Capitalism Can't Figure Out How to Operate in a World Without Advertising
As many of you know by now, I’m somewhat critical of capitalism, which is why it might surprise many of you to learn that, in my weaker moments, I yearn for the return of the days of relentless, ubiquitous advertising.
I’m not just referring to some of those old ads that I kind of have a soft spot for, the ones that actually added to the culture for better or worse.
No, I mean just kind of yearn for the way things used to work. I don’t miss advertising itself, I miss what it actually did for us. For artists, creatives, journalists, and many other industries, advertising generated the revenue stream which enabled people to not only make a living but also have a lot more general freedom within those industries.
In the first few decades of the internet in particular we were living in a golden age of free information and free entertainment, and the knock-on effect for people who didn’t work in these industries but still needed to do literally anything else to earn a living was that advertising subsidised just enough of the non-working portions of our lives to make the working portions of our lives more bearable.
You’ll probably wonder why I’m talking about advertising in the past tense like you don’t still see it all the god damn time but the fact is that the business model in which a company buys space or timeslots within someone else’s product to tell you about their product, and you accept that advertising in lieu of paying for the product – that business model is crying out in the agony of its final tortured days. The result is that the ads you do still get are now more intrusive and annoying than ever before, which ironically accelerates the problem.
A lot of this is Big Ad’s fault and a lot of it is Big Tech’s fault. You can’t help seeing this situation like a battle between two immense kaiju monsters pummelling the stuffing out of each other and stomping all over the city below, their hatred for each other matched only for their disdain for human beings.
I had a lot of trouble researching this piece for the exact reasons that this piece is actually about. Research and fact checking media sources was part of my primary job for several years but that job went away when the website I worked for died in a two-punch knockout—when ad revenue dried up for all the media sources they all went behind paywalls, which we couldn’t afford to bypass because our own ad revenue dried up.
That website, instead of publishing fascinating essays full of rigorously sourced pop culture and history facts, now just reposts jokes and screenshots from Twitter and Reddit because that’s the only free content left.
Still, there was a golden age of stability in the model. The model was, in fact, so stable that nobody predicted anything going wrong with it. More good quality media than ever before in history, online and on television and the radio and other places, more in fact than anyone could plausibly ever consume, was now freely available to everyone. The creators of that media were making piles of money. The advertising agencies were making piles of money. The companies doing the advertising were making piles of money. Everyone was winning, so where was the flaw?
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