I’ve been thinking about propaganda under capitalism and how much I hate it. I like the content in the attached article but also felt like it was missing something. I’d appreciate any feedback or further reading as well.
When it comes to cultural norms, I see two ways to establish it. Either it’s invented organically within a group and propagated, or it’s delivered to us through others/media. Advertising achieves an efficient vector to distribute cultural norms to targeted groups, as well as to achieve broad syndication via advertising events such as the super bowl, cable news, or search results.
I found everything mentioned in the article accurate but the conclusion seems to gloss over a dire conclusion. At least in America, isolation and alienation continue unabated so our source of culture is coming from a smaller and smaller pool of individuals. That leaves the majority of our sources coming from work or the media/ads we consume.
The ads we consume are produced by marketers and generally comes down from the executive suite itself. Meaning ivory tower marketers cultivate our exposures to small pieces of the capitalists “ideal” consumer experience. Take any ad and you see actors role playing an experience loaded with predefined cultural baggage. The product itself is almost meaningless - these are instructions for how we should live our lives with whatever money we are able to exchange for our labor. These instructions are exclusively delivered to us by moneyed interests / capitalists.
We will not see a paid advertisement that suggests we not spend money - this is obvious but maybe the result is less apparent. There are no youtube ads to read books written centuries ago, or to have meaningful conversations with other, or that tell us to post on a message board. These actions are not in the periphery of most people, and to suggest someone do those actions could potentially be utterly novel to them. We will not be encouraged or enticed to do any independent research/activities that doesn’t serve capitalism’s interests - we are in fact rewarded for following the narrative. Post any pro US/NATO news on reddit and watch the upvotes flow in from unwitting followers (or possibly bots).
All the media content that any American has consumed has most likely originated from a capitalist, or been sieved through a marketing departments capitalists incentives, or been analyzed by a corporation sponsoring a youtuber. There is no vast conspiracy required, either - there is simply no profit in encouraging profitless behavior, and much less profit in allowing a suggestion of an alternative system altogether.
So not only are we told how to live by out of touch elites who outsource the minor details to worthless marketers, but we are increasingly encouraged to bifurcate and alienate one another so our sources of behaviors and cultural norms are further restricted to whatever content the capitalist machine desires to churn out for us.
The last thing I’ll say before slapping the post button is that it seems, from the advertisers perspective, that it is crucial that we are persistently exposed to this messaging. Ads have become near parodies by how hard they try to assault us, with shit like this, chrome ad tracking, and youtube ads. It is important to the capitalists that their messages remain a part of the conversation, almost to the point that maybe the actual message (buy X brand) is less important than just looming over us like a threat to readjust our behavior. I have no evidence to support this besides a feeling.
Maybe that’s all pretty obvious in retrospect, but it felt nice to write some of it out. I also want to clarify that I am not advocating anti-materialism or anything - I just don’t like being told what to do, think, and feel by 
I’ve been learning Spanish lately so I’ve been listening to the Mexican radio station a lot in my Midwest city. Other than a few car dealerships and a few immigration lawyers, the only ads are for things that don’t cost money, usually paid for as public service announcements. Go to a park, go to the free salsa night in the city center, get vaccinated (still), etc. All of them end with a disclaimer “paid for by X public service fund.”
It’s something I hadn’t really noticed until I read that line in your post. I wonder what the main reasons are? Do the advertisers just ignore that population because it doesn’t fit into their market? Do the capitalists know they can’t push these cultural norms to that population? Does the minority population just get forgotten about? Are the public service groups recording funding specifically for outreach to this population and so they buy up all the ad space?
I think there’s a few possibilities. There are people that have money and do want to do good and cultivate community outreach, and that ad space is probably affordable considering it’s radio and the demographics may not have enough of a market to be worth advertising to.
The other, more doomer possibility, is X public service fund is trying to do more subtle influencing. The advertising for parks sounds genuinely good to me, but vaccinations are win-win in that people are helped and pharma gets paid. Free salsa night at City center may also be a great way to build community, but every public cultural event I’ve been to has food for sale, shops, and if it’s big enough, someone singing the star spangled banner
. I think that could warrant it’s own discussion because there is definitely effort put in to convert people from other countries to embrace American “culture”Obviously could be anywhere in between, too. I also wouldn’t discount rent seeking by the public service fund. They have people working there with funds set aside for a stated goal, so maybe do some investigating to find out their purpose. I don’t always want to assume the worst but I’d rather be pleasantly surprised.
