Nevermind the dawn of television—advertising predates the printing press.
This is how it all came to pass: once upon a time, there was a blacksmith (say) in a small town. He didn’t need a sign since everybody knew he was a blacksmith, and even if they hadn’t known, they would have found out very soon, what with all the clanging. Still, he did have a sign of sorts: a horseshoe. Anything more would have been pure show, since nobody could read. Time passes; people learned to read, and so did the blacksmith.
One day an itinerant sign painter came by and made him a real sign, with letters; it said: “Blacksmith.”
Ad man Howard Gossage penned “How to Look at Billboards” for the February 1960 issue of Harper’s magazine, and his observations about advertising’s effects on public life and public space remain insightful:
. . . there is a very real question whether [advertising] has title to its domain. Outdoor advertising is peddling a commodity it does not own and without the owner’s permission: your field of vision. Possibly you have never thought to consider your rights in the matter. Nations put the utmost importance on unintentional violations of their air space. The individual’s air space is intentionally violated by billboards every day of the year.
Rereading the essay 60 years later, though, his argument about opting out of certain forms of advertising is less compelling. We’ve been trained to believe that advertising is a necessary evil, and adverts have wormed their way into almost every facet of modern life. Today, opting out isn’t a choice so much as it’s an ongoing battle. Especially when the American consumer economy is the last stop in basically every global production and manufacturing pipeline.
The sheer amount of data that’s become usable as a resource in the last 15-20 years is staggering, which has accelerated the process. If we consider Hayek’s description of the local knowledge problem, price variations and fluctuations have basically constituted ‘low-definition information at a distance’ for centuries, and the quality of information was strictly limited by the speed at which information could travel. Commodity prices in one market were a proxy for dozens of relevant informational inputs (wages, worker satisfaction, abundance of resources, infrastructural development, etc.) that couldn’t possibly have been measured in a single place, let alone compared across markets. But in the information age, the paradigm has shifted, and the most successful firms will be the ones who figure out how to instrumenalize the overwhelm of information.
Shoshona Zuboff explores this idea in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and argues that this new form of capitalist accumulation is an outright assault on human autonomy and free will. Her insight in this interview illustrates the shift from ‘mere advertising’ towards telematics and data harvesting:
Oh, well, look, online targeted advertising was the place where this started, but this is not the place where it ends. It’s like saying that mass production was only relevant to make you Model T’s. This logic is spreading to all these different contexts, and all these different predictive markets, so — let’s go back to the Model T, for example. Three or four months ago, the CEO of Ford says there’s a global auto slump, it’s really hard to sell cars, but we’re getting downgraded in the markets. He says, we want price-to-earnings ratios like Google and Facebook. How do we do that? We’re going to become a data company. We got 100 million people driving around in Ford vehicles. And what we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna now figure out how to get all the data out of this driving experience.
So this is the telematics, this is the stuff that, you know, we can not only know how you’re driving and where you’re driving, we can know the gaze of your eyes — and that’s really important for insurers, to know if you’re driving safely. And we can know what you’re talking about in your car, and, like, Amazon and Google and so forth are already in a contest for the car dashboard, because that’s a way of hearing what you’re talking about and knowing where you’re going. So they talk about, you know, shopping from the driving wheel. So now the automobile itself becomes this little surveillance bubble. We can get all of this information, from your conversation to your shopping to where you’re going to what you’re doing to how you’re driving. And this has predictive value for all kinds of business customers.
See, it makes perfect sense that Ford is a data company and Starbucks is an unregulated bank. The scary part is that everything you do, so long as it’s connected in some way to these telemetric systems, generates data. So even opting out, or skipping ads, or whatever else—it all feeds the machine just the same. The only way to not participate is to not be generating data whatsoever.
Honestly I’m not sure how to truly escape any of this (especially going forward) without moving to the middle of nowhere and embracing the luddite lifestyle. Guess I’ll just have to drink a verification can.