Channel Surfing

We won't need to see ads once they're implicit in everything

Most of the TV I watch is sports—one of the last categories of programming that demands live viewing—so I still absorb plenty of television advertising in its traditional form, the commercial break. While watching an NBA playoff game last week, I told a friend that the commercials are more interesting now that they’ve become relatively scarce, attaining a novelty they didn’t have when they were part of our daily drudgery (my friend disagreed). The modest thrill of watching the Super Bowl, seeing each ad for the first time, and pondering what it’s trying to say is now available any night of the week, if you want it. The first couple of times you see a commercial, you have a chance to really notice it before it becomes invisible to you forever. Thus, I find myself watching an ad for Skyrizi or WingStop all the way through, curious to see how it delivers its message. And when I eventually lose interest and look at my phone, I’m advertised to in more advanced ways that have no nostalgic allure. Like billboards and other physical signage, the TV commercial break is a lingering relic of an era when advertising was a fixed and recognizable part of the landscape, delineated by clear boundaries. To avoid it, you moved yourself or your attention away from it, often physically: You could get up and go to the bathroom or channel surf when the show cut to commercials. You could take the scenic route and avoid the billboard-saturated commercial strip. Or you could just accept it all and learn to turn your brain off when you noticed an ad. But whatever you did, those ads remained in place, legible and predictable.

The forms of advertising that have replaced those static ads are harder to escape because they’re mostly on our phones and thus follow us wherever we go. They are closer to our bodies—literally. Last year, I wrote a speculative piece about self-driving cars and their eventual impact on the built environment, arguing that when humans no longer do the driving, cars won’t even need windows, which would in turn make billboard advertising obsolete. (In theory this would make the landscape more aesthetically pleasing, but advertising signage often turns out to be covering something that looks worse.) This wouldn’t mean that we’d be living in a post-advertising world, of course, but that the ads would be coming from inside the car, with our attention freed up from the road and redirected toward the various screens within the vehicle. Again, the ad as fixed environmental feature melts into the environment and becomes a fluid element that swirls around and envelops us, not only closer to our bodies but personalized like the clothes we wear. With this fluidity, the ads’ clear delineation also breaks down and they are integrated more seamlessly into their surroundings. Podcast ad reads wax and wane gently within the flow of recorded conversation, lacking obvious boundaries, so that we barely notice before they’re half done and anyway we don’t mind enough to bother skipping ahead. Short-form video trains us to press skip as soon as we recognize an ad, which paradoxically intensifies our engagement with them. The paywall model purports to replace ads but it really just relocates them within the content itself: I could suggest to you right here that you should become a paid subscriber to this newsletter (and you totally should). See what I did there? So much of the digital landscape is effectively an ad for itself that the distinction becomes irrelevant.

The late-20th-century dream of a human environment untarnished by visible ads is arriving, but not the way we imagined, via AI: computers advertising to other computers, the models having ingested the existing ad-saturated internet and spit a finer mixture of it back out—a hybridized world where marketing is rarely explicit but also implicit in everything. The nature of digital technology is to embed, mix, smooth, disagreggate; too often, the image of decentralization conceals a quiet recentralization elsewhere. It’s not just advertising that is closer to our bodies, but every kind of information. With cryptocurrency, the spaces of traditional finance are reconstituted in the self, a grim condition highlighted by the recent kidnapping and torture of a Bitcoin whale, in which the access point for dematerialized wealth is no longer the bank vault but the individual and their personal knowledge (their private key). As Deleuze recognized 30 years ago, it was already becoming harder to physically leave work, school, or any other institution: “In a control society, businesses take over from factories, and a business is a soul, a gas.” We never clock out and we’re proud to say it. Today, a TV commercial break is almost charming in its unsophistication—that when you notice it beginning you can just walk away from it. You can’t take a bathroom break from yourself.

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Reads:

• Elena Burger on paperclip-punk as the defining visual aesthetic of today’s internet. “The weightless, cloud-like, visuals of paperclip-punk are an implementation detail, but feel to me like the elimination of unnecessary clutter and distraction, which are an encumbrance to machine thought.”

• Blackbird Spyplane diagnosing the crisis of late internet culture. “As the waters rise, clinging to some sense of vestigial institutional coolness and prestige is like clinging to a slender, beautiful piece of driftwood, hoping it alone will keep your chin above the waves.”

• A good tech criticism reading list from Mike Pepi.

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