What If We Made Advertising Illegal?

# Summary The author argues that making all advertising illegal would eliminate the financial incentives behind addictive social media platforms, algorithmic manipulation, and personalized disinformation campaigns that have destabilized democracy since 2016. By removing advertising's economic foundation, society would dismantle the machinery of mass manipulation that exploits human psychology, while word-of-mouth and first-party websites could adequately replace advertising's actual informational function. The author, ironically an advertiser themselves, contends this reform would be more beneficial to society than addressing gun control or climate change.