During the Super Bowl, Anthropic ran a dystopian AI ad about dystopian AI ads featuring an AI android physical trainer hawking insoles to a user who only asked for an ab workout. Not to be outdone, Amazon ran a commercial for its AI assistant Alexa+ in which Chris Hemsworth fretted over all the different ways AI might kill him, including severing his head and drowning him in his pool. Equally bleak, the telehealth company Hims & Hers ran an ad titled “RICH PEOPLE LIVE LONGER” in which oligarchs access such healthcare luxuries as facelifts, bespoke IVs, and “preventative care” to live longer than the rest of us. It was an anti-billionaire ad by a multibillion-dollar healthcare company.
Turn on the TV today, and you will drown in a sea of ads in which capitalists denounce capitalism. Think of the PNC Bank ads where parents sell their children’s naming rights a la sports stadiums for the money to raise them or the Robinhood ads where a white-haired older man, perhaps meant to evoke Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, curses the “men of means with their silver spoons eating up the financial favors of the one percent” from the deck of a yacht.
After years of ingesting the mainstream discourse around surveillance capitalism, Occupy Wall Street, and democratic socialism, corporations are regurgitating and even surpassing the rhetoric of the modern left. Naturally, it’s all a winking sleight of hand meant to corral us back into engaging with the same capitalism they portray as a hellscape — but with new and improved privatized solutions. In another widely reviled Super Bowl ad, the video doorbell company Ring tells us that every year, 10 million family pets go missing, and by opting into a web of mass surveillance, the company has reunited “more than a dog a day” with their families.
Modern advertisers descend from those ad men of the 1960s who first perfected the art of channeling our angst with society writ large into buying more junk. As historian Thomas Frank wrote in his book “The Conquest of Cool,” midcentury advertisers constructed “a cultural perpetual motion machine in which disgust with the … everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption.”
The machine has hummed on ever since, retrofitting capitalism’s reprimands into its rationales. It churns out commercials reframing the precariat’s pain not as the product of plutocracy but as the product of buying the wrong products. Advertisements pitch that the good life is to be secured by procuring high quality goods, by curating the right combination of AI assistants, locally crafted beer, paraben-free dryer sheets, Jimmy Dean breakfast biscuits, Capital One Venture X points, BetMGM spreads, Coinbase crypto wallets, on and on.
It’s lunacy. Buying Levi’s won’t give you deep pockets. Brand promises, like all promises, are made to be broken. As AI anxiety fueled fears of mass layoffs, Coca-Cola soothed American workers’ worries about “AI coming for everything” with a glossy 2025 Super Bowl ad, featuring Lauren London, where the gleaming actress flexed her dimples and told us everything would be all right. Ten months later, Coke automated its advertising with generative videos, replacing the actors they’d paid to soothe our worries about being replaced by AI with AI itself.
It sounds like you are describing an unfolding future where all communication us ultra-processed.
I have posted about this a couple times, but ever since I saw Jon Stewart a while back describe modern propaganda as ultra-processed speech. It’s engineered for reaction and engagement. It’s like you said, everything collapses into the same register when there’s a BOMBSHELL headline every day.
But the ultra-processed thing has been reaching much further into our media and culture than political speech for a while now. Like I dunno, everything that has half the people’s faces buried in their phone in public.
Yeah, “ultra-processed” is a really good way to put it.
What Stewart was pointing at fits this exactly. The speech isn’t meant to persuade or inform so much as trigger uptake. Reaction density over substance. When everything is engineered for engagement, it all collapses into the same flavor.
And you’re right, this escaped political speech a long time ago. It’s in entertainment, advertising, workplace language, even how people narrate their own lives online. Everything gets intensified, smoothed, and pre-digested so it can move fast.
The phone part matters a lot. When attention is constantly fragmented, communication adapts. Messages stop assuming patience or continuity. They become short, sharp, emotionally saturated enough to punch through distraction. That isn’t a plot. It’s selection pressure.
What that means, though, is that anything deliberately slower starts to feel wrong by default. Not boring, wrong. Out of sync. But that slowness can be doing work of its own, creating space where meaning has time to accumulate instead of spike.
That’s the part that worries me. Once we train ourselves to expect everything pre-processed, we lose our tolerance for forms of communication that unfold rather than hit. And those slower forms are often where thinking actually happens.
What’s our way forward? I don’t know and I’m struggling to figure it out, but the more I get into it, the more I come back to ideas like curiosity, authenticity, and connecting with people outside our comfortable social groups.
I really feel like the world we’re living in now is the result of engineered propaganda and the only cure is related to authentic connections among everyday people.
Yeah, that’s very close to where this thread kept pushing me too. Because of the back and forth here, I tried to consolidate some of it into a longer Substack essay. The link to my Substack is already above, and the new essay was just posted. No answers there either, just a slower pass at the same questions.
I appreciate your efforts, one thing I’m sure of is that, “I alone can fix it” is the antithesis of what we need right now. It’s going to take a lot of open, compassionate people to make things better.