Forced Consumption

The existence of the advertising Industry has not been justified, as far as I know. It almost entirely exists for the purpose of forced consumption.

The Original Justification

In 1594, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a French philosopher, published an essay on the need for an institution that provides all the information that people need to buy and sell commodities in order to fulfil their needs. What he suggested was a clearing house for commerce:

My father had this idea: he was a man of some experience and sound natural judgment, which always stood him in good stead, and he said that once, the idea came to him that in every town there ought to be some sort of place where people could go if they had any particular need or query and where they could register their requirements with an official specially appointed to deal with such matters. For instance, they might go and say “I want to sell some pearls,” or “I want some pearls to sell.” Or “I want someone to travel to Paris with me.” Or “I want a particular type of servant.” Or a master. Or perhaps someone needs a workman to do some job or other everyone’s requirements would be different. And it does seem that it would indeed be advantageous to everyone if we could make our needs known in this way, for many are the times when our needs go unnoticed and unfulfilled for want of opportunity to satisfy them (Richards 2022, p. 113).¹

This passage is quoted by Jeff Richards, a professor and historian in advertising, who argues that it was the motivation that led to advertising agencies. A few decades later, we had adverts making their way into newspapers. The justification for advertising agencies, then, was to provide information to do commerce.

In the above passage, Richards does not comment on what anyone outside of the advertising industry would point out. That this justification for the existence of the advertising industry is now completely irrelevant. We can use the internet to seek any information we want to do commerce.² In practice, the advertiser now seeks us out to provide the information, whether we like it or not. This article looks at their justification for the existence of the advertising industry. The conclusion is that so far, I don’t think they hold up to scrutiny.³

For a long time, the advertising industry mostly served a purpose of providing useful information to people. People wanted to know, for example, what a travelling merchant was bringing to a city.⁴ By the 1920’s, advertising had almost entirely turned into a systematic exploitation and commodification of people’s attention. Today people often call this surveillance capitalism.

The first academic studies on what grabs “involuntary attention” are largely attributed to Harlow Gale, in 1895.⁵ Within a decade, the profession was more focused on psychological manipulation, sometimes associating itself with Taylorism, which is the “scientific management” of labour.⁶

Along side this development, the justifications for the industry itself came to be about overcoming the irrational behavior of the public. Often considered to be so ignorant and emotional that they were almost comparable to women. Such irrationality was argued to be overcome with force.⁷

Forced Consumption

A historian who wrote about this cultural transition, Richard Ohmann, summarized the cultural shift towards forced consumption:

Older advertising assumed a reader wanting a product and willing to search through dense columns of type to find news about it. The newer visual advertising set out to ambush the reader’s attention, produce affect quickly, and lodge in the memory (Sherman, 2019, p. 66).

Explanations at the time were given by a copywriter, Nathaniel C. Fowler:

“It does not take a great writer to produce the words the people want to read. To make people read what they think they do not want to read requires a mind born in intelligence, educated in experience, and fitted to do all things well…

Folks assume that they do not read advertisements, and this is the reason for the engagement of the best artists and the best writers, that the advertisement, by its excellence and attractiveness, may force itself before the public and into the public” (Sherman, 2019, p. 65).

It would take “force” by a “mercenary intruder” (p. 66) to make people read what they don’t want to read. With the arrival of television in the 1950’s, it was quickly recognized in marketing that people could be forced not only to read what they don’t want to read, but see what they don’t want to see. Victor Lebow, a marketing consultant, elaborated on this goal:

We will have over 30 million television households next year. And television achieves three results to an extent no other advertising medium has ever approached. First, it creates a captive audience. Second, it submits that audience to the most intensive indoctrination. Third, it operates on the entire family…

We require not only “forced draft” consumption, but “expensive” consumption as well. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace.⁸

