We’re Living in a Fake World
Advertising is the reason
Throughout my life, advertising has supported the things I enjoy. Every cartoon — from Rocko’s Modern Life to Adventure Time to Steven Universe to Rick and Morty — wouldn’t exist were it not for advertising. Music depends less on radio for distribution these days, but until fairly recently, ad-supported radio was a total necessity for discovering music. Even now, with radio falling out of favor, musicians still receive direct support from advertising on platforms like Spotify, and they join a large pool of creative people who rely on YouTube to do the same. In other words, without advertising, it would be much harder for the things I love to exist.
But in recent years, it’s taken more effort to distinguish where advertising stops and reality begins.
In many ways, ads are reflective of a world attempting to hide its problems from itself. This is true both in the way they portray imperfect products and in their silencing effect on the platforms that shape the way we see things — platforms that rely on ad dollars to survive. The result is a sanitized, “ad-friendly” world, one that conceals injustices and real issues to evoke a false, temporary state of comfort.
Is the world we exist in — a world in which products and services are seemingly gifted to us by short, perfect…
