Advertising That Exploits Our Deepest Insecurities
What are the implications of ads that know our search histories?
The function of advertising, wrote Robert E. Lane in The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, “is to increase people’s dissatisfaction with any current state of affairs, to create wants, and to exploit the dissatisfactions of the present. Advertising must use dissatisfaction to achieve its purpose.”
The web browser is a dissatisfaction-seeking machine. Every search query
