"In John Carpenter's 1988 masterpiece They Live, a drifter discovers (via some pretty special sunglasses) that humanity is secretly puppeteered by a ruling class of aliens manipulating them to buy products and maintain the status quo via hidden messages in mass media. It's an idea that informed artist Shepard Fairey's iconic Andre the Giant 'Obey' posters and a generation of science fiction artists as part of a rich lineage in dystopian science fiction, which locates advertising right at the center of the nightmarish futures it imagines - often presciently so."
"As the ad business deepens its obsession with the idea of personalization at scale, it's uncanny to go back to watch Steven Spielberg's 2002 adaptation of Philip K Dick's The Minority Report, in which Tom Cruise's detective Anderton is beleaguered by creepily whispered bespoke messages for Guinness and American Express as he walks through public spaces."
"Science fiction has long been, in other words, a reliable outlet for (and barometer of) society's more pressing current concerns. Just look at a couple of recent Netflix releases: German thriller Cassandra, a cautionary tale concerned with smart homes and artificial intelligence, and the latest series of Black Mirror. In the latter's first episode, a woman with a brain injury takes a deal for a cloud-based hardware fix to get her back to health, later discovering that she's become a walking-talking advertising channel as part of the deal. In an apparent dig at the streaming environment that houses the show, she's offered a solution: a succession of tiered 'premium' services to turn off the ads."
Science fiction frequently positions advertising as a central mechanism of control in dystopian futures, using metaphors of hidden messaging and technology-enabled manipulation. Classic and contemporary examples portray advertising infiltrating public and private life, from clandestine media signals to whispered bespoke ads targeting individuals in shared spaces. Recent narratives focus on smart homes, AI, and cloud-based hardware that convert people into advertising channels while offering paid tiers to remove intrusions. These portrayals highlight the tension between personalization at scale and individual autonomy, raising questions about whether advertising will evolve toward ambient manipulation or adopt more humane, less invasive models.
Read at The Drum
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]