Wave of Mutilation: On Advertising

I want the internet to be more like a Vermont highway. Image from Vermont Maturity.

If I had all the money in the world, I would spend it on not being advertised to. Perhaps it’s just the price of being on the internet these days, but I think that the constant presence of banners, advertisements, and boosted posts is directly harmful to everyone.

I’ve done what I can – Firefox is a big help here, with a variety of plugins to interrupt the constant stream of noise, but there’s only so much that it can do. Add on to this the fact that, in recent months, advertisements that play sound unbidden have returned, and you have a perfect stew of annoyance and distraction.

And the dirty little secret is that they don’t work.

All other things being equal, why did they decide to call the bad robot “Robocop 2”. That’s just lazy writing.

The internet has turned, in the past two decades, into a panopticon designed to sell you things that you don’t need, but algorithmic advertising doesn’t work, because the behavior of consumption isn’t the same across categories of commodity. Sure, if you buy a book, you may be tempted by advertisements or reviews that talk about the author’s other works. Perhaps you bought Star Wars, and so the machine assumes you might want The Empire Strikes Back. Or maybe you paid money for Robocop 2, and so your computer advertises an at-home therapy service to you.

But the same behaviors don’t hold true for refrigerators: if you purchase one, you’re not likely to want to buy another one immediately afterward. I’m hardly the only person to note this sort of problem, but it seems like this has become a cornerstone of the economy, and it’s just not working.

This is becoming more and more apparent since Reddit went down: while I’m not the biggest fan of Reddit as a cultural institution (which, admittedly, is mostly driven by the behavior of a small set of toxic subreddits), I can acknowledge that it’s a major archive of collected knowledge and the loss of this service alongside the (predicted) loss of twitter is going to be a major harm to the internet as a whole. With reddit down, much of the knowledge contained therein is gated inside discord communities and specialized wikis – the former of which is cumbersome, and the latter of which is lousy with advertisement.

And this event is driven specifically by the fact that online advertising doesn’t really work. Not enough money is coming in through advertising, so they’re saddling third-party applications with exorbitant fees. It’s an attempt to replace the financialized model of advertising with a more feudal, rent-seeking behavior.

This is a response to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. I have commented in the past that I’m not really a Marxist, but Marx hung much of his work on this idea and it’s backed up by a number of other thinkers – to hear Wikipedia tell it, Adam Smith, J.S. Mill, David Ricardo, and Stanley Jevons all noted this tendency. Many more recent studies have backed it up to one extent or another. I see no reason to doubt this tendency’s existence.

In short, there is always a pressure on the growth of profit. Sure, everything about our system is predicated on endless growth, but this never actually materializes. Given that stability is not an option, a lack of growth – or simply lackluster growth! – is considered a sign of morbidity. Like a rich man having a brush with fatal illness, this leads to the corporations that determine so much of our world’s shape to grasp for more and more to stave off the inevitable. They seek new and other sources of profit: they cut benefits, they rob their workers, they ignore regulation, and they attempt to attract new customers with additional – and more invasive – advertising.

However, the inevitable cannot be resisted, and so this grows less and less effective. This is not the only reason for it, but it’s certainly a part of the problem.

Of course, this ignores the effect of advertisement on the public – the audience for this particular communique. To hear Murray Bookchin tell it, this is not simply noise, but is an active violence against the people subjected to it. We have our own drives drowned out and have these additional, alien impulses recorded into us. For Bookchin, this is the new form of scarcity that we have to deal with in industrialized society: not blind want brought on by stingy nature, but new and malignant needs imposed on us from outside. Imagining that most of the audience for this piece is roughly my age or younger: think back to your childhood, think back to the Saturday Morning Cartoons with their mascots and characters, all of which were featured in a toy line. You didn’t actually need it, and if you acquired it, chances were it fell by the wayside pretty quickly. But between being made aware of it and gaining the prize, you felt such desire for it that you can be forgiven for thinking that you might die if you didn’t somehow come to possess the plastic treasure.

Pictured: An actual thing that you can buy with money. This thing may actually count as anti-capitalist, because you will have a heart attack before more surplus value can be extracted from your labor.

According to Bookchin, this is a form of mutilation. Your desires aren’t simply suppressed and overwritten with something alien to you: the way you relate to the world around you is indelibly changed. Perhaps you become like one of those unfortunates who can only stomach meals of bread, meat, and cheese; or for whom water tastes somehow wrong. Perhaps you relate to potential romantic partners the same way you do to the toys advertised to you in the moment between blocks of programming. Perhaps you become desensitized to this stimuli and burned out on the world that you actually live in. This is what makes you what Bookchin calls a “mutilated user”. You’re unable to recognize the use of things in the world around you and become enslaved to desires installed in you from outside.

I don’t know how to fix this, but it seems to me that recognizing this mutilation – and retreating from the source of it – comes first.

The one thing that advertisements can do is offer a window into the zeitgeist: this requires that you use them in a way that they’re not meant to be used. That is, to think critically about them. Hold them up as an object of analysis and consider them as an artifact of a culture that – for the moment, at least – you suspend your membership in to the best of your abilities.

In doing this, I have only hardened my resolve to avoid being advertised to as much as possible, because the culture put forward by contemporary advertisements is not one which I wish to be a part of. Many of them have a conservative message – something that I know might seem hilarious to people on the right, given their recent moral panics about whether or not a foul-tasting beer or a big box store are in some way, shape, or form queer.

As an aside, this moral panic shows the mutilation I mentioned previously: they are offended because to be advertised to is to exist. Someone being targeted by advertisement is someone being given warrant to exist in society, hence the hand-wringing over rainbow capitalism. This means that the most powerful agencies in contemporary society view the existence of queer people as acceptable. I am not, here, writing about rainbow capitalism. I married into the queer community, so I’ll avoid criticizing too much there beyond mentioning this as an explanation for the moral panic.

However, much of the advertising I see on the internet is for idle games that claim to boost your IQ or pills that are, essentially, gender-confirming medicines for middle-aged men, or cryptocurrency scams. It really feels like the world described in this marketing is one that no one would actually want to be a part of: a soulless autotune cover of the worst moments of the 20th century, mashed up, chopped and screwed so that the 20s, 30s, and 80s all happen at the same moment.

Better than 100% of games advertised to you on social media (image taken, ultimately, from I Think You Should Leave. Playable here, but watch out.)

Looking at this, I think it’s understandable to talk about a desire for the New, as discussed in leftist theory. If all that we have is the past hundred years, sold to us again as overpriced dick pills and touchscreen games that capture our attention and banking details, then it might make sense to roll the dice on something that we’ve never seen before.

To get started: Get Firefox and UBlockOrigin. You can go a bit further from there, but my life has been improved quite a bit thus far — and I intend to go further down this path.

I’m going to maintain, though, through the whole process: the fewer advertisements you see – all other things being equal, – the happier your life will be. See if you can isolate yourself from direct advertising, and judge for yourself. But if I’m wrong, I invite you to let me know in the comments. I don’t think I’m going to get too many people saying it had a negative effect on them.

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