Mind-time is precious to me. I resent it when random
outsiders, trying to sell thneeds, get inside my brain. I
resent it even more when they get inside my
children’s brains. What they claim is free speech,
I experience as mental trespassing, and so do millions of
others. As Kalle Lasn has written, “Our mental
environment is a commons like air or water. We need to
protect it from unwanted incursions.”
Advertising — and by this I mean all forms of
commercial attention-seeking — is part of the dark
side of surplus capitalism. (I say this as one who,
during my own career, modestly added to the din.)
It’s one of those borderline activities
that’s necessary, or at least acceptable, in
moderation, but becomes dangerous when it spirals out of
control. The trouble is that advertising escalates
inexorably. Every new product needs to announce itself.
Moreover, the greater the ambient noise, the more each ad
has to shout in order to be heard. If anything is a
“tragedy of the commons,” this is it (though
here, again, the commons is victim, not cause).
Here are a few statistics that confirm what everyone
knows. Children in America see, on average, one hundred
thousand television ads by age five; before they die
they’ll see another two million. In 2002, marketers
unleashed eighty-seven billion pieces of junk mail,
fifty-one billion telemarketing calls, and eighty-four
billion pieces of email spam. In 2004, a Yankelovich poll
found that 65 percent of Americans “feel constantly
bombarded with too much advertising and
marketing.”
Advertising isn’t just an occasional trespass of
one person against another; it’s a continuous
trespass of relatively few corporations (the one hundred
or so that do the most advertising) against all the rest
of us. These companies want to — indeed have to
— increase their sales, and for this they need
access to our minds. But mind-time is a scarce resource.
We have only so many hours of it a day, and so many days
in our lives. Because of this scarcity, every
neuro-minute occupied by an ad is one less neuro-minute
available for our own thoughts and feelings. Every ad
thus has an opportunity cost, a cost we experience but
advertisers don’t pay.
Ads also have other side effects. They bias us to
high-priced branded products, to junk foods rather than
healthy foods, and to spending rather than saving. They
diminish our self-esteem by suggesting that we never have
enough or look good enough. And ultimately, they diminish
our natural wealth by increasing pollution and depleting
resources.
As individuals, we can do a few things to protect
ourselves against ads: we can turn off our television,
delete email spam, and toss junk mail in the recycling
bin. But that doesn’t dampen the collective noise,
or do much to reduce the external costs of ads. To do
that we need economy-wide volume controls.
At present, there are no such controls. Though the
airwaves belong to the people, no public agency limits TV
advertising time. Until 1982, the major networks adhered
to a voluntary code limiting ads to 9.5 minutes per hour
in prime time. Then, profit maximizing took over, and the
networks dropped their code. Today, a typical
“one-hour” prime-time show has about
forty-two minutes of content and eighteen minutes of ads
and promotions, nearly twice the advertising intensity of
two decades ago.
What if we managed advertising as we manage, or could
manage, physical pollution? If corporations want to
pollute our minds, they’d have to pay for the right
to do so. As with physical pollution, the transactions
could be brokered by a trust. This guardian of our inner
commons would set caps on total trespasses and sell
tradeable advertising permits to corporations. Our
psychic costs would then show up as advertisers’
monetary costs. There’d be less advertising, more
peace of mind, and if we so earmarked the revenue, more
money for commercial-free broadcasting and the arts.
An advertising cap-and-trade system could have another
benefit as well. At present, there’s only one
macroeconomic valve for regulating the pace of economic
activity: the Fed’s handle on money. If the economy
is too hot, the Fed raises interest rates; if it’s
too cool, the Fed lowers them. The trouble with this
valve is that it has unpleasant side effects. When
interest rates go up, so do credit card bills and
mortgages, and millions of households suffer. But if we
dampened an overheated economy by lowering the volume of
advertising, we’d get the benefits of higher
interest rates without the pain. In fact, households
might save money by buying less. ...
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