During the Super Bowl, Anthropic ran a dystopian AI ad about dystopian AI ads featuring an AI android physical trainer hawking insoles to a user who only asked for an ab workout. Not to be outdone, Amazon ran a commercial for its AI assistant Alexa+ in which Chris Hemsworth fretted over all the different ways AI might kill him, including severing his head and drowning him in his pool. Equally bleak, the telehealth company Hims & Hers ran an ad titled “RICH PEOPLE LIVE LONGER” in which oligarchs access such healthcare luxuries as facelifts, bespoke IVs, and “preventative care” to live longer than the rest of us. It was an anti-billionaire ad by a multibillion-dollar healthcare company.
Turn on the TV today, and you will drown in a sea of ads in which capitalists denounce capitalism. Think of the PNC Bank ads where parents sell their children’s naming rights a la sports stadiums for the money to raise them or the Robinhood ads where a white-haired older man, perhaps meant to evoke Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, curses the “men of means with their silver spoons eating up the financial favors of the one percent” from the deck of a yacht.
After years of ingesting the mainstream discourse around surveillance capitalism, Occupy Wall Street, and democratic socialism, corporations are regurgitating and even surpassing the rhetoric of the modern left. Naturally, it’s all a winking sleight of hand meant to corral us back into engaging with the same capitalism they portray as a hellscape — but with new and improved privatized solutions. In another widely reviled Super Bowl ad, the video doorbell company Ring tells us that every year, 10 million family pets go missing, and by opting into a web of mass surveillance, the company has reunited “more than a dog a day” with their families.
Modern advertisers descend from those ad men of the 1960s who first perfected the art of channeling our angst with society writ large into buying more junk. As historian Thomas Frank wrote in his book “The Conquest of Cool,” midcentury advertisers constructed “a cultural perpetual motion machine in which disgust with the … everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption.”
The machine has hummed on ever since, retrofitting capitalism’s reprimands into its rationales. It churns out commercials reframing the precariat’s pain not as the product of plutocracy but as the product of buying the wrong products. Advertisements pitch that the good life is to be secured by procuring high quality goods, by curating the right combination of AI assistants, locally crafted beer, paraben-free dryer sheets, Jimmy Dean breakfast biscuits, Capital One Venture X points, BetMGM spreads, Coinbase crypto wallets, on and on.
It’s lunacy. Buying Levi’s won’t give you deep pockets. Brand promises, like all promises, are made to be broken. As AI anxiety fueled fears of mass layoffs, Coca-Cola soothed American workers’ worries about “AI coming for everything” with a glossy 2025 Super Bowl ad, featuring Lauren London, where the gleaming actress flexed her dimples and told us everything would be all right. Ten months later, Coke automated its advertising with generative videos, replacing the actors they’d paid to soothe our worries about being replaced by AI with AI itself.
I think the biggest mistake that the current administration is making (at least in terms of domestic commerce) is the complete failure to understand that consumer protections are NOT altruistic services given away to people. They are devices intended to increase consumer confidence and therefore consumer spending. A properly regulated market means that customers are confident that they will be given fair terms and will get what they have paid for. If you erode those protections the result is that consumers spend less.
The governments role in a capitalist nation is to serve as a guarantor of the integrity of transactions within its jurisdiction. If it abdicates that responsibility people will curtail their spending commensurate with their perception of increased risk. In short, people stop buying shit when they view those purchases as risky.
Since Trump and his cohort have never actually engaged in LEGITIGIMATE business they view these regulations exclusively as impediments when the reality is that they greatly benefit corporations in a consumer driven economy.
https://www.superbowl-ads.com/1997-tabasco-mosquito/
Best ad ever IMHO (sorry for funky link, YouTube if you prefer).
No dialog, no rampant consumerism (hot sauce is a necessary food), no sex/sexism, no emotional manipulation.
What feels different this time isn’t hypocrisy. Capitalism has always been happy to sell us our own anger back at retail. What feels different is that the ads no longer presume a shared reality at all.
Advertising once depended on ambient trust. Not belief, exactly, but a background assumption that words meant roughly what they said, that fear was proportional to risk, that reassurance implied some intention to follow through. That layer is gone. Now the ad doesn’t ask to be believed. It just asks to be noticed.
When companies openly dramatize the harms of the systems they profit from, they aren’t confessing. They’re signaling that truth has become optional. The message isn’t “we see the problem.” The message is “nothing means anything long enough to matter.” Anxiety becomes just another raw material, interchangeable with humor or nostalgia or menace.
This is where the information economy starts to eat itself. If every message arrives pre-saturated with irony, critique, and self-awareness, then no signal can rise above the din. Warnings, reassurances, satire, and sales pitches collapse into the same register. The audience isn’t persuaded or misled so much as numbed.
AI accelerates this collapse because it removes the last residue of intent. When the thing soothing your fear of replacement is itself replaceable by a cheaper, faster version, trust doesn’t break. It evaporates. There’s no betrayal because there’s no relationship left to betray.
And that erosion reaches even here. A reply like this would once have felt like an intervention, or at least a refusal. Now it lands as another object in the stream. Legible, maybe even accurate, but easily skimmed, quickly metabolized, and just as quickly forgotten. The critique doesn’t fail because it’s wrong. It fails because the conditions that once gave critique traction are gone.
At that point advertising stops functioning as communication and starts functioning as weather. It happens around us. We endure it. We don’t argue with it because there’s nothing there to argue with.
That feels new. And it feels brittle. Societies can survive a lot of lies. They don’t do well when meaning itself becomes non-durable.
