> It’s easy to overlook how much advertising works. It works at a deeper level than you appear to describe. Agricultural society is a machine for converting in

> It’s easy to overlook how much advertising works. It works at a deeper level than you appear to describe. Agricultural society is a machine for converting increasing proportions of the Earth's biomass into larger numbers of biological humans. Culture is a set of practises for creating persons from that raw human material. Marketing is a means for business to capture culture for the purpose of creating persons with values overwhelmingly tilted towards goods-acquisition. The consequent positive feedback loop makes a marketing-driven culture incompatible with the continued existence of a healthy living planet. Marketing's victory over a sustainable culture was well-entrenched before the internet, which is essentially a (powerful) accelerant. We will slide faster into self-destruction with the internet than otherwise, but it's the same destination. A population of self-abnegating saints may have saved us from this, but beyond such fantasies, concentrating on the 'morality' of individuals in advertising is a misdirection. Once the machine was set in motion, the dismal result was probably inevitable.