When Ads Interject

On teaching amidst unquestioned consumerism.

“What television teaches through commercialism is materialistic consumption.”

- Richard Serra, Television Delivers People, 1973

“Industrial capitalism transformed nature’s raw materials into commodities, and surveillance capitalism lays its claims to the stuff of human nature for a new commodity invention. Now it is human nature that is scraped, torn, and taken for another century’s market project.”

- Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2018

Stop advertising to me!

STOP!

This past fall semester, I showed my seniors the BBC’s filming of Andrew Scott as Hamlet in a London production in 2018. I chose it because the actors mostly work in television and film, so their more subtle style resonates in tight shots while they nevertheless perform all five acts on stage in one take. It’s a moving performance––shouldn’t shock the Andrew Scott fans––and I was thrilled to be able to access it for free on YouTube. Thrilled, until I realized I had no control over the timing of the advertisements.

“Thus conscience––”

“––LIBERTY LIBERTY LIIIIIIBERTY––”

As soon as the corn-yellow and decibels-higher ad cut into the Gothic soliloquy, my hand jolted to the laptop, ripping out the dongle (yes, that is its government name) so that the projection went dark. Once the students saw me do this a couple times, it became a laughing matter. They giggled more out of surprise than amusement, but there was something decidedly funny about the principled, even zealous, way I went about muting the ads. This pattern repeated class after class as I reacted to the aggressive invasion into our sacred learning space with an equally aggressive TUG on the dongle. (Yes, I’m aware of what’s happening in that sentence.)

Eventually, the students addressed my inexplicable yet evident displeasure.

“Ms. Staffaroni, why do you always yank out the cord like that?”

“Why not just mute it?”

”Yeah, or let us watch the ads!”

”I don’t mind the ads, honestly.”

Well, students. I mind them. I mind them very much.

STOP ADVERTISING TO ME! It’s not a new feeling, but for me it has crystallized into a rallying cry, one I would gladly shout at a protest. Do I have the right not to encounter an advertisement? In what public spaces might I be spared the jumbo symbology? Certainly not on the streets of Paris, where now instead of scaffolding––long considered an eyesore maligning the Haussmannian facades––one gazes upon a sleek, eight-story canvas emballage featuring an ad for fancy perfume or AI on your phone. Did I need reminding that we are buying luxury goods? That we can (must?) all rejoice in AI’s ubiquity? Yes, apparently.

I don’t come across a lot of artistic representation of my angst and fury about this (this absence itself a kind of ad for compliant consumption). I did recently enjoy MoMA’s exhibition of Richard Serra and Carlota Schoolman’s 1973 “anti-advertisement” entitled Television Delivers People, which, according to MoMA’s wall text, “cautioned that viewers themselves were becoming products delivered to corporations.” I get a modicum of solace remembering a particular scene from the limited series, Maniac (2018) (remember 2018?), in which Emma Stone’s character is broke and must therefore hire an “Ad Buddy,” a kind of broker narrating ads at her, while she eats her noodles. In lieu of demanding payment, the meek but persistent “buddy” drones on in exchange for your consumption. This scene literalizes for me the trade-off at stake: my private thoughts, my sensual experience of eating, my peace, all feel interrupted by manipulative nonsense. By personifying ads into corporeal beings, themselves impoverished enough to take a job as an ad-reader, the show comments on the layers of immiseration possible in a society whose only logic is extraction.

Life imitates art: when I pass the public ads on my way to work each day, I know I resemble this flat-haired, flat-affect, worn down persona channeled by Emma Stone in this scene. And when I seek solidarity in my ennui, I’m usually met with the reminder that those billboards generate revenue. Do the billboards on my way to work really pay for the maintenance of public space? Prove to me that this gigantic billboard for diamonds (which could also be an ad for…women?), and the one right past it for injectable botox (really an ad for…puffiness?), and the one after that for…Jesus? (even in Massachusetts, folks), are in fact repairing the potholes, employing plow drivers and landscapers, preserving delicate and disappearing ecosystems. Prove to me that these ads have something to do with the public life of living beings. Even with that assurance, I am dubious that the strip-mining of my complex inner self––drilling into me what Beauty and Woman and Youth and Life really mean, according to these corporations––could possibly be worth the patina of asphalt on this highway (especially since Bill Nye the Science Guy thinks we ought to be paving roads with new, white materials that deflect the sun’s increasingly dangerous rays).

