A New Chapter in the Grand Narrative

Rachel Haywire

Dec 12, 2023

Today, we have a guest piece about advertising by the always thought-provoking Vanya Bagaev. He is the mind behind Echoes of NoNe and a contributor to the Soaring Twenties Social Club. It is far too often that critiques of advertising offer generic screeds against capitalism without any substance behind them. In contrast, Vanya takes a deep dive into the technics of modern advertising and the social manipulation involved. He paints a sardonic and dystopian picture of the world we already live in, concluding with a whisper of resilience.

You vs. Marketing

To our grief, most of the tech we use now exists only because of ads. Advertising and technology always go side by side. First, pictures and text, then audio and video, then high-quality audio and high-quality video, then the same but AI-generated, then the same but in a virtual space, then the same but in dreams. Soon, as the technology advances, we enter the brave new world where we are going to watch ads, porn and 4.5-second cat videos in our brains, drinking banana smoothies without using our outdated devices called ‘eyes’. People get their dopamine fixes, companies get their products sold, shareholders of NeuralAd Inc. buy yachts and run their private military campaigns, the economy is growing, and everyone is happy.

Thus wander my thoughts as I stroll through a white-tiled Tube’s corridor at Angel station in London. The corridor meanders leading me to moving steps. I put my feet on them and the steps start transferring me down into surroundings of colourful ad imagery neatly tiled with low-resolution screen panels. Did you know that marketers lobbied for underground design and architecture? It’s not a conspiracy. Long labyrinths and slow escalators allow marketers to exhibit hundreds of hypnotising billboards juxtaposed well to the monochrome walls that immediately draw the eye of the beholder.

Angel is the station with the longest escalator in London. The vertical rise is 27.5 meters and the total length is 61 meters, making it 3rd longest in Europe. Flashing pictures don’t bring me joy but the long escalator reminds me of the time when I was living in St. Petersburg. The average underground escalator in there is deeper and longer than the average escalator in London, and probably anywhere else. They even have the longest escalator in the world on the Admiralteyskaya station. Steps move you into a depth of 67 meters with a total length of 130 meters. That means only one thing: a shitload of ads.

Marketers can build only a finite tunnel in the physical world, unless it’s a circle or something like a Möbius strip¹. Dante should have thought of adding the 10th circle. Just below the very bottom, after the funnel narrows to the Treachery circle, it expands again and creates the Advertising circle, where people who want to reach spiritual refinement circulate inside, endlessly watching ads with their eyes wide opened like in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. That’s all just a fantasy, but we live in the era of the internet, inhabiting high-tech virtual spaces where everything is possible, including the most daring fantasies. What if marketers could build an infinite shithole of ads inside the virtual world instead of the physical? Oh, wait…

Advertising metastasized into a greedy abomination called AdTech. Do you know how it works? Door-to-door canvassers don’t need to knock on every door to find you. Not anymore. Now they have the precise coordinates of your porch because you gave them consent to spy on you, and they don’t even need to knock. The door is always open because you do it voluntarily, offering them cookies when they come. The tech giants buy, HODL and sell your attention in real-time with billions of transactions happening every second. The highest bidder gets you first.

However, for absolute success, the bidder must have a perfectly designed ad². An ad network that sells placements doesn’t want to waste bullets. They value your attention more than you do. So, in a case when the bidder pays for clicks or app installs, the advertiser is interested in showing only the ads that you are most likely to click. Having the best ad is not enough, you must also have money to show it. Who wins? NeuralAd Inc.

The grand delusion is a belief that you are anaesthetised to ads. The vast majority of websites have tracking and ads enabled. Many scripts responsible for this take up to a few seconds to load and worsen your browsing experience. It devours your time, your internet traffic, and therefore your money. People say they hate junk mail and fliers. Yet these artefacts of the physical world are much less intrusive than anything you see online. To start using a website, you, scared by the pop-up, need first to navigate your shaking hand to a tiny cross and terminate it. Ironically, together with the emergence of AdTech, the code was written for Adblock commencing the resistance.

Once you’re through the ads jungle, you enter the content maze. Many things you read, watch or listen are designed to sell you something (subscribe, by the way, and leave a comment). The aim is to get more sales, a bigger audience, more clicks, more money, and more attention. The evilest inventions of the XXI century are not “better” guns, bombs, dubstep, vape, 5G, shoe-umbrellas, climate change, or Netflix anime adaptations³. The cruellest and the most inhuman creations are infinite scroll and push-notifications. Your attention is continuously bought and sold: before you start scrolling to get you scrolling, during the scrolling to keep you scrolling and when (if?) you stop scrolling to get you back to scrolling.