Forced consumption is not just about creating artificial desires, but can also be seen as an architectural design for ensnaring attention. James McNeil was a big player in creating the child-targeted advertising industry. He explained that kids now become consumers as soon as they are born because “they don’t know it any other way. They think it comes with the territory, that it is a natural part of becoming a person”(McNeil 1999, p. 19). This he explains, is how they handle the response from adverts. To oppose such a thing would be wrong according to McNeil, because “Being a consumer is a right; being a marketer is a privilege” (p. 38).⁹

With Google’s development of personalized search in 2009, similar justifications were needed to explain why the public was wrong in their opposition to surveillance. Google’s then CEO Eric Schmidt said, “more and more searches are done on your behalf without you having to type” and opined, “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next”.¹⁰

A similar sentiment was given by Larry Page, who said “Our ultimate ambition is to transform the overall Google experience, making it beautifully simple…almost automagical because we understand what you want and can deliver it instantly” (Zuboff 2019, p. 103).

Google’s interest in telling people what to do and what to search is perhaps a contributing factor behind why “66 percent of search engine users believe that the searches they conduct result in fair and unbiased sources of information”.¹¹

How Surveillance Capitalism Actually Developed

Narratives of how surveillance capitalism, and technofuedalism are a new economic order have been pushed recently. But when you look at the definition of surveillance capitalism¹², every single condition (except the automated computation) was met by about 1920. Including data-mining, invasion of privacy, human feedback and reinforcement, and conditioning.¹³

All of it was distrusted and resisted by the public back then, just as it is now. Economic historian Zoe Sherman gives a clear picture of this. Direct mailing lists were personalized data collection. The first to be collected was the name and address. The advertising industry harvested data on customers by pressuring clerks into asking for the name and address of their customers.¹⁴ Post office employee’s were bribed for data. Auto registries were scraped. This data was used to compile mailing lists.¹⁵ Mail was sent to individuals, asking for responses.¹⁶ More information was collected from the responses in order to refine the data. It wasn’t long before consumer credit ratings were constructed in secret through this surveillance.¹⁷

Yanis Varoufakis also seems to think this surveillance based attention economy is new.

The true revolution cloud capital has inflicted on humanity is the conversion of billions of us into willing cloud serfs volunteering to labour for nothing to reproduce cloud capital for the benefit of its owners.

This is not new, (and to correct him, it’s not willing). You can find examples of people in the 1920’s making comments about how adverts nudged their decision making in different directions due to the billboards, magazines, and newspapers that covered cities.¹⁸ The consumers made money for advertisers by driving down highways. The billboards were set up around corners to capture the attention from drivers that slowed down.

Zoe Sherman gives examples of resistance, or secret imposition of all aspects of surveillance capitalism from 1870-1920. The progressive movement wanted to restrict or ban the existence of billboards.¹⁹ The direct mailing was discussed in terms of psychological warfare.²⁰ The magazines and newspapers fought and caved in to the advertisers, which by 1900 had the majority share of revenue. For the most part, there was no consultation from the public.

It is not unreasonable to think that the scholarship from Varoufakis and Zuboff shows that the architecture designed to confine the visual space for society has contributed to preventing them from realizing that these architecture’s already existed.

Zuboff explains how this happens by bringing up Weiser’s concept of ubiquitous computing:

"The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it." He described a new way of thinking "that allows the computers themselves to vanish into the background.... Machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods"(Zuboff 2019, p. 156-157).

The Future of Forced Consumption

Michael Kwet and Karen Hao have both written about public resistance to the hyperscaler sized data centre’s that Amazon, Microsoft and Google have forced down the throats of countries like South Africa, Uruguay, and Chile.

This cloud colonialism, as Kwet quite accurately calls it, is almost certainly causing more emissions from induced consumption than from the energy use of the data centres themselves. That said, the new data centres will supposedly use more energy than San Francisco, make enough noise to harm nearby habitats, and use enough water to drain regional water supplies.²¹

The AGI masterminds explained their ambitions to a reporter at the New York Times. In Sutskever’s words, "I think that it's fairly likely that it will not take too long of a time for the entire surface of the Earth to become covered with data centers and power stations." There would be "a tsunami of computing...almost like a natural phenomenon." AGI—and thus the data centers needed to support them—would be "too useful to not exist."

