As someone who's worked in marketing for 15 years - across big agencies in New York and running growth for startups - there's an uncomfortable truth to this piece. The industry has quietly become something darker than when I joined.
Modern advertising doesn't just sell products, it sells our own attention back to us at a premium. What started as "connecting products to people who need them" has warped into engineering digital environments that hack our baseline neurological responses.
The most disturbing part is that most people inside the machine know it. I've sat in rooms where we've explicitly designed systems to maximize "time on site" by exploiting cognitive vulnerabilities. The language we use internally is more clinical than predatory, which makes it easy to avoid moral questions.
What's wild is how this piece frames advertising as a relatively recent phenomenon. It's right - for 99% of human history, we made purchasing decisions based on community knowledge and direct information, not carefully engineered psychological triggers that follow us around.
Sure, banning all advertising sounds extreme, but it's worth asking: what would we actually lose? Product information would still exist. Reviews would still exist. Word-of-mouth would still exist. We'd just lose the sophisticated machinery designed to bypass our rational decision-making.
The "free speech" counter-argument has always struck me as disingenuous. Nobody believes they have a constitutional right to interrupt your dinner with a telemarketing call.
Modern advertising doesn't just sell products, it sells our own attention back to us at a premium. What started as "connecting products to people who need them" has warped into engineering digital environments that hack our baseline neurological responses.
The most disturbing part is that most people inside the machine know it. I've sat in rooms where we've explicitly designed systems to maximize "time on site" by exploiting cognitive vulnerabilities. The language we use internally is more clinical than predatory, which makes it easy to avoid moral questions.
What's wild is how this piece frames advertising as a relatively recent phenomenon. It's right - for 99% of human history, we made purchasing decisions based on community knowledge and direct information, not carefully engineered psychological triggers that follow us around.
Sure, banning all advertising sounds extreme, but it's worth asking: what would we actually lose? Product information would still exist. Reviews would still exist. Word-of-mouth would still exist. We'd just lose the sophisticated machinery designed to bypass our rational decision-making.
The "free speech" counter-argument has always struck me as disingenuous. Nobody believes they have a constitutional right to interrupt your dinner with a telemarketing call.