I Influenced Three Senators for $477.85

- The author finds that the click-through rate (20%) is much higher than the rate he typically sees in his career --> This is evidence of people being mad about Betsy Devos, and doesn't necessarily say anything about how easy it is to influence people through ads.

- The hardest part is to get people to go from watching a video to physically pick up the phone. The author doesn't (and can't) track this part, so can't prove his ads' true effectiveness. He "conservatively" estimates that his ads' audience make up half of the 1400 calls to the North Dakota senator. For this to be true, the conversion rate from video to physical phone call has to be 70% [1]. I'm not convinced it's this high.

Indeed, if it's so easy to convince people to actually pick up the phone, a school district or a church can get the hundreds of parents and church-goers in a day.

[1] 996 North Dakotans watched the ads. The conversion rate needs to be 700 / 996 ~ 70% for his audience to make up half of the 1400 calls to the senator.

Five hours on here and no comments is also scary.

So, online marketing seems to be trying to toggle desired functionality out of large audiences.

Why does no thought ever seem to go into the opportunity cost of redirected thought?

For instance... Most programmers are quite familiar with the phenomena wherein one is interrupted, thus losing track of a sizable mental context that has to be painstakingly rebuilt.

Marketing and advertising seems to be BUILT on exploiting this type of interaction though.

"Hey! I know you're busy working on that report, but how about a Coke?"

Now, as a society, we've accepted small amounts of this over time as in many cases, it hasn't seemed that disruptive.

Yet as mass-media has evolved, it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell what is the first class citizen anymore. The "important/desired" content, or the ads. As more and more opportunities are created for injecting advertising, we're seeing a society that seems steered in a direction where our interactions are being increasingly guided by our reaction to media in the environment rather than by the environment itself. Other human "agencies" (translation: businesses) are attempting to replace "human agency" (translation: self-inspired decision making capability predicated upon personal experience) itself as the primary means through which one achieves "a comfortable existence" (translation: living a fulfilling and virtuous life; living a high Quality existence; achieving self-actualization).

This article paints a picture of one scenario where this type of externalized agency becomes increasingly problematic.

The American Legislature was DESIGNED to be inefficient. This is easy to see when one takes preservation of liberty as a starting point, and then defines the act of legislation as the process by which liberty's definition is refined and bound in order to preserve the societal superstructure of a state while facilitating the state's capacity for action and need to evolve over time.

When you apply a highly efficient system for spreading one individual's viewpoint in an emotionally galvanizing way, one detracts from the built in inefficiency of the legislative process, enabling faster implementation of more restriction, but less efficient removal of restriction due to a natural bias against "rocking the boat" endemic to a large portion of the population.

I guess for me, this raises a couple big questions.

A)Should the output of a legislature be governed by the fact 1000000 people listened to one guy's five minute blurb and regurgitated it to a representative, or should it be because a representative granted a staff with higher access to information has had the time to work through the issue to figure out the least restrictive way to implement a law?

B) Should marketing/advertisement be looked at more carefully, and possibly regulated or downgraded to a less protected form of speech due to how easily it can be weaponized? (I.e. Advertising material being restricted in the types of claims it can make such as having to be backed by factual publicly accessible data; Or being restricted in forms and situations in which it can be employed/consumed)

C) Is marketing/advertising in its current digital forms even desirable?

I'm somewhat disturbed that some of these questions are even seemingly in need of being asked, but the last decade or two is really quite disturbing when looked at through the lens of an individual living in a world just coming into an age of digital marketing and information warfare.

Sorry for the wall of text, but this has been bugging me a lot lately.