchet down your sense of trust. It begins to feel as this financial transactions are the only form of interaction there is in the world.

But in fact most people can be trusted, and should be trusted—you are missing out on a great deal of what makes life worth living if you do not know how to trust.

The question is whom you trust. You should trust people you know, people you interact with personally and directly. Even strangers are more trustworthy than any corporation will ever be. And never are corporations more dishonest than when they are sending out ads.

The more the world fills with ads, the less room it has for trust.

Is there any way to stem this tide? Or are we simply doomed to live in the cyberpunk dystopia our forebears warned about, where everything is for sale and all available real estate is used for advertising?

Ads and scams only exist because they are profitable; so our goal should be to make them no longer profitable.

Here is one very simple piece of financial advice that will help protect you. Indeed, I believe it can protect so well, that if everyone followed it consistently, we would stem the tide.

Only give money to people you have sought out yourself.

Only buy things you already knew you wanted.

Yes, of course you must buy things. We live in a capitalist society. You can’t survive without buying things. But this is how buying things should work:

You check your fridge and see you are out of milk. So you put “milk” on your grocery list, you go to the grocery store, you find some milk that looks good, and you buy it.

Or, your car is getting old and expensive to maintain, and you decide you need a new one. You run the numbers on your income and expenses, and come up with a budget for a new car. You go to the dealership, they help you pick out a car that fits your needs and your budget, and you buy it.

Your tennis shoes are getting frayed, and it’s time to replace them. You go online and search for “tennis shoes”, looking up sizes and styles until you find a pair that suits you. You order that pair.

You should be the one to decide that you need a thing, and then you should go out looking for it.

It’s okay to get help searching, or even listen to some sales pitches, as long as the whole thing was your idea from the start.

But if someone calls you, texts you, or emails you, asking for your money for something?

Don’t give them a cent.

Just don’t. Don’t do it. Even if it sounds like a good product. Even if it is a good product. If the product they are selling sounds so great that you decide you actually want to buy it, go look for it on your own. Shop around. If you can, go out of your way to buy it from a competing company.

Your attention is valuable. Don’t reward them for stealing it.

This applies to donations, too. Donation asks aren’t as awful as ads, let alone scams, but they are pretty obnoxious, and they only send those things out because people respond to them. If we all stopped responding, they’d stop sending.

Yes, you absolutely should give money to charity. But you should seek out the charities to donate to. You should use trusted sources (like GiveWell and Charity Navigator) to vet them for their reliability, transparency, and cost-effectiveness.

If you just receive junk mail asking you for donations, feel free to take out any little gifts they gave you (it’s often return address labels, for some reason), and then recycle the rest.

Don’t give to the ones who ask for it. Give to the ones who will use it the best.

Reward the charities that do good, not the charities that advertise well.

This is the rule to follow:

If someone contacts you—if they initiate the contact—refuse to give them any money. Ever.

Does this rule seem too strict? It is quite strict, in fact. It requires you to pass up many seemingly-appealing opportunities, and the more ads there are, the more opportunities you’ll need to pass up.

There may even be a few exceptions; no great harm befalls us if we buy Girl Scout cookies or donate to the ASPCA because the former knocked on our doors and the latter showed us TV ads. (Then again, you could just donate to feminist and animal rights charities without any ads or sales pitches.)

But in general, we live in a society that is absolutely inundated with people accosting us and trying to take our money, and they’re only ever going to stop trying to get our money if we stop giving it to them. They will not stop it out of the goodness of their hearts—no, not even the charities, who at least do have some goodness in their hearts. (And certainly not the scammers, who have none.)

They will only stop if it stops working.

So we need to make it stop working. We need to draw this line.

Trust the people around you, who have earned it. Do not trust anyone who seeks you out asking for money.

Telemarketing calls? Hang up. Spam emails? Delete. Junk mail? Recycle. TV ads? Mute and ignore.

And then, perhaps, future generations won’t have to live in an ad-supported world.