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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

The rent is high because of demand - Which is driven by advertising - Which someone has to pay for.

If only we knew who's buying all the advertising, maybe it would start making sense.

Walk me through the causal process here. Does it go something like...

Landlords want more money so they devise a massive marketing campaign, including a complete cultural narrative, TV series, movies, and even gasp whole companies created out of thin air.

They infiltrate media outlets to con dreamers into coming to their city, and expect to charge them 10x more than they used to pay in rent. They have to, after all, to cover the costs of the largest ad campaign ever created in the universe.

And it's a massive success! It just worked. Whoa.

Or... Maybe that's just not very realistic.

Maybe your rent is high because you live in a city with a flourishing job market for highly qualified and highly paid workers who came there to find new jobs, and whose real estate market has a chronically low supply of housing due to various cultural or regulatory reasons.

Maybe there's a convergence of shared interests across all advertisers that serves to create a culture of consumption? I don't think it's that hard to explain or that it requires the positing of any sort of conspiracy.

Maybe there is a whole human culture of consumption and it isn't the advertisers fault that humans are greedy. No need to play the victim card all the time.

Or maybe they exist symbiotically? And the role advertising plays is to accelerate the feedback loop in a way that's beneficial to the interests of their employers.

Not to mention, advertising often has been used to create markets out of thin air:

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/issues/82feb/8202diamond1.ht...

You don't think it's hard to explain what?

How advertising causes high rents in San Francisco?

Be my guest.

It's not hard to find reasons other than conspiracies, to explain the role of advertising in creating a consumption culture.

If by "consumption culture" you mean "sales", then yeah.

A sale in and of itself doesn't necessarily imply a broader ideology about what it means to be a consumer. There was a time before consumer culture when we still had sales.

While consumer culture certainly includes sales, it's also about deeper things such as associating your identity and self esteem with consumption, the way those ideas intertwine with culture, the psychological structures through which those ideas are mediated, and the way it all congeals into a way of life.

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