We’ve sold our humanity to ads
And replaced it with a mindless void of “content”
I began writing articles with several motivating factors: to enhance my resume, improve my professional credibility, articulate my developer instincts as coherent ideas, and maybe to start discussions with likeminded individuals. While it’s debatable how much I’ve really moved the needle toward those goals seeing how much writing I’ve actually done, there was another compelling motivation in the mix: making money.
By producing content, I’d capture the attention of readers like you, and monetize views and reading time through sponsorships, advertisements (ads), or platform commissions. I thought that if I could churn out enough articles, eventually those views would compound to the point where I could have a small, yet steady stream of cashflow even if I stopped writing regularly.
Initially, I felt good about this plan. It can take serious time and effort to write, so why should I do it for free? There’s nothing wrong with wanting to supplement my income with a “side hustle” or some passive income, right? As time went on though, I increasingly found myself loathing the internet’s “pay with your attention” content and services, and realized I too was contributing to the very thing I hated. My original motivations were healthy, and would have made the endeavor more than worth the energy, but the promise of financial gain eroded those initial incentives into little more than afterthoughts. This epiphany snapped me out of that avaricious mentality, and reignited my appreciation for the more fulfilling rewards which inspired me in the first place.
I now recognize how modern technology has steadily perverted the natural human drive to create into an “attention economy” with diminishing returns for both creators and consumers alike.
What is the “attention economy”?
The most concise definition I’ve landed on is:
The creation of content for which:
1. The creator is motivated by the promise of compensation.
2. The attention — or perceived attention — of the consumer is an important factor in determining the creator’s compensation.
Note: “Compensation” here isn’t exclusive to direct monetary rewards. It could also be personal data, marketing leads, or other assets which may eventually or indirectly lead to financial gain.
This definition isn’t enough to build a Theory upon, but it hopefully gets the basic point across. I’ll give a simplified example of a way this manifests in the real world.
A creator uploads a video (content) to YouTube. You (the consumer) watch some ads before watching the video.
YouTube provides certain creators — most these days — the ability to choose whether YouTube can show you platform-level ads (the dynamic ones that prevent the actual video content from playing). Further behind the scenes, numerous advertisers have agreed to pay YouTube to display their ads. In exchange for you giving your attention to the ads, you get to watch the video. The advertisers pay YouTube with money, YouTube pays the creator with money, and you pay the advertiser(s) with your attention. The longer creators can capture your attention, the more ads they (and their platforms) can show you, and the more revenue is generated.
The attention economy isn’t new in the digital age, but attention as a commodity is more accessible than ever.
Long before the digital age, ads were already tainting the neutral spaces and the aesthetics of the world around us. Today, billboards still create jarring interruptions to scenic landscapes. Posters, and the remnants of their predecessors — in the form of tape residue and rusty staples — litter windows, walls and telephone poles. Even restrooms often contain “rentable” surface areas for flyers to capture your attention in your most private moments.
Now we live in a world that has almost no sanctuaries. Our lives are as much online as they are in the “real world” — perhaps even more so. News, banking, shopping, communication, education, job searching, and so many more daily activities are migrating to the world wide web. Where attention goes, ads follow; thus, to participate in society at all requires payment with your eyes and ears.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Not all ads are created equal. Making people aware of products and services is a necessary part of a functional economy. The problem arises from the increasingly digital world that presents an all-too-easy opportunity for companies to commandeer your attention for their own gain.
To understand this problem, I’d like to examine advertisements through three lenses. The lenses are not mutually exclusive, but the latter two are especially harmful.
Reasonable Ads
The promotions that fall into this category include those products and services that are genuinely useful. Innovations to make life easier, even if only marginally, rely on people actually knowing they’re available.
Curated content also falls into this category. “Oh, you bought cat food last week, here’s an ad for some cat toys as well.” These ones teeter the line of useful and invasive — depending on the product category — but generally this is a good experience for the consumer, and may prove useful. Targeting gets a bit hairy though when you pull back the curtain on data collection. Your credit card, search history, geo-location data, and more are all being tracked, sold, and resold to pay for this experience. Therefore, it comes with an asterisk.
A variation on curated content is things like movie previews. They don’t explicitly rely on your personal data, but by visiting the cinema for a specific film, you get to see previews for similar films without explicitly forfeiting your privacy.