I teach at a private high school, but I consider my classroom a simulation of public space. Call me delusional, but I believe that’s one of the functions of school, any school: to give youth a space to practice being a composed adult in a communal forum. It’s a space to gain experience communicating with people you did not choose, about a topic or text you also did not choose. Public space often involves not choosing with whom you’re sitting, talking, driving, shopping, spectating. I suppose it also involves not choosing the advertisements that saturate your visible landscape. I wish to ride the subway from 145th Street downtown, but that means I must also learn about how AI will revolutionize my fill-in-the-blank. I want to wait patiently in my airline terminal, but that means I must also contemplate every contour of Demi Moore’s 20-foot-tall billboarded face before agreeing that it must be this expensive serum making her skin so ‘ageless.’ (The irony, of course, cuts deep for those who watched The Substance and thought maybe, just maybe, Moore had defected from the cult of youth! Alas, one must collect one’s Revlon check.)  No one is looking out for me on the subway, on the train platform, or in the public restroom (yes, sometimes even in there!). I have to look out for myself: I avoid the ads, or if I’m feeling generous, I mock them. But I am required to see them, just as I must notice the other human beings getting on or off the metro, and the other cars merging on or off the highway.

Many teachers I know have their own classrooms, whose walls they adorn with inspiring images, cultural references, famous citations, student artwork, and perhaps a helpful poster of verb conjugations or algebraic functions––all visual media conveying the message of the class, which is, Here, we value human intelligence. I’m OK with that kind of advertisement in school. I’m even tolerant of having to see conspicuous (dare I say gaudy) designer shoes or sweatshirts or jewelry, though I’ll probably look at the brand emblazoned on your body like it’s a scarlet letter: askance, with derision.

Because I’m fed up! I want the right not to have a single advertisement in my line of sight. I want a country that maintains its parks and transit systems without saddling us with corporate meaninglessness everywhere we traipse. I want film directors to stop making ads, and I want English majors to be employable in fields other than marketing. I want words and images to mean more than dollar signs.

Right now, on my back porch, the overgrown trees block my view of the commercial downtown area near my house. On my water bottle, I’ve affixed an ad for my local yoga studio. (I’m advertising to the world that, in addition to hydration, I love stretching.) A few houses down, I can see a curvy, futuristic car, but I do not know the name of the company who made it. Above me, a few grackles take turns bathing in my neighbor’s gutter. Otherwise, no one seems to be selling me anything right now. I’m free.

My attention is mine. I mean this to be understood as radically as possible. When Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff published her exposé on surveillance capitalism in 2019, she employed the analogy of strip-mining to describe how “futures markets” extract not from earth’s natural resources, but from our private human experience. They’ve come in to build mines in our souls. Now we can’t tell if we like something unless the algorithm reminds us. We are listening to this. We are spending on that.

We have a president whose career rests on this intangible hope: that, awash in the blaring noise and lurid symbolism, no one will notice him robbing us blind. His grift began early, with late 20th century blockbusting, redlining, and bank-fraudstering through which he stole enough money and land from New Yorkers to be able to claim he was “successful in real estate.” (Feel free to read about his six bankruptcies, as well as the historic landmarks he destroyed in the process of colonizing the city.) Normally, a man like that would leave someone like me alone: I don’t have any tangible assets for him to steal. Ads and headlines are the only way men like him can get my valuable human eyes on their meaningless plastic lies. Consider my refusal an act of treason: I will not memorize your insipid jingle. I will not read your neon sign. My attention is not yours. 

I don’t care if my seniors remember me as a stridently anti-consumerist freak who refused to let them watch ads––for insurance, sports gambling, protein shakes, or whatever other “American” crap one peddles these days––during the very few hours of their attention I was allotted to teach them about Hamlet’s sense of justice. Perhaps they will remember me responding, “I don’t think you should have to watch ads in school.” Hopefully, though, they’ll remember how much it hurt to watch Hamlet betray Ophelia; how their skin crawled when they watched Claudius lie. The fraudsters won’t be peddling anything to my students on my watch, and while yes, “conscience does make cowards of us all,” I’d rather be a coward than a product.