Advertising is "the machinery of mass delusion," says writer Kōdō Simone. He calls for abolishing all advertising — not regulating it, but making it completely illegal.
Banning advertising would eliminate the financial incentives behind addictive digital content and reality-distorting algorithms. He claims an advertising free world would force both commercial and political actors to engage more honestly with the public. He points to how advertising marketplaces have been exploited since 2016 by populists and foreign actors to microtarget divisive content and bypass traditional media gatekeepers.
The idea feels like sci-fi because you're so used to it, imagining ads gone feels like asking to outlaw gravity. But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.
The traditional argument pro-advertising—that it provides consumers with necessary information—hasn't been valid for decades. In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform.
The modern advertising apparatus exists to bypass rational thought and trigger emotional responses that lead to purchasing decisions. A sophisticated machine designed to short-circuit your agency, normalized to the point of invisibility.
Simone says the proposal my seem ridiculous now, but he draws parallels to other once-unthinkable social changes: "I think there's a world where we'll look back on our advertising-saturated era with the same bewilderment with which we now regard cigarette smoke, child labor, or public executions: a barbaric practice that we allowed to continue far too long because we couldn't imagine an alternative."
Previously:
• Apple resumes advertising on Twitter
• Empirical analysis of behavioral advertising finds that surveillance makes ads only 4% more profitable for media companies
• MLK on car ads