These are of course non-exhaustive, but certainly represent a sizable portion of the kinds of advertising most would find relatively acceptable.
Annoying Ads
There’s a small middle-ground when it comes to the unfortunate necessity of advertising. This is where those uninspired, unimportant, or useless ads fall. These might not necessarily be harmful, except to the extent that they are annoying and time-wasting, but neither do they have any redeeming qualities. One usually ends up with these types of ads by opting-out of personalization, or data sharing, though they are still quite ubiquitous even with targeting enabled. This is an unfortunate lose-lose situation: sacrifice your personal privacy and security, or suffer mind-numbing minutes — even hours — of your day being sucked away by irrelevant marketing. Some premium services offer an avenue out of this, but the unfortunate reality is the value of many such services often isn’t worth the cost, or if it is, they’re still collecting and selling your information to feed the attention economy in other ways.
Sponsorships are a type of advertising that fluctuate in their benefit to the consumer, but usually fall into this middle category. When sponsorships strongly align with the primary content being consumed, there is room for their utility. The problem arises from potentially compromising the integrity of the creator. Successful creators usually have some level of trust or support from their audience, but sponsorships rarely come with an unbiased review. Would a company want to pay someone to paint their product in a poor light? Probably not. Contracts usually stipulate no negativity toward the product, with incentives for positive promotion. Other types of sponsorships might truly just be this middle kind of mildly annoying, but not unethical. Sport stadium naming comes to mind here.
Evil Ads
In my experience, close to half of all promotional content falls into this category. It includes unethical tactics as well as products that exploit psychological and physiological weakness of human nature.
Unethical tactics are mostly due to some form of dishonesty. So called “clickbait” is a prime example of this. Clickbait is often used to describe promotions that sensationalize a story, or in some cases, present some form of sensory temptation, but actually redirect attention to entirely unrelated content. This tactic often overlaps with exploitations of other kinds. For example, using hyper-sexualized women as a means to promote a product having nothing to do with sexuality. A similar tactic is peddling misinformation, especially the kind to drum up fear. Make no mistake, misinformation is absolutely a form of advertising and a lucrative one at that; change someone’s worldviews and you change who they vote for, the causes to which they donate, and the brands they spend money on to present their identity to the world. Most national news networks in my country (the USA) are either doing this already, or heavily flirting with it.
Hand-in-hand with the tactics are the exploitative products. Commercials litter the airwaves glamorizing alcohol, gambling, tobacco, and many other addictive substances and practices. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not taking a stance against the availability of these products— plenty of these can be safely enjoyed in moderation — rather, the romanticization of addictive products constantly being trumpeted is inherently dangerous. Not only can these inescapable ads encourage lapses in addicts and those with health conditions, but can introduce such substances to individuals who might never have otherwise acquired a taste for them. These are just a few examples of the many commodities in this category that exploit human nature beyond simple awareness.
Content for the sake of ads
Have you ever searched for a recipe online? Maybe you knew most of the ingredients, but couldn’t remember the quantities, or how hot the oven needed to be. You found exactly what you were looking for on Google, clicked the link and then…wait, where is it? You landed on a page with walls of text, pop-ups and ads as far as the eye could see. After scrolling for an eternity, you finally found the only content you were actually looking for taking up a fraction of the page. This is what I mean by content for the sake of ads, only now it’s worse than ever.
One of the worst consequences of the digital attention economy isn’t the reality that ads were always destined to be present. It’s not even their near inescapability. No, it’s the fact that more and more content is being created for no purpose other than to capture every waking moment of your attention. In fact, with the rise of tools like generative AI, I would not be surprised if soon this type of content completely overtakes the kind that at least had a shred of genuine helpful intent (if it hasn’t already).
If you participate in social media, you’ve probably seen heated debates in comment sections. What you may not have realized is just how many of those “people” arguing were actually “bots”: computer programs designed to get you to engage with the content for as long as possible. Bots are as old as social media itself. Sometimes they are just there to increase post engagement, and other times they are used to scam people. Regardless, they are probably responsible for lots of the content you see every day on these platforms.
