What If We Made Advertising Illegal?

Summary

What if we made all advertising illegal? It's such a wild idea that I've never heard it in the public discourse.Even saying it seems so far outside the Overton window that it makes nuking hurricanes sound reasonable (as some politicians proposed).But why? It makes perfect sense. The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear, and so would the mechanisms that allow both commercial and political actors to create personalized, reality-distorting bubbles:Clickbait, listicles, and affiliate marketing schemes would become worthless overnight.Algorithm-driven platforms like Instagram and TikTok that harvest and monetize attention, destroying youth, would lose their economic foundation.Facebook, X, Google, YouTube—all would cease to exist in their current forms.Ad companies are never going to regulate themselves—it's like hoping for heroin dealers to write drug laws.Think about what's happened since 2016: Populists exploit ad marketplaces, using them to bypass traditional media gatekeepers and deliver tailored messages to susceptible audiences. Foreign actors do the same, microtargeting divisive content to fracture our social fabric along existing fault lines.Outlawing advertising would help protect and reinvigorate our minds and democracy.Even as an advertiser (especially as an advertiser), I am convinced that outlawing advertising is the best thing we can do for our world now. More than gun control. More than tackling climate change. More than lowering the price of eggs.Removing these advanced manipulation tools would force everyone—politicians included—to snap back into reality. By outlawing advertising, the machinery of mass delusion would lose its most addictive and toxic fuel. Any form of paid and/or third-party advertising would become illegal. Full stop.The idea feels like sci-fi because you're so used to it, imagining ads gone feels like asking to outlaw gravity. But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for ...