According to Brockman, "The way we think about it is the following: We're on a ramp of AI progress. This is bigger than OpenAI, right? It's the field. And I think society is actually getting benefit from it."

The message from the tech industry is clear. Civilizational collapse through forced consumption is in fact beneficial to us. These genius’s have found the wisdom to correct society of their emotional and irrational behavior, just as the founders of modern advertising set out to do.

The algorithms will be used to generate adverts, slop, and do useful things as well. But mostly it will be slop. The exponential growth of computing power will likely enable their algorithms to get better at exploiting existing weaknesses in the limbic brain, and perhaps find new ones too.

Conclusion:

Forced consumption requires not just artificially created desires, but the construction of a fishing net to prevent people from escaping the mercenary intruders. Beyond that, forced consumption works best by preventing people from thinking about the net, and from knowing about how the net came to exist in the first place.

The last two decades quite evidently justify Sherman’s view that the overfishing of attention has led to a tragedy of the commons.²² It’s hard to justify the existence of the advertising industry anymore when other methods of informing people exist, and it’s purpose is almost entirely to force consumption.

Bibliography

Chase, S. (1925). The tragedy of waste. Macmillan Company.

Hao, K. (2025). Empire of AI: Dreams and nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI. Penguin Press.

Kwet, M. (2024). Digital degrowth: technology in the age of survival. Pluto Books.

Linn, S. (2022). Who's Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children. The New Press.

McNeal, J. U. (1999). The kids market: Myths and realities. Paramount Market Publishing.

Perzanowski, A. (2022). The right to repair: Reclaiming the things we own. Cambridge University Press.

Richards, J. I. (2022). A history of advertising: the first 300,000 years. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

Sherman, Z. (2019). Modern Advertising and the Market for Audience Attention: The US Advertising Industry's Turn-of-the-twentieth-century Transition. Routledge.

Varoufakis, Y. (2024). Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism. Melville House.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.

1. Richards, J. I. (2022). A history of advertising: the first 300,000 years. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

He was suggesting a clearinghouse for commerce. I doubt Montaigne or his readers ever suspected this paragraph would give birth to the idea of advertising agencies. It did.

In 1610 England, King James I appointed Sir Arthur Gorges and Sir Walter Cope to work for the Crown. They might be considered the first advertising agents, and for a king! King James approved an office called “The Publique Register, for generall commerce.” It was that clearinghouse, letting sellers post notice of goods for sale, and buyers post notice about goods they sought. While Gorges and Cope were charged with providing that information clearinghouse, beginning in 1611 the law let users decide how much to pay these agents. It wasn’t terribly profitable and closed in less than a year…

Theophraste Renaudot, King Louis VIII’s personal doctor, latched onto a variation of the idea. He established the Bureau d’Addresse et de Rencontres in 1630, which was a recruitment office and place to post job notices. Then, to obtain more reach for those notices, in 1631 he started the first French newspaper: La Gazette (Tungate 2007). He became not only the first French newspaper publisher and journalist but also the inventor of the personal ad. In a way, he became what could be considered an advertising agent, though one who specialized in recruitment advertising ( Richards, 2022, p. 114).

2. Such efforts are sometimes hindered of course, by the tech monopolies and their power to hide information by downranking useful information when it opposes their interests.

But in 2018, Google announced a new policy banning ads for “Technical support by third-party providers for consumer technology products and online services.”96 This shift was not initially designed to target hardware repairs. It was a response to growing and justified concerns about tech support scams that were duping unsuspecting computer users.97 Ads would direct users to call toll-free numbers. Once connected to a call-center, often located outside the jurisdiction of local law enforcement, the consumer would be convinced to pay exorbitant fees for useless or even harmful software fixes.