According to CBS News citing a Morning Consult survey, “86% of young Americans want to become a social media influencer” (source). An “influencer” is a person whose entire job consists of capturing the attention of their audience for as long as possible in order to promote sponsored content to them (aka ads). That’s right, the most glamorized job by the next generation is to be a human billboard. I of course don’t blame these kids. The career is accessible at their fingertips, and success in it is incredibly lucrative. To me however, there’s something sadly dehumanizing about it. Yes, in some cases, influencers can make videos of themselves doing what they love, and even hand-pick the advertisers that align best with their values, but not everyone can be that lucky. Selling-out to advertisers is likely the only way for most people to maintain the profession as a primary income source, and even if it isn’t, greed can sneak into the mix pretty easily anyway.
There are numerous other examples of the prevalence of content for ads sake. Producing attention-grabbing mindless content is practically a core tenant of digital “side hustles”. Netflix, Amazon Prime and other streaming platforms continue to churn out volumes of garbage and then use that volume to justify pushing ads on already-paying subscribers — never mind the environmental cost to producing and maintaining such waste. Even the networking platform LinkedIn is now mostly promoted posts copy and pasted from ChatGPT. If I’ve convinced you at all that there is a problem, then the future looks rather grim. This attention economy is growing faster than ever thanks to modern technology while ads, bots and page-fillers drown out whatever value might remain.
What’s the solution?
The most uninspired argument against critiques of the status quo usually goes something like, “Even if you’re right, what’s the alternative? You can’t just get rid of X!” And while the question itself is understandable, it misses the point entirely. Ignoring real problems like those caused by advertising simply because fixing them requires nuance and effort doesn’t mean that reasonable solutions are unattainable.
The first step has already begun: raise awareness for the problem. I have no doubt others have made a far more compelling case than I that there is a problem happening with content for the sake of ads, but unless people start to recognize how truly pernicious it’s become, any effort to change things will be futile.
The next step is to start to fight back as individuals. The ultimate irony of the “free” market is the price of admission has never been higher. It’s pretty much impossible to not pay heavily with your attention, but there are ways to reduce — elimination is practically impossible — advertising’s control over your life. Alternative internet browsers, ad-blocking plugins, and/or VPNs are a good start, but some services can detect these well enough to deny you entry entirely. For paid services that are actually ad-free and provide quality content: pay for them! Nothing speaks louder than money, and quality is becoming the exception these days. For services that provide mostly content for content’s sake, cut them out of your life; the second-rate entertainment is probably doing more harm than good. There are some services that are useful, but severely bloated with distractions. I would recommend using app timers or similar tools to limit your time on such programs and to keep you actively aware of their effects on you. Modifying our behavior was what got us here in the first place, only deliberately changing it again to reward companies for quality and punish them for garbage will naturally incentivize change.
Policy is a controversial subject, and requires the highest level of nuance to be effective without side effects that are as bad as (or worse than) the original problem. That being said, when it comes to misinformation, and harmful products or products that prey on addicts, regulation should be part of the discussion. I don’t know what the right answer is here, but predatory practices that take advantage of physical and mental illnesses should have no place in society. I find quite often that those who disagree with this point either don’t distinguish between economic value and moral value, or don’t believe exploiting disabilities absolves the exploitee from personal responsibility. It’s possible for someone to still object if they subscribe to a hardline flavor of anarchism, but if I’ve truly missed the mark here, I’d be interested in seeing the argument in the comments.
So where does that leave this article? Is this just another drop of content in the sea of the attention economy? Despite me publishing this without monetization enabled, I have still made an effort to capture your attention for a time to “advertise” my point of view. It’s not entirely original, but it also wasn’t written by generative AI or explicitly derived from somewhere else. My hope and goal for this article wasn’t revenue, or increased internet followers or even entertainment, but first-and-foremost for me to attempt to articulate a problem that’s been bothering me for quite some time. I hope that by publishing it, I’ve given others a foundation to express the same intuitions or — and maybe unlikely — I’ve expressed an idea entirely new to someone for the first time. If not, perhaps I’ll learn something new from the comments and revise some of the positions I expressed. Regardless, my argument was never that content creation was a bad thing, only that it’s increasingly being perverted into something unhealthy and hollow. Hopefully I’ve lived up to my goal, but either way, I’m happy to finally get this off my chest.