The Science fiction horror story that came true and we’re living in now. – Daily Kos

We're familiar with a lot of science fiction horror stories about the future, with A.I. Uprsings, alien invasions, economical collapse, cyperpunk worlds ran by corporate oligarchs, post nuclear war, meteor hits earth, etc.

But there is another, subtler, kind of science fiction horror story that goes back to the 50's which has already come to pass and we're all living in today. It's a genre involving advertising basically destroying the world and making people's lives a living hell.

An early entry into the genre was Captive audience in 1953, a world where it was illegal to block or interfere with advertising, even if it was to make yourself unable to hear it by wearing earplugs.

It's freely available online here:

https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v005n02_1953-08/page/n53/mode/2up?q=%22Captive+Audience%22+Ann+Warren+Griffith&view=theater

Now does this story seem impossible today? Can you imagine today's SCOTUS ruling against a major advertiser in a right to advertise case?

Another early entry I read as a kid was 'the room, from 1961 and it's amazing how prophetic it was with saturation advertising constantly battering at people's minds.

http://www.lfvhenglish.weebly.com/uploads/8/2/5/6/8256468/the_room_text.pdf

The only thing missing today is the advertising being pushed into people's dreams, but you know someones' working on it, don't you?

There is a novel called 'merchants war about advertising reaching levels that can cause instant addiction to products like MOKIE COKE! that destroy lives in short order and how a war between planets is fought via weaponized advertising that uses various neurological means to produce instant addiction.

This genre of SF apocalypse and horror doesn't get much press, probably because we're living in it and the advertisers don't want us to know about these stories. But it's the SF horror future that came true first. (Others are pending.)

We know that big business doesn't see human beings as people, it sees them as human resources to exploit for maximum profit. Now we're also seen as simply Advertising target units to be targeted with more and more ads that are carefully crafted with more and more knowledge of psychology, neurology and the science of memetics to have more and more influence over people while being so prevalent in all areas of life as to be inescapable.

The advertisers know we're tired of ads, they don't care. Put an adbocker on your net device, get greeted at most sites with WE HAVE DETECTED YOU ARE USING AN ADBLOCKER! PLEASE DISABLE TO CONTINUE! (I simply leave the site at that point.)

Maybe it's time for more mass public action against advertising. Has anyone considered charging internet advertisers with theft? Seriously, if you own and pay for an internet account, and advertisers use it to send you garbage (Which is what advertising most is. Annoying, irritating, useless, worthless garbage.) then they are essentially taking the access you're paying for, they're basically stealing your data flow. How is putting ads on a screen I own or into an email account I own different from them coming to my home and putting ads up on the walls, bedroom ceiling, etc? It's my property, and they're pouring ads into it and on it. Maybe advertisers should have to pay me for the bandwidth they take up that i'm paying for.

TV is of course as bad, with more ads than ever on tv you're paying for. I remember watching a dr. who christmas special (Yes, I said christmas, not holiday. I'm unwoke!) that was supposed to be two hours.

Out of 120 minutes 50 were ads.

Imagine paying for a 12 ounce steak, and when it arrives there's 7 ounces of steak and 5 ounces of garbage on your plate, because people paid to take 5 ounces of steak away and replace it with 5 ounces of garbage. That's what its like to pay for a 120 minute show and get 70 minutes of show, 50 minutes of ads.

If we pay for a show, then at least 3/4 of it should be show, not ads. We're not paying for ads.

The stories I linked to above may have seemed impossible when they were written, but they're largely come to pass today in some ways. I'm afraid if the public doesn't demand and maybe even fight for laws controlling advertising, advertisers will pay for and get laws controlling us as in the captive audience story above.

Maybe it's time for people to file class action suits against advertisers for theft of service, as in they're stealing out internet connections to force ads on us. Or 'theft of time as we're forced to lose time dealing with the ads, deleting them, clicking them down or suffering thru them if they are unskippable.

Of course this depends on the American public getting off its asses and doing something. Better buy up earmuffs while they're still legal...

The rest is here:

The Science fiction horror story that came true and we're living in now. - Daily Kos