It feels like the essence of America has become a big, pervasive advertisement. I can’t go anywhere or do anything without being bombarded by ads. They are intrusive and, worse, they purposely seek not to persuade but to manipulate.
Gross.
One of the more annoying examples is, to me, the autoplay feature. Which goes right along with the infinite scroll.
Used to be, you would finish watching something and then take a breather before deciding what to do next. You’d go back to your list of content to think about what else you may want to watch, or you’d watch a commercial and get a pause to think. But over time, companies learned that they should steal these breaks from us as a way to increase how much money they extract. They decided they should disallow us from making any decisions about our time, and instead force their product upon us in ways that make it hard for our brains to decide to take a break.
I have noticed that every single video streaming platform now has a countdown, or a banner, or some other indicator that, before the credits even finish for the thing you just watched, you’re going to be pushed into the next thing that might capture your interest enough to keep you on the platform. Then they can grab your attention for another 30 minutes or 2 hours, attempt to do it again after that, rinse repeat.
I can’t figure out why we as a society put up with not just strategies like this, but egregious stuff like ads repeatedly interrupting a video mid-word or mid-sentence. Or ads blaring at us while we fill up our gas tanks. Or ads interrupting our social media feeds. Or ads on nearly every public surface we encounter, from benches to walls to billboards. And now, even ads when we hit “pause” on something we’re watching.
The only answer I can come up with is that these companies just have too much power. They do it because we don’t have alternatives and can’t get away, and there is also no societal will to rein in the behavior.
I don’t know how many times I’ve gotten fed up with <insert platform here> only to realize that there is no alternative platform available. I say this often about YouTube, where I watch watercolor tutorials and cooking videos that are continuously interrupted by longer and longer ads. But some of those creators don’t have their content anywhere else right now, so it’s either watch it there and put up with the nonsense, or don’t watch it at all.
I’m inching closer to “don’t watch it at all.”
I think we are going to reach a point (maybe soon?) where large groups of people just start disconnecting from tech because they’re finally sick of it. I’m already seeing hints of this happening, with “analog lifestyles” now in the lexicon and owning physical media becoming fashionable. I think we’re all worn down from the constant extortion, whether it’s of our time via ads and addictive design, or of our money via endless subscriptions and never owning anything.
I’m also starting to see a pull back from social media and a movement to less ad-ridden platforms, which is a longtime coming and probably for some of the same reasons. These “social” platforms don’t steal our money directly, but they sure do purposely steal our time in exchange for money. And when I really sit back and think about it, and about how this is done deliberately and everyone knows it, it’s a sad commentary on the wider dysfunction of how humans treat one another.
Because there is a long list of other terrible things done on purpose and everyone knows it, like how the conglomerates put all the crap into our food that either addicts us or kills us. Or how they continue to use non-renewable materials and planned obsolescence, even though it’s impacting the planet in such a way that we may not survive as a species.
We continue to allow it all…why?
In my own little microcosm, I’ve tried for years to quit social media, to quit scrolling, to quit these leeching content platforms that use my one life for a profit. And I do ok for a while before being sucked in again, because everyone is on them. All of the content I want to ingest for learning or for entertainment is on them, my friends are on them, my job and colleagues are on them. I’ve found very few workarounds.
But I guess it’s like everything else, as far as what drives broader change: large groups of people finally getting fed up and organizing en masse. As more of us start divesting from these entities and saying no, I think we will start to see some change.
In the interim, those of us who are feeling fed up should keep trying to find alternatives. We should seek out other ways to connect, like in person or on less corporatized platforms. We should buy physical books. We should buy physical media. We should do “analog” things like going to coffee shops and to live theatre, and we should buy physical things we can own and hold in our hands. This is the only way to ensure we engage with products and services that do not have their primary goal of extracting money from us but of enriching our lives.
Maybe eventually it’ll catch on.