The Great Advertising Immunity

By James Quillian — Economist, Political Analyst, Teacher of Natural Law

The tech industry has been riding high for a long time, mostly on the back of advertising dollars. For years, the public needed tech more than tech needed the public. That balance has flipped. These days, the tech giants need the population a whole lot more than the population needs them, and they’re not handling the shift with much grace.

For the better part of forty years, the public has been treated as a herd of virtual human beings. Not real people—just anonymous shapes on a spreadsheet. AI has taken that habit and polished it to a shine. You get “no‑reply” emails that take a machine a split second to send, and you can lose half a day trying to fix whatever problem the machine created.

Safety, of course, is the new profit center. Everything requires signing in, and you’d better have a smartphone handy or you’re out of luck. The irony is that most of these “safety issues” could be solved overnight by taxing bot traffic as the social nuisance it is. But that won’t happen. There’s too much money in keeping the public jumping through hoops.

Still, all of that is small potatoes compared to the real problem: advertising.

Back around 1900, a person might go a whole day without seeing a single advertisement. By the 1960s, ads were everywhere. Today, the number of impressions a soul is exposed to has gone clean off the rails. Folks swat away internet ads like mosquitoes—half the time they zap them before they even know what they were selling. The public has developed an immunity.

And why wouldn’t they? Ads are pests by design. They can’t be anything else. The public cow has been milked past the point of kindness, and now the bucket’s running dry.

That’s where tech’s trouble begins. When your whole business model depends on pestering people who’ve stopped paying attention, you’re not running an industry—you’re running out of time.