(I write fiction and essays about witnessing systems as they fail quietly rather than spectacularly. If this kind of erosion, of trust, meaning, and shared signal, is something you’re thinking about too, my work lives here: https://tover153.substack.com/)
It reminds me of the documentary Hypernormalisation, well worth a watch if you haven’t seen it.
“The word hypernormalisation was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s. He says everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. Over time, the mass delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting it as the new norm rather than pretend, an effect Yurchak termed hypernormalisation”
Thanks for the link. I was gonna ask if you were a writer, heh.
I agree. The tone of the ads this year felt almost like lampshading. Like if we acknowledge the problem, we’re wise to what the audience is feeling, but we’re not going to do a damn thing to address it. It’s just something that needs to be done to make the ad feel remotely relevant.
AI is scary, but don’t be afraid of our surveillance device because we acknowledged that AI is scary
AI will sell you ads. Anyway, you’re watching an ad for AI
Work sucks amirite? Why not let us unemploy you?
There’s a wealth gap. Spend money on our stuff.
And I’m not going to even link the He Gets Us ads.
Great comment and 100% agree this is bad news for society, tho personally I have not engaged with ads or even noticed ads for over a decade. It’s been untrustworthy noise for a long time for me
I could hear this. Like a rousing speech.
this is one of the greatest things I have read in a while, thank you
i bet you are a fan of The Machine Stops?
Advertising is one of the most prolific environmental pollutants of economic activity, and needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.
The solution to capitalism is not more capitalism.
Maybe Ted Kaczynski was right in a way.
No, he was just crazy. We can be anticapitalist without relying on terrorists who targeted random civilians.
Well… maybe not.
I do think we’re running into a problem of net in exceeding net out with modern tech and finance companies. They’ve surpassed the point at which they can generate meaningful amounts of profit because they’ve cartelized all the major profit centers.
But the idea that there’s nothing left to improve, nothing left to repair, and no one left to consumerize… no, obviously not. The market system isn’t failing. It is being failed by business leaders that no longer want to do the hard work of management, innovation, and improvement.
Look outside the US and you can find everything from massive overhauls in modern infrastructure to breakthroughs in manufacturing and miniaturization to exciting modernization in entertainment and sports. Within the US, though, its just slop.
Please don’t confuse actual technological progress with markets. These two things have always been separate. The intellectual property market is a huge problem for innovation, and it exists because the market system is inherently a resource control system, and resource control systems that are driven by market dynamics are huge problems for innovation.
Modern infrastructure is not built by markets. University materials research is not driven by markets.
Exciting modernization in entertainment and sports
Whut?
Please don’t confuse actual technological progress with markets.
Consumer goods are delivered through market distributions for nearly every post-industrial society on earth.
The government could distribute widgets, but it doesn’t.
Modern infrastructure is not built by markets.
Construction crews, materials purveyors, architects, electricians/plumbers… All come through the market system. That’s why Americans have to turn to Spain or Japan every time they float the idea of expanding HSR. That’s why only two companies in the world build civilian airliners. That’s why our telecom network is an oligopoly.
Whut?
Teqball’s a lot of fun.
Th exception proves the rule. Department of Transportation is not market driven. DPW is not market driven. Army Corps of Engineers is not market driven.
And that’s just the US. Look to the rest of the world and you’ll see that most infrastructure is not market driven at all.
And even in the cases where they have to get private companies to do the build, the INFRASTRUCTURE ITSELF is not market driven, it’s the talent that’s market driven.
Modern infrastructure is not built by markets. University materials research is not driven by markets.
It kind of is, though. Modern infrastructure is built by companies. Universities acquire materials, labor, as well as share knowledge through marketplaces of ideas and information.
“Market” is really just a construct describing social interaction. You can’t really blame it for a problem since all it is is a description of reality.
You don’t know what markets are then.
Modern infrastructure in China is built by state owned enterprises and funded by the government. There is no price competition, and the infrastructure is not sold on the market as a commodity.
“Marketplaces of ideas and information” would be places where you could purchase ideas and information and resell them. That’s what a market is. That’s not how universities work. They receive planned funding for planned research and conduct planned research according to forward looking plans without regard to the market demand for specific outcomes. Granted IP markets are layered on top of that but they pervert the entire process and they are totally artificial.
The idea that you think markets are not actual systems but just a descriptive word used to refer to various non-marker realities indicates that you are fully saturated with neoliberalism and need a detox.
Markets are not uniquely neoliberal nor capitalist.
No. But describing all social interactions as “markets” is distinctly Neoliberal brain rot
No, I said markets describe a type of social interaction. You inferred all.
That was a grim, difficult read. The last paragraph is quite good, bringing the ideas together.
I really hate modern media. The advertising in it is the worst part, and being ingrained in every aspect of the media itself just makes it worse. I don’t watch TV, and I’ve been blocking ads since I had to curate my own host files in order to do so, well before the introduction of extensions that would do it for you. I find using today’s unfiltered internet just about as odious as watching TV.
It was hard just to read about that shit. Every word was a true, ugly reflection of the culture I live in.
You’ve brought 2010 ad blocking techniques to 2026.
The ads now a days are less in your face and way more pervasive.
They are in the articles you read with a tiny “sponsored content” under the by line(if there even is one)
They are recommendation from a friend who themselves got the information from some small time influencer or podcast they follow.
They are the AI comments here and elsewhere that might not stick a product in your face but make sure it’s always in the conversation.
The list goes on and on and sucks.
You are close. The original Adblock extension was mid-2000’s. Before that, we traded host files online in forums and shit. So I’ve been filtering the internet since Windows XP.
