Advertising - The War Against The Audience
Why is advertising and marketing the expression of grievance against the consumer?
Isn’t it as obvious as any assault against one’s being? You’re not paying attention? You don’t understand what’s most important here? You’re not subscribing, sharing, or commenting? You’re not buying my products and services? THIS MEANS WAR!
Wilkins Coffee best illustrates this never-ending battle on the eternal planes of higher-education - the pretensions and aspirations of a bourgeois people - and its reflections below the class heirarchy in the battle fields of consumer “culture,” or, corporately manufactured products created for large bases of consumers. If mass-culture is psychoanalysis in reverse, and “consumerism” is apocylpse neatly packaged into a world-imperialistic devouring tendency, then it can be said that “consumerism” is also the masses themselves being devoured by the few, as they set the programming, the calendar. There is nothing unnatural about Leviathan, rather, “man” and “nature” vanished altogether, leaving the Nemesis-less Superdragon to devour its own tail.
The entirety of it is conducive to “an unreal world,” but it is the promised “better world,” or the advertiser would have nothing to sell, and no claim to change the viewer, the consumer, or the world in which they live. Advertising is no differnt than politics or religion in this regard, and at the least, one can observe - did they stay true to their promise? In this case, did the product deliver you from the desires the advertisers teased out in conspiracy of your mutual creation, together? Again, politics is no different - especially when seduction may be as ecstatically liberating as it is terminally fatal. The Image (TM) is sexy1 and god-like, but the accounting and banality around it are stupefying.
Speaking of intended ends, has anyone thought to ask, what is the end-goal of such an indomitable wave of medieval organizing prowess turned immutable corporate structure in the name of the money god? What is the end-goal and conclusion to people and centuries manufactured like so? Answer: no different than the church or the state, the end is to have no end, to continue propagation, as long as possible, no matter the consequences, even into unnatural and bad positions, and to follow these through to their inevitable endings too.
Nothing has ever been so big that it “can’t fail.” That’s just wishful thinking, and the money god, in conjunction with Hephaestus, have seen to it that, as far as whig history, democracy, and Christian world are concerned, “progress” can only have meant - shedding the future of all present possibilities, until none are left, and the young can no longer generate novelty in any meaningful, therefor powerful and affective capacity. As Orwell wrote in 1984: time stops.
The fundamental catch or gimmick of advertising is the same as comedy: griefing the audience. This could mean insult, questioning, bothering, calling, convincing, reasoning, but either way, an unasked-for imposition is made – good lords let’s hope they be gracious, but war is real, not pretty, including its comedies. The war is against the potential consumer: why aren’t you buying what I’m selling? Why aren’t you on my page already? Look at this solid case made; look how happy the buyers; see how needy and lonely you are, how your life could be complete if you too learned to love the all powerful Red Rocket Sky Daddy? Join the crowd, find belonging. Rather, the war is ongoing, forever long-going. Pick a side. If you don’t pick, nobody will wait for you. To quote the Catholics of old: “kill them all, God will recognize his own.” Or, as popular human leaders tend to say, “The death of one is a tragedy, the death of a million is hardly ambitious.”
When it comes to consumption, whether it is a need or want is secondary to the war first and foremost, of which profits are first and foremost. Antiquated notions of morality and doing the right thing are a quaint luxury compared to the need of the knife and the whip, the the need of machines of misery, of consuming labor to survive, and the total depravity, vulgarity, sex and violence used to huck products at the head and bed of every potential victim, or consumer in the world (all 9 billion of them, and their shadow data profiles owned by all business and state). It’s simply too profitable to not wage war, and too profitable to not profit off every aspect of the waging and orchestration of said war, from literature and Philosophy, to Gulf War Tommy Gun foolery and neo-liberal propaganda leaflet literature bombarding Baghdad – all of it is money, and it is for this money that this “world” has been built: the bombs, the people, are both products and food. Collateral damage itself becomes its own industry of lawyers, consultants, and general middlemen need to be kept busy. More powerful still, the media, the projectors, the projection screens, the politics, the ponzi scheme itself are social democracy. The image of it, the “as-if-ness,” matters most, because an image is all that's left. Even with a world of manufactured products or theoretical “choices," there is no choice. Everyone has to buy what they sell, or else. Bad things just seem to happen to people who don’t buy.
Bombarded out of hiding, and shed then of all idealism, or naiveté and cowardice, along with shedding of all possibilities and their future, the position is precarious, inevitable, fatal. From these furthest futures, the marketing feeding frenzy at present resembles the greatest war ever fought, and in its imagistic glory and desire for conquest and discovery down every last possible road unto sickness and dusty happy death itself – one can see in colossal hunger and exaggerated style, the explosion of all possible energy, the very life of a species flashing before its eyes, having lived out its bloodlines as tributaries and testaments to time itself. For those who are about to die, let this round be on us. Salut!
-ZM
4/20/2025
Sex, violence, and the fantasies fomented from the heart of a decadent society’s doubly decadent media demonstrates that it’s easy to prey on a naïve planet full of naïve animals, and that responsibility of any variety is a much harder sell – rather, that’s what everyone is seeking to be rid of: autonomy, authority, responsibility of the self, deferred to other powers, “other” not being synonymous with sacred, higher, or good. For a history of the Western mind obsessed with liberty and freedom, these words mean nothing, given the circumstances of constructing worldwide institutional power through surveillance, media, and military dominance with zero “real” opposition or derivation.