Unfortunately, Google’s ad ban does not distinguish between fly-by-night scam operations and legitimate independent repair shops. As a result, repair providers have seen drops in revenue of as much as 70 percent, and some have been forced to close their doors altogether.98 Perhaps most gallingly, while small shops are banned from advertising repairs, manufacturers and their retail partners, like Best Buy, are not. So, consumers looking for repair services are being diverted from independent repair options, towards the authorized ecosystems maintained by device makers.

In August of 2018, Google promised it would “roll out a verification program” for legitimate providers “in the coming months.”99 That program never materialized. In fact, the company doubled down on its repair-ad ban in late 2019, expanding it globally. Again, Google had good reason to crack down on fraudulent ads, but its rationale for hanging legitimate repair providers out to dry is harder to discern. Google, notably, has moved into the hardware business itself in recent years. In 2014, it acquired the smart-device maker Nest. Its Pixel line of smartphones launched in late 2016, and the Pixel book laptop a year later. Much like other device makers, Google offers its own repair services and authorized repair providers.100 The company has a clear, if small, financial interest in restricting third party repair (Perzanowski 2022, p. 110-111).

3. It’s impossible to go through tens of thousands of books and articles to find all of them, by hand. I may try to use machine learning to do that in the future. The case for a justification here is restricted to a philosophical one. In later articles I will look at the practical one.

4. Sherman, Z. (2019). Modern Advertising and the Market for Audience Attention: The US Advertising Industry's Turn-of-the-twentieth-century Transition. Routledge.

The most familiar and non-suspect form of advertising prior to the Civil War came from merchants alerting the local public to recent shipments. Few items, especially items transported from afar, were consistently stocked.

The implicit assumption behind such early advertisements was that buyers generally knew what they wanted to buy (a bolt of cloth, a porcelain tea set, a slave) and were keeping half an eye out for when the items they wanted reached a merchant in their area. Such advertising was modest and generally limited to merchants.

Aggressive advertising or advertising undertaken by manufacturers was considered highly untrustworthy. Only the disreputable or the desperate would undertake a large-scale advertising campaign. If a business had to advertise, it was taken as a sign of weakness; bankers were likely to conclude that the business was in trouble and decline to offer credit (Sherman, 2019, p. 7).

5. Eighmey, J., & Sar, S. (2007). Harlow Gale and the origins of the psychology of advertising. Journal of Advertising, 36(4), 147-158.

6. Sherman, Z. (2019). Modern Advertising and the Market for Audience Attention: The US Advertising Industry's Turn-of-the-twentieth-century Transition. Routledge.

Instead, they wrote about establishing in audiences an unthinking habit of consuming the advertised product. Herbert Casson wrote, for example, that “the aim of the farseeing advertiser is to make the public buy his goods, not from choice, but from habit” (Casson 1911, p. 70). Consumption habits can be formed, Walter Dill Scott claimed, by tapping into an understanding of instinct (Scott 1910, p. 79). An advertising campaign has been a success, he explained, if audiences “attribute to our social environment that which in reality has been secured from the advertisement which we have seen so often that we forget the source of the information”….

This changing view of the manipulability of audiences overlapped with the emergence of a new language for talking about workers. Scientific management, associated first with Frederick Winslow Taylor and other celebrity efficiency experts, suffused much business thinking. The scientific manager’s view of workers is that they weren’t that bright and couldn’t be relied upon to find the best way of performing their own job. An expert, however, could determine the best way of performing any task, and then could shape the work environment to induce (or coerce) workers to do the task in that expert determined best way (Taylor 1911).

Some advertising professionals imported Taylor’s “scientific” label. Herbert Casson introduced his 1911 book Ads and Sales: A Study of Advertising and Selling from the Standpoint of the New Principles of Scientific Management by stating, “This book is the first attempt, as far as I know, to apply the principles of Scientific Management to the problems of Sales and Advertising” (Casson 1911).

