How ads hijacked the dream of the internet. Can digital citizens fight back?
In 2015, Anastasia Dedyukhina, then a client director for a London digital ad agency, found herself at the peak of her career but at a low point in her emotional life.
“Basically my job was to launch all these new tech products into the markets and convince people to use more technology,” she says. “Having said that, I don’t think I was managing my own devices very well.”
Like many smartphone owners, Dr. Dedyukhina, who holds a PhD in philology from Lomonosov Moscow State University, found herself habitually checking her phone, she says, for no reason. And her attention to her screen began to come at a cost.
“I was very reactive and I was constantly feeling very tired,” Dedyukhina says. Except, she noticed, when she was traveling abroad without a data plan.
“I realized that I was feeling much lighter. I didn't feel that anxious,” she says. “I like to compare it to this feeling that you’re surrounded by 10 children of different ages, and they all pull you in different directions.”
As with many moral awakenings, the breaking point came when the ghosts started visiting. “I started feeling phantom
An infrastructure problemChasing eyeballsA way forward?