Why is it that mar­ket­ing dri­ves peo­ple to deface com­mu­nity wikis? To spend their time and atten­tion writ­ing bots to infest Twit­ter and Face­book and social media gen­er­ally with arti­fi­cial “friends”? To hire Indian folks to call me dur­ing din­ner and pre­tend to be “Gertrude” or “Molly”? To do that often enough that there is a law against it now, a Do Not Call Reg­istry? To eat 30% of my tele­vi­sion time, splat­ter­ing mul­ti­ple chan­nels with thou­sands of copies of the same stu­pid air-​​freshener ad every night? What makes engi­neer­ing pro­fes­sors set up spam blogs full of Markov gib­ber­ish to try to game their pro­fes­sional organization’s Google pager­ank? Why do algo­rithms com­pose and send out the major­ity of all emails actu­ally sent in the world?

Think about it. I’ll be you are dis­turbed by or even hate those things, every time they hap­pen to you. Even if you’re one of the peo­ple in the mar­ket­ing business.

Adver­tis­ing can be sub­tle, and beau­ti­ful. It can be a con­ver­sa­tion, a thought­ful image. It can be pleas­ant, sought-​​after, a tes­ti­mo­nial to the prod­uct. It can be polite, opt-​​in, and com­ple­men­tary.

What makes this other lifestyle viable, the one that we hate? What eco­nomic or cul­tural norm, what law, what incen­tive exists to make it fea­si­ble for oth­er­wise decent human beings to con­sider costs and ben­e­fits and opt to act that way?

That thing, what­ever it is, is our enemy.

With few excep­tions, I note that it isn’t human beings who are being mar­keted. It doesn’t seem to be peo­ple with names who have ads, spam, phone calls—as long as we count celebri­ties as non-​​people (or meta-​​people). As brands, say.

Maybe that’s a clue.