Eliminate Advertising

I came across this provocative essay via Peter Spear’s That Business of Meaning on Substack. This takes my criticism of marketing and advertising to one logical conclusion.

WHAT IF WE MADE ADVERTISING ILLEGAL? by Kōdō Simone

https://simone.org/advertising/

from the essay:

“But why? It makes perfect sense. The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear, and so would the mechanisms that allow both commercial and political actors to create personalized, reality-distorting bubbles:

Clickbait, listicles, and affiliate marketing schemes would become worthless overnight.

Algorithm-driven platforms like Instagram and TikTok that harvest and monetize attention, destroying youth, would lose their economic foundation.

Facebook, X, Google, YouTube—all would cease to exist in their current forms.

Ad companies are never going to regulate themselves—it's like hoping for heroin dealers to write drug laws.”