Do You Demand Destruction, Or Are You Demanding Destruction?

When you talk about demand destruction, you could be talking about a few things. In general, one of the things that suppliers have done is falsely convinced themselves & the market that there is more demand than there actually is. If you’re a supplier, you generally need to supply more in order to sell more, and therefore make more money. When demand goes down, so does what suppliers need to supply. But supply can be fabricated, or falsified, and often is. So you must demand destruction, of false demand.

For example, nobody demands advertising. Certainly no sane person asked Facebook to advertise more to them. There is also no limit to the amount of digital advertising you can be targeted for by any one advertiser or platform. Unlike the physical world, where outdoor advertising is highly regulated, in terms of the volume. On highways for example, there are very strict rules for how many boards can be placed in certain locations based on population and other factors.

Yet, on the information superhighway (yes they used to call the internet that) there are no such safeguards. Either nobody ever thought about it, or people assumed there is no dangerous level of overload on the internet, compared to the physical world. In other words, people assume that you can be unsafely bombarded with ads on the highway while driving a car, but not on your cell phone at home. If you were asking that question in 1996 you’d be speculating. In 2022, we actually can answer this.

The bombardment of digital advertising, and the platforms that provide it, have dramatically increased the level of suicidal ideation, depression, drug addiction, etc. Did the public demand content that would trigger or induce mass counter-productive decay? I should think not. If society did do that, then we have got to figure some things out as a culture. In the case that these horrible things were thrust up on us from manipulative forces, we should reject those forces and everything like them.

Eat Crow

In terms of food, produce is oversupplied right now. There is also a massive inefficiency in the production of food that has 25% – 50% of what is made, to go bad. In other words, we should be producing about half as much as we are currently. But the companies who profit if they supply more, will never let go of that kind of paradigm, until they can’t help it anymore.

Streaming Is A War Nobody Wanted

The entertainment industry is another insane example. Every major streaming service (Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Comcast, Hulu, HBO, Warner Discovery) spend about $15,000,000,000/year on content. That is a total of about $120,000,000,000/year. This is so obviously not sustainable. But only now are companies shutting down productions, and starting to get more diligent. The streaming model also eliminates the metrics of good and treats every production like the same valued widget. It doesn’t matter what people are watching, and despite the data that’s collected, none of it has made more, better content. They just made more content. We would actually all be better off rewatching better content – we are anyway.

Destroy Demand For Political Advertising

2022’s midterm election blew $15,000,000,000 in advertising or so. 50% of that is absolutely wasted because it was used by a candidate that lost. Also, there is 0 benefit to spending that much money other than for the fundraisers, marketing agencies, and consultants. The public would benefit from a much cheaper scenario where the candidates have long-form debates every day, or every week, which the public can watch for free. It doesn’t need to be marketed at all, because anybody that wants to participate in the process would have the same access.

Advertising elections actually inherently creates a discriminatory condition when you do it online. It can still become quickly discriminatory if you do traditional advertising but it’s more difficult. For example, if you put a billboard up somewhere, you are definitely picking who you want to see it but you can’t block anybody from seeing it so long as they go to that location. A newspaper can be picked up or purchased by anybody, too. But any digital ad can be targeted at certain people, and not at others. Therefore the entire digital advertising program (most of the $15B spent on the 22′ mid-terms) is not actually being demanded. The demand is being fabricated by those who supply it.

Demand destruction of these unnecessary things, and figure out a way to hold our society up without them. We can no longer be satisfied with thinking that just because generations before us survived with inferior markets that we should too. It’s also stupid to think the only way to make something more efficient is with technology. People who think that obviously never really read “The Question Concerning Technology,” they just like to say the name Heidegger at cocktail parties.

“America…is run…by stupid people.” – Donald Trump

While Kanye West, Donald Trump, and both sides of the moron machine ask the Jewish question, you ought to really be asking the Big Tech question. The question is, would you rather outlive technology or build such great technology that it kills you? For example, if we create more demand for the lack of human life than a demand for human life you’d have the world we have now.

So demand the destruction of false idols, and a culture of consuming nothing.