With this article, Thomas Wells asks a questions that I have long considered. Since we are almost powerless to resist the cravings that advertising instills in our highly manipulable brains, shouldn't it be regulated like other dangerous things?
Wells' concern goes even deeper...
"Advertising is a natural resource extraction industry, like a fishery. Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention. We are the fish and we are not consulted.
"Two problems result from this. The solution to both requires legal recognition of the property rights of human beings over our attention.
"First, advertising imposes costs on individuals without permission or compensation. It extracts our precious attention and emits toxic by-products, such as the sale of our personal information to dodgy third parties.
"Second, you may have noticed that the world's fisheries are not in great shape. They are a standard example for explaining the theoretical concept of a tragedy of the commons, where rational maximising behaviour by individual harvesters leads to the unsustainable overexploitation of a resource.
"Expensively trained human attention is the fuel of twenty-first century capitalism. We are allowing a single industry to slash and burn vast amounts of this productive resource in search of a quick buck."
I used to work in advertising and I can tell you all of the above is true. The question is: what are we going to do about it?
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