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.
Thank you for this. This is a phenomenal framing of the death of meaning.
This also has scratched an itch that has been bothering me…
Because I would say my biggest frustration with what you specifically described is how it bled through the common landscape of ideas. Through the whole social fabric.
It’s almost an infection in all forms of communication now.
It’s not just in ads, but journalism and even fiction or how art only seems to be presented as only viable as submissive to commerce and act merely as entertaiment or be condemned to oblivion where close to none can find it.
I’ll add a more precise example to what I’m trying to communicate…
There has been a strangely growing number of “eating the rich” pieces in all forms of media and art this decade.
Fiction especially seems to have escalated the rate in both literary and cinematic explorations. But it is clear that the current cultural landscape wants mere faint acknowledgement to act as consequence. Awareness is the only permitted punishment. Because then it has to forcefully act as the only form of absolution available.
So the invitation to mockery and the cartoonish portrails of the wealthy triggering the intended and controlled schadenfreude response is what is “sanctioned” for publishment or distribution. Because it addresses the existence of a problem but with enough distance from reality that it remains divorced of real world consequences. So bring on projects where the elite are just clowns or murdered in silly ways in silly thrillers and horror flicks but leave out of focus or frame, the consequences of their actions, or at least the more concrete and real forms of how real lives are affected by them. But especially and essentially leave out the possible and tangible ways in which the problems of the system that benefit them and negatively impact others can be spotted or dealt with.
There are projects who do not fit this description, but they don’t get much publicity, wide promotions or wide distributions in the end. Even when they get acclaimed runs in festivals or good critical reception. The “Machine” doesn’t get behind them.
Which is obvious in the end, after all, the publishers and heads of studios do belong much more to that faction in the class war. But if they play it well, they make it seem brave to finance these carefully selected projects to “the other side”, but just as long as these act as “casual roasts” of their peers, and not indictments that call for actual consequences. As it would be a call on themselves to actually change, or for them to also face consequences. In reality. And not just in just a performative plane.
So… “We may acknowledge the problem, just as long adressing that said problem is not permitted or at least inaccessible to most” becomes the approved and sanctioned approach.
Also to add another tangent to the death of meaning in the post-truth world… it is not a coincidence that in the current social paradigm of alternative facts and the subsequent alternative realities that people inhabit, the only form of universal concensus seems to be that the world as we know it is coming to an end.
And the death of meaning is an inevitable contributor to that conclusion, regardless of whom or from where one observes the world now. As it is an unsustainable reality from all angles.
The great tragedy is that onto itself the end of the world as we know it is not necessarily a terrible ordeal if people were allowed to perceive other ways of existing.
But as it stands, bleakness seems the only outcome as the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy running on a feedback loop of self-preservation.
Anyway… I hope I made enough sense in my rant in comparison to your sharply written and succinct comment. Again, I thank you for your words, even in your other comments in this thread.
I’m going to try and follow up on your writing.
We all need more people with your level of insight. And not in just “times like these”. But always.
So I wish you the best and hope to find more of your writing shared around along the way.
Cheers.
Thank you for taking the time to write this out. You’re making a distinction here that feels important.
What you’re describing about “sanctioned” critique is exactly the failure mode that worries me. Awareness is allowed to substitute for consequence. Mockery is permitted as long as it stays cartoonish. The system absorbs the gesture, digests it, and nothing downstream is disturbed.
That’s why so much of the “eat the rich” material feels weightless. It discharges anger without ever letting it become diagnostic. The problem is acknowledged, but only at a distance that keeps it abstract and safely un-actionable. Awareness becomes absolution.
I also think you’re right about the infection spreading across forms. Once that logic sets in, it doesn’t stay confined to advertising or politics. It reshapes journalism, fiction, and even how art is justified. Things are allowed to exist as entertainment, commentary, or spectacle, but not as something that might meaningfully reorient how people see their own agency.
The point about apocalypse is well taken too. When imagination is constrained, collapse starts to feel inevitable, not because it is, but because alternatives stop being legible. That’s a feedback loop, and a dangerous one.
You made sense. More than that, you pushed the frame forward. I appreciate it.