I’ve been thinking a lot about advertising recently. It’s a step in the “de-social-media-izing” project that I’ve been embarking on over the past year and a step that has allowed a certain uncomfortable amount of existential dread into my life. About a year ago I realized that my attention has a certain value. Not just a personal value (a lesson that my father spent most of my adolescent years trying to drill into my head) but a tangible and traceable market value. It’s a subtle sort of value, one that’s been hiding in plain sight my entire life and that only after taking a serious look at how I spent my time became clear to me. I spend a lot of time on the internet. A space completely pervaded by advertising. Even in the minute I took to check Instagram after writing that last sentence I encountered two different ads trying to sell me something, promising to fill the voids in my life that I didn’t even know were there! I didn’t have any choice in these ads, they were served to me via sub-consumer facing auction, mediated by computers working at speeds that the human mind can’t comprehend (for more on how this process works check out this video my CGP Grey). Ads by their very nature are invasive and non-consensual, any ride on the subway or brave excursion into Times Square illustrates that. The money and technology that goes into facilitating theses ads are staggering. Gone are the days of passive television advertisements whose shotgun blast approach hoped that one in a hundred viewers might subliminally choose their product over a competitors. Modern ads are precise, exact, built on profiles created by the users who willingly give away their personal information and demographics so that advertisers can serve them targeted ads that they are certain to relate with.
This feels wrong, right? In my mind I don’t like the idea of being forced to watch a sales pitch with no option to leave it, especially when that pitch has been fine tuned to tug on just the right strings to get me to relate to it. It makes my personal beliefs feel dirty, like they are nothing more than a tool used by men in badly tailored suits to get me to buy their snake oil. But like it or not, the internet has found its way into the center of most of our lives in one way or another and the playing field of the internet is littered with advertising detritus.
I don’t mean to come off as a “high enlightened sage whose mind and will has risen above the tricks of advertisements” its quite the opposite honestly. I feel manipulated, exploited by platforms whose services are built to be addicting so that our eyes see more ads and generate them more money. And I don’t think ads are inherently evil, we live in a world where money has to be made somehow for the services we enjoy to keep existing. There’s always the bills to be paid. But I thinking their methods are becoming more and more tricksy (to steal a phrase from my favorite subterranean ring bearer) and that we should all be a little more suspicious of what we’re being served without our consent as passive viewers of the internet.
Until then I’ll be hiding out in my doomsday bunker, awaiting the day where my over paranoid delusions of corporate sponsored dictatorship become vindicated. In the meantime, be safe out there.
-Tim Caston
This post was inspired largely by the CGP Grey video I linked above and by this video by HBomberguy talking about the newest form of ad revenue being linked to “outrage news”. Both videos are excellent and I would high recommend watching them both.
The Junction Journal 