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.
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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What feels different this time isn’t hypocrisy. Capitalism has always been happy to sell us our own anger back at retail. What feels different is that the ads no longer presume a shared reality at all.
Advertising once depended on ambient trust. Not belief, exactly, but a background assumption that words meant roughly what they said, that fear was proportional to risk, that reassurance implied some intention to follow through. That layer is gone. Now the ad doesn’t ask to be believed. It just asks to be noticed.
When companies openly dramatize the harms of the systems they profit from, they aren’t confessing. They’re signaling that truth has become optional. The message isn’t “we see the problem.” The message is “nothing means anything long enough to matter.” Anxiety becomes just another raw material, interchangeable with humor or nostalgia or menace.
This is where the information economy starts to eat itself. If every message arrives pre-saturated with irony, critique, and self-awareness, then no signal can rise above the din. Warnings, reassurances, satire, and sales pitches collapse into the same register. The audience isn’t persuaded or misled so much as numbed.
AI accelerates this collapse because it removes the last residue of intent. When the thing soothing your fear of replacement is itself replaceable by a cheaper, faster version, trust doesn’t break. It evaporates. There’s no betrayal because there’s no relationship left to betray.
And that erosion reaches even here. A reply like this would once have felt like an intervention, or at least a refusal. Now it lands as another object in the stream. Legible, maybe even accurate, but easily skimmed, quickly metabolized, and just as quickly forgotten. The critique doesn’t fail because it’s wrong. It fails because the conditions that once gave critique traction are gone.
At that point advertising stops functioning as communication and starts functioning as weather. It happens around us. We endure it. We don’t argue with it because there’s nothing there to argue with.
That feels new. And it feels brittle. Societies can survive a lot of lies. They don’t do well when meaning itself becomes non-durable.
(I write fiction and essays about witnessing systems as they fail quietly rather than spectacularly. If this kind of erosion, of trust, meaning, and shared signal, is something you’re thinking about too, my work lives here: https://tover153.substack.com/)
The wild thing is how this is a complete 180 for the marketing industry. They went through a paradigm shift into authenticity, or at least the appearance thereof, not all that long ago as millennials aged into their prime spending demographic.
That demand didn't go away, but now as wide swaths of people continue settle more into a post-truth world, I have to imagine the most effective mass market communication is the kind that can successfully serve both sides of the divide at once, almost like quantum superposition. I think of the success of The Boys, which did well because it simultaneously carried a scathing critique of fascism and capitalism while presenting fascist "heroes" that some could see as validation of their beliefs.
That’s a fair example, though I should say I bailed on The Boys midway through season one. Not because it was bad, but because the mechanism felt a little too exposed for me. Once you see how it’s balancing critique and indulgence at the same time, it stops being interesting and starts feeling instructional.
That doesn’t undercut your point, though. If anything it supports it. The show works precisely because it can be read in incompatible ways at once, and different viewers walk away convinced it’s speaking for them.
I haven't got a substack account, or I would have subscribed, but I hope you keep writing. You've given me a lot to think about. While I don't quite know what to do with these questions yet, or if there is even something I can do about them, they're salient and framed extremely well.
Thank you. That really means a lot, and I’m glad it gave you something to sit with, even if there’s no clear next step yet. I think that uncertainty is honest.
I also understand the pushback against Substack, whatever your reasons are. I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about how I relate to corporations in general, including continuing to write there. For now my line is simple. I don’t ask for subscriptions, I don’t gate content, and everything I write is free. That may change someday, but it’s where I’m comfortable at the moment.
I’ve made other small adjustments too. Leaving Reddit after years, dropping a couple streaming services, shopping more carefully. None of it feels heroic. It just feels like paying attention and trying not to lie to myself about tradeoffs.
I don’t think any of us knows exactly what to do yet. But if we keep thinking about it, and keep being honest with each other instead of performing certainty, my optimistic side still hopes we can find our way through.
It reminds me of the documentary Hypernormalisation, well worth a watch if you haven't seen it.
"The word hypernormalisation was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s. He says everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. Over time, the mass delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting it as the new norm rather than pretend, an effect Yurchak termed hypernormalisation"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
Yes, that’s a really good pull.
Hypernormalisation gets at the same feeling from a different angle. Everyone knows the system is strained, maybe failing, but the performance continues because nothing else feels imaginable. So the pretense hardens into reality.
At that point, the lie isn’t even that things are fine. The lie is that there’s no alternative to continuing exactly like this.
That’s the part that feels brittle.
Thanks for the link. I was gonna ask if you were a writer, heh.
I agree. The tone of the ads this year felt almost like lampshading. Like if we acknowledge the problem, we're wise to what the audience is feeling, but we're not going to do a damn thing to address it. It's just something that needs to be done to make the ad feel remotely relevant.
AI is scary, but don't be afraid of our surveillance device because we acknowledged that AI is scary
AI will sell you ads. Anyway, you're watching an ad for AI
Work sucks amirite? Why not let us unemploy you?
There's a wealth gap. Spend money on our stuff.
And I'm not going to even link the He Gets Us ads.
Exactly. Lampshading is the right word for it.
Once acknowledging the problem becomes the whole move, relevance replaces responsibility. The ad doesn’t promise to fix anything. It just proves it knows the vibe. That awareness is treated as absolution.
“AI is scary, but trust our AI” “Work sucks, so automate yourself out of it” “There’s a wealth gap, here’s a checkout button”
None of it is persuasion anymore. It’s alignment theater. The point isn’t to convince you. It’s to make sure you don’t recoil.
And yeah, the He Gets Us ads are a whole separate category of grim. When even moral language is reduced to brand-safe tone, you’re not being spoken to. You’re being processed.
I’ve got a few essays in the drafting stage on moral coercion, how systems use shared values to narrow choices without looking like force. This ad cycle feels like a case study.
this is one of the greatest things I have read in a while, thank you
i bet you are a fan of The Machine Stops?
Thank you, I really appreciate that.
Yes, I’ve read The Machine Stops, and it’s hard not to feel it hovering over moments like this. Forster saw the danger early. What he couldn’t have known is how normalized the machine would become, or how willingly we’d narrate its failures and keep feeding it anyway.
My instincts tend to run a bit later. More Pat Cadigan, a little J.G. Ballard. Less catastrophic collapse, more systems that keep functioning long after they stop making human sense. I’m interested in the quiet failure modes, the ones that don’t trip alarms but slowly change how people trust, notice, and relate.
If this landed for you, that’s probably the overlap.
Great comment and 100% agree this is bad news for society, tho personally I have not engaged with ads or even noticed ads for over a decade. It’s been untrustworthy noise for a long time for me
That makes sense, and honestly it’s probably a healthy adaptation.
The thing that worries me isn’t whether any individual ad works. It’s that even as background noise, the tone still leaks. You can opt out of watching ads, but you can’t fully opt out of the language they normalize, the way everything gets framed as a “solution,” or a vibe, or a managed anxiety.
So yeah, ignoring them is rational. I just don’t think the effects stay neatly contained to the people still paying attention.
I could hear this. Like a rousing speech.
Ha, fair. That’s probably a failure mode on my part.
I’m not trying to rally anyone. I’m mostly trying to describe a feeling I don’t hear named very often, that low-grade sense that something about how we talk to each other has gone thin. If it sounds like a speech, it’s probably because we’re all a little starved for language that isn’t trying to sell, soothe, or steer us.
I’m more interested in noticing than convincing.
It’s not a failure. It’s a strong piece. It’s sensible to know a good influential individual rarely writes their own content. You are the Bernie to an Elton.
That Funny Feeling?