What If We Made Advertising Illegal?
What if we banned all advertising? Not regulate it—abolish it. This proposal would transform manipulation machines, and maybe save democracy itself. A thought experiment worth considering.
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:
Ad companies are never going to regulate themselves—it's like hoping for heroin dealers to write drug laws.
Think about what's happened since 2016: Populists exploit ad marketplaces, using them to bypass traditional media gatekeepers and deliver tailored messages to susceptible audiences. Foreign actors do the same, microtargeting divisive content to fracture our social fabric along existing fault lines.