Advertising industry giant Claude Hopkins published a book entitled Scientific Advertising in 1923 (Hopkins 1966 [1923]). Instead of workers, Casson’s and Hopkins’ intended subjects of scientific control were audiences (Sherman 2019, p. 126).

7. Ibid, p. 125

The direct-mail medium reached its modernization take-off as a new view of the relationship between expert and audience came to prominence. Merle Curti’s content analysis of the prominent advertising professionals’ journal Printers’ Ink found that authors were split between two views of human nature.

Some took the view that humans, especially men, are basically rational and will make reasoned decisions about their purchases. Advertising, therefore, should present a well-supported, logical argument that explains how purchasing the advertised product serves the consumer’s self-interest. This genre of advertising came to be known as “reason-why” advertising. Others took the view that although humans are self-interested, most, including men but especially women, are not rational. They respond to emotional cues, particularly to anxieties about their social status.

From the time Printers’ Ink was founded in 1888 until sometime around 1905, the first view predominated in its pages and the second was a minority dissenting view. After 1910, the second view predominated (Sherman, 2019, p. 125).

8. Lebow, V. (1955). Price competition in 1955. Journal of retailing, 31(1), 5-10.

9. Full context:

Since children are a future potential market for all goods and services does this mean all marketers should begin targeting them at birth? This sounds ridiculous, but as ridiculous as it may sound, children begin their consumer journey in infancy and certainly deserve consideration as consumers at that time. Being a consumer is a right; being a marketer is a privilege. Therefore, children may be the focus of marketing efforts in infancy, although these efforts primarily are funneled through the parents.

10. Jones, J. (2025). Don’t fear artificial intelligence, question the business model: How surveillance capitalists use media to invade privacy, disrupt moral autonomy, and harm democracy. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 49(1), 6-26.

11. Kristen Purcell, Joanna Brenner, and Lee Rainie, “Main Findings,” Pew Research Center, Internet and Technology, March 9, 2012, www.pewresearch.org/internet/2012/03/09/main-findings-11.

66 percent of search engine users believe that the searches they conduct result in fair and unbiased sources of information. Among users eighteen to twenty-nine, the number of believers rises to 72 percent.

12. The definition here is taken from Zuboff’s book:

13. The aforementioned historian of advertising, Richards, argued that Ptolemy’s idea of putting his face on coin’s would have reinforced people’s beliefs about his divine power. “In 305 BC, Ptolemy I of Egypt was the first to depict his own portrait on his currency, both as a legitimisation of his power and as a propaganda instrument…Coins allowed rulers to put their message in the pockets of nearly every citizen” ( Richards 2022, p. 20-21).

14. Sherman, Z. (2019). Modern Advertising and the Market for Audience Attention: The US Advertising Industry's Turn-of-the-twentieth-century Transition. Routledge.

Data could be compiled from the direct data-collection efforts of the advertiser. For retailers in particular, direct-mail giant Homer Buckley wrote, “The first source for the list is charge customers. These names can be taken off the ledger.” Cash customers can also be added to the list “by asking customers to kindly give you their names and addresses so that they may be insured of receiving literature which might be of interest to them as it is issued. It is seldom that customers are not willing to give you their names” (Buckley 1916a, p. 55).

15. Sherman, Z. (2019). Modern Advertising and the Market for Audience Attention: The US Advertising Industry's Turn-of-the-twentieth-century Transition. Routledge.

John Lee Mahin wrote in the 1910s, “At clipping bureaus, one can buy lists of names of persons who are accustomed to travel, those who are reported ill of certain diseases, those who contemplate building, and other information which is gathered from the newspapers” (Mahin 1916, p. 238)

16. Sherman, Z. (2019). Modern Advertising and the Market for Audience Attention: The US Advertising Industry's Turn-of-the-twentieth-century Transition. Routledge.

