The Future & Advertising
The bar of what it takes to be a “star” drops lower and lower with the increased interactivity
of the digital age. Time was, you had to be the ruler of a country to be worth lobbying - whole
mercantile dynasties have been founded on a monarch’s careless favour, while others have
died with one’s displeasure. Later you had to be a film star, paid millions and seen on
televisions all over the world, to qualify to be approached by ad companies. Now? Even
comparatively normal people with some slight “influencer” status are being leveraged to
subtly advertise products by featuring them in the background of their Instagram pictures or
similar.
It is clear that over time humans have become more and more tolerant of what would be
considered intolerable intrusions in any earlier epoch of history. With the increase in blanket
online surveillance, advertisers now see almost all you write and say online. And once the
last few methods of avoiding this digital molestation are closed up, they can (and will) begin
leveraging this surveillance in more and more obvious ways. A common sight in low-budget
online games of the early 2010s were popup messages that said things like "Share this
game on Facebook and receive a free item!" These simple messages were nonetheless
effective at turning average people into willing product promoters, and using all carrot and no
stick. But it was crude, and there’s no doubt things will go further. Sony patent 8246454-B2,
filed in 2009, gives us a glimpse of the future. The description explains that the patent
describes “methods, systems, and computer programs for converting television commercials
into interactive network video games.” An example of such “interactive” commercials is
illustrated by the figure reproduced below.

Here, the microphone of a Smart TV or videogame console is used to detect sound, and
McDonalds requires the repetition of the company name before a commercial can be exited mandating proactive engagement with the advertisement rather than just passive absorption.
And it's inevitable that this will spread beyond personal abasement in the privacy of your own
home. When you order food online you'll see a popup saying "Mention Coca-cola positively
in a tweet and get 10% off your next Coke!". Neural networks will scan your tweet, check the
context isn’t negative or neutral, and reward you accordingly. Still all carrot and no stick, of
course.
Eventually companies will be able to track what we say in-person as well, either through
always-on phone microphones, invasive personal assistants, or cliche police-sponsored
Big-Brother style compulsory bodycams for public safety. Now companies will partner with
government to ask you to shill in public for bonuses. "Tell a friend about the new Mountain
Dew Electric flavour today and receive a shocking 2% off your next electricity bill!"
The ‘bonuses’ will start becoming direct fiat cash bribes - 0.5p for every corporate slogan
you say during your day, 1p for every jingle you whistle in public with a bonus based on how
many people are nearby, £2 if you wear a shirt with their logo on it on your next date. Et
cetera. Everyone else will be doing it too of course, so nobody will mind you spouting these
advertisements at them mid-conversation. After all, your friends will probably reply with a
slogan from their own chosen corporate teat in return!
I expect eventually it will be so normalised and accepted people will put aside a certain time
of day to get together with all their friends, sit in a big group, and get all their corporate
shilling for the day done in one big go. They'll all assemble and one by one spit out as many
catchphrases and jingles as they can, as quickly as possible. Everyone will get their money,
and they'll move on with their day. It's only efficient, after all.
But the advertisers will keep adjusting the rewards and tweaking the algorithms to make you
work harder and harder for your money. Eventually it will become a fulltime job for people,
who will make their entire living just by becoming these walking billboards. Your daily
morning session won’t be enough to pay the bills anymore. You'll have to spend more and
more time at the group shilling session, hour after hour, until eventually you have no free
time left, and neither does anyone else.
Every waking moment you are in contact with another human being you will both be
stumbling over yourself as you compete to blurt out as many promotional announcements as
possible, with specialist software watching carefully to make sure you have the requisite
levels of enthusiasm and sincerity in your voices.
The only respite your ragged vocal cords will get will be when you are alone, and you will be
so exhausted from a hard day’s bleating you’ll be keen to give your voice as much of a rest
as you can. You will simply stop speaking your own words altogether. When you are with
people you will be advertising, and when you are alone you will be resting in silence.

And as this goes on, actual language will become obsolete. You, and the rest of the planet,
will simply forget how to speak normally. You will have spent so long uttering these empty
company catchphrases, you will literally forget what they mean. They call it "semantic
satiation", and you’ve probably experienced it yourself. You repeat a word for long enough,
and it stops sounding like a word at all. Now imagine that, but with all of human language.
There’ll be no more interior monologuing, and all that will rattle around inside your head will
be abstract conceptions and the occasional stray slogan bouncing through your mind.
In the same way cavemen would grunt and groan at each other, people in the far future will
communicate solely through these commercial catchphrases devoid of all meaning save the
low-fidelity slight variation of tone that the sincerity detectors will allow. Even the company
ad-men will be doing it, and its likely they themselves will no longer be able to create new
jingles now their language skills have so far deteriorated. They'll just string random snippets
of gibberish from existing catchphrases together to form "new" advertisements, until
eventually the entire purpose of the system has been forgotten.
The system, like all systems strive to, will endeavour to become perfectly balanced and as
self-sufficient as it is possible to be. Devolved animal-like humans will echo the garbled
slogans of long-defunct companies to each other while scrabbling around in the ruins of
civilisation and automated systems will deposit money into their bank accounts, which will
automatically be used to pay the automatically-generated utility bills which will fulfill their
needs. The electricity bill will keep people warm. The food bill will keep people fed. And so
on, for ever and ever.