[throwaway23597]

How is online advertising not useful? It's directly greasing the gears of the economy, matching up potential customers with businesses in a reasonably intelligent way. Yeah, sure, it's not saving the world from climate change or something, but it's clearly facilitating economic activity, and also helps keep a number of very useful products free. Seems pretty useful to our society to me.

[bbor]

Don’t you think a catalog would do a better job of matching up consumers to products?

Given our environmental situation, is it really ethical to “convince” people that they need some new thing that they previously didn’t know about or want?

Re: keeping stuff free, that’s still pretty convincing and it’s mostly what keeps me going as I work on the great google ad machine. It seems like a massive social good for sites to be free to users of an economic class worldwide, both large tools and tiny blogs. Any alternative I can think of (e.g. government buys everyone google drive subscriptions, sites run off donations, micropayments) have some pretty obvious issues

[throwaway23597]

It's not like we DON'T have a catalog though. Amazon exists. The problem is that there is such a deluge of products that it becomes difficult to choose. That's where advertising can help.

As for the environmental situation, it is unfortunate. But I do believe that the only realistic way out of the climate crisis without a collapse-level drop in standard of living (read: starvation) is technological innovation, a process that seems to be aided a lot by a healthy economy (which results in stable livelihoods, etc). So I'd say if anything there's a moral imperative to keep the economy as healthy and productive as possible.

[flavius29663]

"ethical" is very hard to prove or disprove. For example, is it ethical for me to pay 400USD for a camera, since there is a 350 alternative that I didn't even know existed?

A complete and fair catalog is very hard (if not impossible ) to implement. But even if you did, that would NOT be enough. You might not know you "need" a good mattress unless an ad would sell it to you. Btw, if you think a global catalog would solve all these issues why not build it yourself? It can't be that hard... There are probably only a few billion products on earth, with a few variants each. Why not just do it?

Speaking of "ethical", there are many concept in the modern world that can be seen as "un-ethical", but at the same time they make the world run much better than the medieval (or communist) world they replace: interest, inflation, income taxes to name a few.