There are lots of cultural opposition movements online, like against work exploitation, consumerism, car culture, surveillance, intellectual property, etc. I can find communities on lemmy for all those topics. But regarding a more general opposition to advertisements and marketing, other than the occasional person telling others to use adblockers online (what about ads in every day life?), I fail to see organized attempts to challenge advertisements. There is a lot that can be scrutinized. Ethical concerns such as manipulation, lack of consent and just the simple fact your attention is for sale. The effects range from damage to environment, to our mental health, to harming industries themselves, lowering product quality and maintaining monopolies.


My eyes opened when a videogame in a company I worked for (I worked on another title) was made under hard conditions, polished, pushed under almost burnout conditions to be finished “in time”, and the budget for commercials was 4x the dev budget…
You know, if I gained that knowledge as an employee I would go apeshit and probably quit. Now I’m going to find out how much my employer uses on advertising and find a way to throw it in their face…
Im here to remind you that someone is wasting untold millions marketing GTA6.
Rockstar could literally say nothing, preview nothing, zero demos, zero screenshots and drop GTA6 randomly one weekend and make a billion dollars.
Yet the money is wasted.
Just make a new 2D isometric Iceland Dale and it will sustain a small dev team no problemo IMO. Then don’t push the tech but write new stories and expand the world. But no, it doesn’t have microtransactions and you can’t get funding without selling your soul I guess.
I’d love working on a project like that, I miss the old game dev days 😊😌.