What If We Made Advertising Illegal?
Importance: 6 | # | ads, attention, policy
What if we made all advertising illegal? It's such a wild idea that I've never heard it in the public discourse.
Even saying it seems so far outside the Overton window that it makes nuking hurricanes sound reasonable (as some politicians proposed).
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.
When I say advertising, I also mean propaganda. Propaganda is advertising for the state, and advertising is propaganda for the private. Same thing.
Interesting discussion on HackerNews.