this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

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Everything that makes advertisers happy is to the detriment of humanity as a whole. Everything that makes advertisers' jobs easier also makes it easier for authoritarian governments. "Innovation" is no longer about creating new things, it's about taking what already works, breaking it, shoving ads on it and charging a ransom in the form of a premium subscription.

On the other hand, there are endless ad-skipping tools, pages and sites where the main attraction is the lack of ads without a subscription. More and more people are talking about how intrusive and annoying ads are, even those who make their living from them. As the efforts of big tech to please advertisers grow, so do the efforts of ordinary people to screw them.

Very Cyberpunk.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago

There's a French film called "BigBug" that makes an interesting parody about this.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

Started with 8Chan, where the same radicalised incels who support the rise of fascism worked in unison to move the Overton window. Allowing big Tech and Rupert Murdoch to constantly run propaganda against immigrants, whilst sustaining high levels of legal immigration to afford cheap labour and push the working class against eachother. All while Google, Meta, Microsoft and all of those clowns sell our active location Data collected from our phnes to Saudis, Russia and other extremely wealthy families so they could see businesses with less footfall during COVID, allowing them to bankrupt the global economy by shorting those companies through options. Netting them billions in profit and bankrupting businesses causing further economic downturn, in conjunction with the hostile takeover of the taxi cab and food delivery businesses. Further damaging restaurants and creating more unemployment, leading to fewer entry level jobs, normalising isolation and creating an atmosphere of distrust between people. Allowing for the further radicalisation of now unemployed young men by circulating millions of misleading, and sometimes, totally fake stories about immigrants. People that they brought here in the first place. All in order to push the world into a global conflict, buy up Earth and install themselves as the rulers of the ashes at the cost of billions of peoples lives.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago

Datavampires.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 days ago

Advertisers waste our time which is the only measurable currency we are all spending at the same rate

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 days ago (2 children)

You could generalize that to "exploiters vs. humanity", ads are just a part of that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Or, Capitalism

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

we have ads because services paid for with attention are more accessible and get more traffic than services paid for with a monthly subscription ... we could probably subsidize a lot of websites or make them community efforts (like Wikipedia), but because there is a desire to profit from websites, we have this aggressive push for ads and monetization in every corner of the web.

Commercialization, though, is the problem more than advertising itself is. Monetization through "native ads" or affiliate link marketing is just as insidious and toxic, and pervasive. Just like people hate loot boxes and games that have mechanics where skill is less important than paying cash for in-game content to gain an advantage, the root problem is commercialization.

This is just capitalism, and cyberpunk as a genre is meant to be critical of capitalism and its rotten fruits.

I think it misses the mark to interpret the war as a war between humanity and advertisers when it's a war between the powerful and wealthy and the 99%.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 days ago

Modern marketing, post WW2 was the privatization of propaganda.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

Calvin and Hobbes warned us

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Is this a self affirmation or are there other people in your shower?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

.ml many loofahs

[–] OminousOrange 4 points 2 days ago

There could be thousands of people in that shower if they were pondering in the rain!

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago

Advertisers are basically just arms manufacturers, supplying the wealthy with the tools needed to manipulate and use the population. Cut the head of the dragon

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago

Ads literally make me disabled. There presence challenges my freedom to interact both online and the real world.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

More and more people are talking about how intrusive and annoying ads are, even those who make their living from them.

And majority of them won't do shit about it and keep complaining.

I know, there are user-friendly tools to deal with it, but the problem is that those people are lazy enough to not even bother spending few minutes looking for and implementing them.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago

Chris Hayes spends a good deal of time on this subject in his book The Siren's Call which I can't recommend enough.

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