There is no algorithm that optimises well-being or well-thinking. These concepts cannot be explained mathematically with all their beauty and complexity, their results only visible in the long term. Ads want your clicks. The smartest people on Earth constantly optimise them to make you click without thinking. For advertisers, you are not a modern homo sapien making intelligent decisions. For them, you are a savage given a rectangular piece of plastic and metal, deeply confused, overdosed on dopamine and lost in the loneliness of the brave new world.

It’s a new chapter in the grand narrative, and a new type of conflict we are all engaged in. All realms, physical, spiritual and virtual, have blended together into one surreal creamy mash, and this new world wants only one thing from you. Your attention. The opponent with the ancient archetype has taken a new chthonic entity.

Selling Dreams, Buying Whims

“It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.” ― David Foster Wallace

In the ninth episode of the first season of Rick and Morty, an eccentric old man named Mr. Needful opens a vintage store called Needful Things. Summer, Rick’s granddaughter, works in that shop. Rick gives her a ride to the job and after meeting Mr. Needful there, he becomes suspicious that the merchant is the devil.

All items sold in Needful Things are cursed. An aftershave sold to one of the customers is supposed to capture female attention. It works, yes, but also makes you impotent. Any desire fulfilled by a needful thing turns into misery as time passes.

Rick invents a device that identifies all cursed items. He uses the device to reveal the truth to the customers which leads him and Mr. Needful into a fight. But Summer, who among others doesn’t believe Rick and trusts and admires Mr. Needful, pushes her granddad out of the shop. Rick opens a new shop across the street – Curse Purge Plus! He can instantly cleanse any item from curses for a small fee. This pushes Mr. Needful to attempt suicide but Summer ends up saving him. Later, Summer arrives at Rick’s shop to concede her defeat.

At the end of the episode, Mr. Needful, wearing a black turtleneck sweater, opens a new business, now on the internet under the domain n33dful.com. While Mr. Needful congratulates employees on the opening, he receives an SMS saying that their startup has just been bought by Google. Mr. Needful fires Summer upon knowing of her betrayal and Summer accuses him of “Zuckerberging” her. In response, he says, “I was Zuckerberging people before Zuckerberg’s balls dropped”, which probably is the best line of the entire season.

The irony of the episode works on multiple levels. First, dramatic irony. Nobody believes Rick, although it is apparent to us and him that Mr. Needful is the devil. We learn this even before Rick learn this. It’s obvious from the first scene when we meet Mr. Needful. Second, the situational irony. Every needful thing makes the customer expect one thing but they get the opposite. Third, the story makes a full circle returning back to where it started, but instead of a vintage shop full of cursed things, now Needful Things is the startup bought by a tech giant.

Rick And Morty is famous for cultural references and deconstructions of modern society. In this episode, the authors took a widely used storytelling trope and turned a cliché into a powerful satire. One of the variations of this Satanic archetype, a wish seller, tends to enter bargains by helping others in the short term and then screwing them over in the long run. Remember Demiurge who first created the physical world and then kept mankind away from all that is purely spiritual? As Mr. Needful says about his shop, “Nobody ever pays here… not with money” (this essay is free, for that matter).

In this trope, the devil relies on the way people desire things. He uses whimsical desires and turns them into a bargain with a high price that is not money. We want things for various reasons. Sometimes we don’t have a choice because of life’s circumstances, sometimes we just have a dream caused by internally or externally formed desires.

So let’s take an example. If you get fired from your job you may end up having no money to live on. You need to find a new job and probably have to learn new skills along the way. You could enrol in a paid course to achieve this, which is perfectly logical. It’s a necessity that dictates this desire. Yet dreams are delusional. If you already have a steady job you dream of a better one, with a higher salary and social status. It appears perfect in your vision, but everything flawless is inherently flawed. In your dream, you are successful, healthy, wealthy, wise, creative, interesting, intelligent, fit, loved by family, friends, followers, fans and have limitless opportunities ahead of you.

That’s what marketers sell you, a dream. Now they have the tools to target only the most susceptible to each individual temptation. Using advances in science and technology, a Mr. or Ms. Needful will find you and make you an offer you desire with a price they set. The question is not if you can resist a single offer but how many offers you will expose yourself to.

…

61 meters pass but the steps are still moving. I realise I am alone in the tunnel. Ads get weird. Like magic mirrors, they show things I want to see. I am scared. I run down but the steps start moving up, freezing me in space and time. I hurl myself up but they revert their direction. Suddenly, on one of the screen panels, I see myself. Better me. He is healthy, wealthy and wise, a Greek statue, a conqueror, a king with a banana smoothie in his hand. Bewitched and beguiled, I gaze at the ad and the steps keep carrying me forwards.

¹ But I would prefer a rollercoaster designed by Julijonas Urbonas

² If you don’t have enough cringe in your life, here’s a good place to fix that r/shittymobilegameads/

³ One Piece was good, tho.

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