I’m tempted to propose a small experiment, if anyone wants to try it.

Hold this frame in mind, then go watch a live walk through any major downtown. Tokyo is a good example, but anywhere dense works as long as you can see people’s faces. Don’t analyze yet. Just watch the ads, the screens, the signage. Then watch the faces moving past them.

Last week in Shibuya I noticed something that stuck with me. People wearing large electronic ad boards on their bodies, moving in coordinated packs through the crossings. Literal walking billboards. It felt like escalation. Not confidence. Desperation.

What I keep noticing isn’t outrage or engagement so much as flattening. The ads are louder, more animated, more self-aware. The delivery systems are becoming more intrusive and physical. But the faces moving past them are tired, inward, already elsewhere. It doesn’t feel like persuasion happening in real time. It feels like two systems passing through each other with minimal contact.

There’s a long-standing observation that societies can look healthy right up until they aren’t. Japan is undergoing a severe demographic contraction, and yet the surface still looks immaculate, hyperfunctional, optimized. The signals say vitality. The underlying trajectories say something else.

I don’t think this is about Japan specifically. It just makes the contrast easier to see. When meaning thins out, systems get very good at looking alive. Ads keep acknowledging the problem. Infrastructure keeps humming. People keep moving.

What struck me in Shibuya was the sense that advertisers already know this. The escalation feels like an admission. If the old signals worked, they wouldn’t need to strap screens to human bodies and march them through crowds.

And it didn’t look like it was helping.

What’s harder to spot is where imagination, trust, and shared future quietly step out of frame.

Thank you for taking the time to write this out. You’re making a distinction here that feels important.

What you’re describing about “sanctioned” critique is exactly the failure mode that worries me. Awareness is allowed to substitute for consequence. Mockery is permitted as long as it stays cartoonish. The system absorbs the gesture, digests it, and nothing downstream is disturbed.

That’s why so much of the “eat the rich” material feels weightless. It discharges anger without ever letting it become diagnostic. The problem is acknowledged, but only at a distance that keeps it abstract and safely un-actionable. Awareness becomes absolution.

I also think you’re right about the infection spreading across forms. Once that logic sets in, it doesn’t stay confined to advertising or politics. It reshapes journalism, fiction, and even how art is justified. Things are allowed to exist as entertainment, commentary, or spectacle, but not as something that might meaningfully reorient how people see their own agency.

The point about apocalypse is well taken too. When imagination is constrained, collapse starts to feel inevitable, not because it is, but because alternatives stop being legible. That’s a feedback loop, and a dangerous one.

You made sense. More than that, you pushed the frame forward. I appreciate it.

Yeah, that’s very close to where this thread kept pushing me too. Because of the back and forth here, I tried to consolidate some of it into a longer Substack essay. The link to my Substack is already above, and the new essay was just posted. No answers there either, just a slower pass at the same questions.

Yeah, “ultra-processed” is a really good way to put it.

What Stewart was pointing at fits this exactly. The speech isn’t meant to persuade or inform so much as trigger uptake. Reaction density over substance. When everything is engineered for engagement, it all collapses into the same flavor.

And you’re right, this escaped political speech a long time ago. It’s in entertainment, advertising, workplace language, even how people narrate their own lives online. Everything gets intensified, smoothed, and pre-digested so it can move fast.

The phone part matters a lot. When attention is constantly fragmented, communication adapts. Messages stop assuming patience or continuity. They become short, sharp, emotionally saturated enough to punch through distraction. That isn’t a plot. It’s selection pressure.

What that means, though, is that anything deliberately slower starts to feel wrong by default. Not boring, wrong. Out of sync. But that slowness can be doing work of its own, creating space where meaning has time to accumulate instead of spike.

That’s the part that worries me. Once we train ourselves to expect everything pre-processed, we lose our tolerance for forms of communication that unfold rather than hit. And those slower forms are often where thinking actually happens.

That’s a fair example, though I should say I bailed on The Boys midway through season one. Not because it was bad, but because the mechanism felt a little too exposed for me. Once you see how it’s balancing critique and indulgence at the same time, it stops being interesting and starts feeling instructional.

That doesn’t undercut your point, though. If anything it supports it. The show works precisely because it can be read in incompatible ways at once, and different viewers walk away convinced it’s speaking for them.

Thank you. That really means a lot, and I’m glad it gave you something to sit with, even if there’s no clear next step yet. I think that uncertainty is honest.

I also understand the pushback against Substack, whatever your reasons are. I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about how I relate to corporations in general, including continuing to write there. For now my line is simple. I don’t ask for subscriptions, I don’t gate content, and everything I write is free. That may change someday, but it’s where I’m comfortable at the moment.