Those who responded by mailing in an inquiry were by definition likely prospective customers and well worth paying the postage to reach with additional sales material. Mail order pioneer Samuel Sawyer wrote,“The most valuable addresses are those of people who have replied to your advertisement” (Sawyer 1900, p. 36).

17. Sherman, Z. (2019). Modern Advertising and the Market for Audience Attention: The US Advertising Industry's Turn-of-the-twentieth-century Transition. Routledge.

Mailing list construction took place in the context of an expanding information economy. Personal information collected for a variety of purposes, not just advertising audience assembly, became available, often in commodity form, and then became an input into mailing list construction.

For business-to-business advertising, credit rating bureaus were a common and information-rich source of data for direct-mail targeting. Dun and Bradstreet was a leader in commodifying commercial credit data and was the most frequently cited as a source of names and addresses for direct mail (Cited by, e.g. Maurice Elgutter 1916, p. 31).

Dun and Bradstreet grew out of the first credit reporting agency in the US, the Mercantile Agency, formed in 1841. By the 1870s under R.G. Dun’s leadership, they employed 10,000 investigators in 69 branch offices and handled 5,000 queries daily (Beniger 1986, p. 257; Lauer 2017, p. 6).2

Credit reports could also sometimes be used for consumer good marketing; Elgutter referred to “credit rating books, if there are such in your city,” as a source of names of wealthy men who are prospective buyers of luxury consumer goods (Elgutter 1916, p. 33).

The construction of institutions for consumer credit surveillance were well underway, but consumer credit bureaus “long refrained from selling promotional lists” out of fear that doing so “would tarnish their reputation for impartiality and stir resentment among subscribers (on whom they also depended to furnish consumer information)” (Lauer 2017, p. 19).

18. Tragedy of Waste, p. 116

"But I have come to the conclusion that I am going to have a funny diet and a funny existence if I take all the advice that I am getting in the advertisements. 'Ride on Trains,' says one great series of advertisements. The railroads must be behind that, although, for all I can tell, it may be the plush manufacturers. They may have it figured out that if more people ride on trains, these people will wear out more plush in seats in railroad coaches, and the railroads will have to buy more plush.

"But I get a conflicting urge from that other great series of advertisements which tells me to 'Stay at Home More,' and which pictures so passionately the comforts of home. I had my grip all packed the other day to ride on a train (just anywhere, so it was on a train), when I happened to read one of those stay-at-home ads, and I immediately unpacked my things and put on my house slippers and—I have it! It is the House-Slipper Manufacturers' Association that is running those stay-at-home ads!

19

The most substantive attempts were probably some Progressive Era reformers’ campaigns to restrict or even ban billboards (Sherman 2019, p. 21).

20

Beyond the moment of first contact achieved by the mail carrier, direct-mail advertisers had to rely on psychological control. Seemingly all worked from the premise that audiences were resistant(Sherman 2019, p. 127).

21

Until recently, the largest data centers were designed to be around 150-megawatt facilities, meaning they could consume as much energy annually as close to 122,000 American households. Developers and utility companies are now preparing for AI megacampuses that could soon require 1,000 to 2,000 megawatts of power. A single one could use as much energy per year as around one and a half to three and a half San Franciscos ( Hao 2025, p. 270-ish).

22. Attention is described by economic historian Zoe Sherman as a “fictitious commodity”, borrowing a phrase from Polanyi, who defined it as “something that is treated as a market commodity, but is not actually produced for the market.”

Fictitious commodities will not respond appropriately to market signals – and because allowing “the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment . . . would result in the demolition of society” (Sherman 2019, p. 3)…

Anyone who devises a way to get in our faces can sell that space in our visual field to advertisers and the more they get in our faces, the more they have to sell; if, collectively, all the attention merchants in aggregate assault our senses beyond our capacities to process, all of their messages get lost in the din and our brains get jittery (Sherman 2019, p. 156).