Look, I’ve accepted it. We’re barreling toward a future where corporations know everything about us, algorithms predict our every move, and privacy is about as quaint a concept as handwritten letters or knowing your neighbors’ names. The surveillance capitalism ship has sailed, the data has been harvested, and resistance is futile.
But if we’re going to live in this dystopian hellscape—and it seems we are—I have one humble request: Can we at least make the advertising good?
The Current State of Irrelevant Interruption
Right now, I’m bombarded with ads that seem designed by someone who’s never met me, never seen my bank account, and has apparently never heard of the concept of “target demographic.” I get ads for:
- $80,000 luxury SUVs (my car is held together by hope and duct tape)
- $300 skincare serums (I buy my moisturizer at the grocery store)
- Investment opportunities requiring six-figure minimums (my investment portfolio consists of loose change in my couch cushions)
- High-end vacation packages to destinations I couldn’t afford to fly to, let alone stay at
It’s like being stuck in a magazine meant for someone living in a completely different economic reality. These aren’t aspirational—they’re just annoying reminders that I exist in the wrong tax bracket for most of the modern economy.
The Promise of True Personalization
Here’s where it gets interesting: we’re living through the rise of AI that can apparently write poetry, pass medical exams, and beat grandmasters at chess. Surely, surely, this same technology could figure out that someone who clips grocery store coupons probably isn’t in the market for a $15,000 handbag.
Imagine a world where every advertisement you see is actually relevant to your life:
- Ads for affordable meal delivery services instead of $200-per-person restaurants
- Promotions for streaming services in your price range, not luxury experiences you’ll never try
- Deals on products that actually fit your lifestyle, budget, and genuine interests
- Sales on things you were already planning to buy anyway
The Dystopian Bargain
I’m not naive about what this would require. True advertising personalization would mean surrendering even more privacy than we already have. Companies would need to know not just what we search for, but how much money we have, what we worry about, what keeps us up at night, and what small luxuries actually bring us joy.
They’d need access to our bank accounts, our shopping patterns, our social media sentiment, our location data, our stress levels, and probably our dreams while we’re at it. The level of surveillance required would make current data collection look like amateur hour.
But here’s the thing: they’re probably going to collect all that data anyway. The question isn’t whether we’ll live in a surveillance state—it’s whether that surveillance state will at least have the courtesy to show us ads for things we might actually want.
The Efficiency Argument
From a purely practical standpoint, wouldn’t this be better for everyone? Companies would waste less money advertising $5,000 vacation packages to people who can’t afford a weekend camping trip. Consumers would see fewer irrelevant ads and maybe—just maybe—discover products that actually improve their lives.
Instead of being constantly reminded of everything we can’t afford, we’d see deals on things we actually need: cheaper alternatives to products we already use, sales at stores we actually shop at, and services that solve problems we actually have.
The Strange Comfort of Being Truly Known
There’s something almost comforting about the idea of being so thoroughly understood by the algorithmic overlords that every piece of marketing feels personally curated. Sure, it’s creepy. But it’s also kind of… nice?
Instead of feeling like an outsider looking into a world of luxury I’ll never access, I’d exist in an advertising ecosystem that actually acknowledges my reality. The algorithms would know that I comparison shop for everything, that I read reviews obsessively, that I care more about durability than brand names, and that my idea of splurging is buying name-brand cereal.
A Future Worth Surveilling For
So here’s my proposition to our future AI overlords: if you’re going to know everything about us anyway, at least use that knowledge responsibly. Make the ads so good, so relevant, so perfectly tailored to our actual lives that we almost forget we’re being manipulated.
Create a world where advertising isn’t an interruption but a service—where every ad is something we might genuinely want to know about. Where the surveillance state at least has the decency to understand what we can actually afford.
It’s not much to ask for from our dystopian future. But in a world where privacy is dead and corporations run everything, maybe “relevant advertising” is the small comfort we can hope for.
After all, if Big Brother is watching, the least he could do is recommend products in our price range.