I’ve made other small adjustments too. Leaving Reddit after years, dropping a couple streaming services, shopping more carefully. None of it feels heroic. It just feels like paying attention and trying not to lie to myself about tradeoffs.

I don’t think any of us knows exactly what to do yet. But if we keep thinking about it, and keep being honest with each other instead of performing certainty, my optimistic side still hopes we can find our way through.

Yes, that’s a really good pull.

Hypernormalisation gets at the same feeling from a different angle. Everyone knows the system is strained, maybe failing, but the performance continues because nothing else feels imaginable. So the pretense hardens into reality.

At that point, the lie isn’t even that things are fine. The lie is that there’s no alternative to continuing exactly like this.

That’s the part that feels brittle.

That makes sense, and honestly it’s probably a healthy adaptation.

The thing that worries me isn’t whether any individual ad works. It’s that even as background noise, the tone still leaks. You can opt out of watching ads, but you can’t fully opt out of the language they normalize, the way everything gets framed as a “solution,” or a vibe, or a managed anxiety.

So yeah, ignoring them is rational. I just don’t think the effects stay neatly contained to the people still paying attention.

Ha, fair. That’s probably a failure mode on my part.

I’m not trying to rally anyone. I’m mostly trying to describe a feeling I don’t hear named very often, that low-grade sense that something about how we talk to each other has gone thin. If it sounds like a speech, it’s probably because we’re all a little starved for language that isn’t trying to sell, soothe, or steer us.

I’m more interested in noticing than convincing.

Exactly. Lampshading is the right word for it.

Once acknowledging the problem becomes the whole move, relevance replaces responsibility. The ad doesn’t promise to fix anything. It just proves it knows the vibe. That awareness is treated as absolution.

“AI is scary, but trust our AI” “Work sucks, so automate yourself out of it” “There’s a wealth gap, here’s a checkout button”

None of it is persuasion anymore. It’s alignment theater. The point isn’t to convince you. It’s to make sure you don’t recoil.

And yeah, the He Gets Us ads are a whole separate category of grim. When even moral language is reduced to brand-safe tone, you’re not being spoken to. You’re being processed.

I’ve got a few essays in the drafting stage on moral coercion, how systems use shared values to narrow choices without looking like force. This ad cycle feels like a case study.

Thank you, I really appreciate that.

Yes, I’ve read The Machine Stops, and it’s hard not to feel it hovering over moments like this. Forster saw the danger early. What he couldn’t have known is how normalized the machine would become, or how willingly we’d narrate its failures and keep feeding it anyway.

My instincts tend to run a bit later. More Pat Cadigan, a little J.G. Ballard. Less catastrophic collapse, more systems that keep functioning long after they stop making human sense. I’m interested in the quiet failure modes, the ones that don’t trip alarms but slowly change how people trust, notice, and relate.

If this landed for you, that’s probably the overlap.

What feels different this time isn’t hypocrisy. Capitalism has always been happy to sell us our own anger back at retail. What feels different is that the ads no longer presume a shared reality at all.

Advertising once depended on ambient trust. Not belief, exactly, but a background assumption that words meant roughly what they said, that fear was proportional to risk, that reassurance implied some intention to follow through. That layer is gone. Now the ad doesn’t ask to be believed. It just asks to be noticed.

When companies openly dramatize the harms of the systems they profit from, they aren’t confessing. They’re signaling that truth has become optional. The message isn’t “we see the problem.” The message is “nothing means anything long enough to matter.” Anxiety becomes just another raw material, interchangeable with humor or nostalgia or menace.

This is where the information economy starts to eat itself. If every message arrives pre-saturated with irony, critique, and self-awareness, then no signal can rise above the din. Warnings, reassurances, satire, and sales pitches collapse into the same register. The audience isn’t persuaded or misled so much as numbed.

AI accelerates this collapse because it removes the last residue of intent. When the thing soothing your fear of replacement is itself replaceable by a cheaper, faster version, trust doesn’t break. It evaporates. There’s no betrayal because there’s no relationship left to betray.

And that erosion reaches even here. A reply like this would once have felt like an intervention, or at least a refusal. Now it lands as another object in the stream. Legible, maybe even accurate, but easily skimmed, quickly metabolized, and just as quickly forgotten. The critique doesn’t fail because it’s wrong. It fails because the conditions that once gave critique traction are gone.

At that point advertising stops functioning as communication and starts functioning as weather. It happens around us. We endure it. We don’t argue with it because there’s nothing there to argue with.

That feels new. And it feels brittle. Societies can survive a lot of lies. They don’t do well when meaning itself becomes non-durable.

(I write fiction and essays about witnessing systems as they fail quietly rather than spectacularly. If this kind of erosion, of trust, meaning, and shared signal, is something you’re thinking about too, my work lives here: https://tover153.substack.com/)