DOROTHY SAYERS saw this hell coming 90 years ago, when she wrote Murder Must Advertise. “Like all rich men, [Lord Peter Wimsey] had never before paid any attention to advertisements. He had never realised the enormous commercial importance of the comparatively poor. Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion. Phantasmagoria — a city of dreadful day, of crude shapes and colours piled Babel-like in a heaven of harsh cobalt and rocking over a void of bankruptcy.”
Then there were the brutally far-sighted novels of Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth in the 1950s, in which advertising agencies contend to arrange or avert a war with the human colony on Mars; and, nowadays, we live in a world in which Facebook could provoke massacres in Myanmar, because it employed only one man who could understand the incitements to genocide posted in Burmese, and he lived in Dublin.
When I was at The Guardian, I made sure that every reference to Google and Facebook in the editorials called them giant advertising companies. It was an important point. They do not join people together: they aggregate and then segment an audience larger and better understood than any other in history.
They have also revolutionised what this advertising can sell. Between them, they have invented or at least democratised an entirely new thing to advertise: the person of the advertiser himself. This is not a Mad Men-type glamorisation of the men who make ads. If it is a development of anything in the 1960s, that is the use of television in political campaigns to sell candidates.
YouTube, which is, of course, owned by Google, seems to have invented — and TikTok, perhaps, has perfected — the model whereby quite ordinary people can become extremely rich by selling an image or simulacrum of themselves. Mr Beast, the most popular “creator” on YouTube, has 374 million subscribers there, and more than a million on TikTok. An influencer, then, is someone who sells themselves as a product, as well as all the other phantasmagoria that they tout. Sometimes they are politicians, but the most successful are not.
This was the innovation that Elon Musk brought to Twitter when he bought it and renamed it X. The premium program there allows you to earn money off the advertising that is stuck on the back of your posts. It explains how Rupert Lowe, the fanatical anti-immigration MP expelled from Reform, makes £930 every hour on X. It explains the financial success of the Tate brothers and the political success of Donald Trump. All the incentives in such a system work as they do in porn: the audience wants more and more, harder and harder, to titillate its jaded appetite.
IN A world run by advertising agencies, or even one in which they are more powerful than most national governments, and could be said to have captured the Trump administration, the problem is not just that they direct our attention where it should not be. They also corrupt the quality of attention by constantly interrupting it.
This is something that smartphones have made very much worse. I watched yesterday a heartfelt rant on TikTok by a teacher describing the state of American state schools: how her pupils wake up to their smartphones and are so constantly stimulated by their screens that, when these are removed for lessons, the pupils sink into complete apathy. They cannot follow an argument; they can’t be punished, because they have no sense of consequences. This is all described as dopamine withdrawal after the overstimulation that the phones provide for them. It is eerily reminiscent of the patients described in Oliver Sacks’s book Awakenings, who were cured after years in a zombie state by a drug that restored their natural dopamine levels.
Perhaps civilisation can be saved only by the invention of the opposite drug: one that will dial down the dopamine system until it can resist the attractions of the smartphone. The only alternative is self-control, and that is exactly what advertising exists to subvert and, ultimately, to destroy.
