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  1. Sep 2014
    1. Avoiding ads doesn't help much either. Because brand images are part of the cultural landscape we inhabit, when we block ads or fast-forward through them, we're missing out on valuable cultural information, alienating ourselves from the zeitgeist. This puts us in danger of becoming outdated, unfashionable, and otherwise socially hapless. We become like the kid who wears his dad's suit to his first middle-school dance.

      Unless you accumulate friends who also avoid ads, who think you're less cool for having allowed yourself to be exposed to them or for deploying them too conspicuous as social signaling, at least when that brand is not favored by that scene. Ironically, of course, most scenes are simply favoring different brands, because it's hard to accumulate any significant set of material trappings that aren't branded.