What if we made all advertising illegal? It's such a wild idea that I've never heard it in the public discourse.

Even saying it seems so far outside the Overton window that it makes nuking hurricanes sound reasonable (as some politicians proposed).

But why? It makes perfect sense. The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear, and so would the mechanisms that allow both commercial and political actors to create personalized, reality-distorting bubbles:

• Clickbait, listicles, and affiliate marketing schemes would become worthless overnight.
• Algorithm-driven platforms like Instagram and TikTok that harvest and monetize attention, destroying youth, would lose their economic foundation.
• Facebook, X, Google, YouTube—all would cease to exist in their current forms.

Ad companies are never going to regulate themselves—it's like hoping for heroin dealers to write drug laws.

Think about what's happened since 2016: Populists exploit ad marketplaces, using them to bypass traditional media gatekeepers and deliver tailored messages to susceptible audiences. Foreign actors do the same, microtargeting divisive content to fracture our social fabric along existing fault lines.

Outlawing advertising would help protect and reinvigorate our minds and democracy.

Even as an advertiser (especially as an advertiser), I am convinced that outlawing advertising is the best thing we can do for our world now. More than gun control. More than tackling climate change. More than lowering the price of eggs.

Removing these advanced manipulation tools would force everyone—politicians included—to snap back into reality. By outlawing advertising, the machinery of mass delusion would lose its most addictive and toxic fuel.

Any form of paid and/or third-party advertising would become illegal. Full stop.

The idea feels like sci-fi because you're so used to it, imagining ads gone feels like asking to outlaw gravity. But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.

The traditional argument pro-advertising—that it provides consumers with necessary information—hasn't been valid for decades. In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform.

The modern advertising apparatus exists to bypass rational thought and trigger emotional responses that lead to purchasing decisions. A sophisticated machine designed to short-circuit your agency, normalized to the point of invisibility.

“But it's free speech!”

Bullshit. No one is entitled to yell at you “GET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAY” with a dopamine megaphone in your bedroom. And to track 90% of your life to know when and how to say it. That's not free speech, that's harassment.

When I say advertising, I also mean propaganda. Propaganda is advertising for the state, and advertising is propaganda for the private. Same thing.

I know this proposal won't be implemented tomorrow. But even just stepping back from constant consumption and contemplating what poisons our democracy is a liberating act in itself. An action against that blurry, “out-of-focus fascism”—that sense of discomfort that you feel but can't quite point out (I'm preparing a longer essay about that.) In this world, any mindfulness act—stopping to think rather than reacting—represents a micro-awakening of the self.

I know, it sounds surreal. Yet, many things once thought impossible are now considered basic standards of a decent society.

I think there's a world where we'll look back on our advertising-saturated era with the same bewilderment with which we now regard cigarette smoke, child labor, or public executions: a barbaric practice that we allowed to continue far too long because we couldn't imagine an alternative.