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The Only Solution Capitalism Has Is to Sell Us More Useless Junk

Ad makers will never say the quiet part loud, but they increasingly know that we're unhappy and looking for solutions.

Aaron Ross Coleman is an essayist covering race, business, and economics.

During the Super Bowl, Anthropic ran a dystopian AI ad about dystopian AI ads featuring an AI android physical trainer hawking insoles to a user who only asked for an ab workout. Not to be outdone, Amazon ran a commercial for its AI assistant Alexa+ in which Chris Hemsworth fretted over all the different ways AI might kill him, including severing his head and drowning him in his pool. Equally bleak, the telehealth company Hims & Hers ran an ad titled “RICH PEOPLE LIVE LONGER” in which oligarchs access such healthcare luxuries as facelifts, bespoke IVs, and “preventative care” to live longer than the rest of us. It was an anti-billionaire ad by a multibillion-dollar healthcare company. 

Turn on the TV today, and you will drown in a sea of ads in which capitalists denounce capitalism. Think of the PNC Bank ads where parents sell their children’s naming rights a la sports stadiums for the money to raise them or the Robinhood ads where a white-haired older man, perhaps meant to evoke Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, curses the “men of means with their silver spoons eating up the financial favors of the one percent” from the deck of a yacht.  

After years of ingesting the mainstream discourse around surveillance capitalism, Occupy Wall Street, and democratic socialism, corporations are regurgitating and even surpassing the rhetoric of the modern left. Naturally, it’s all a winking sleight of hand meant to corral us back into engaging with the same capitalism they portray as a hellscape — but with new and improved privatized solutions. In another widely reviled Super Bowl ad, the video doorbell company Ring tells us that every year, 10 million family pets go missing, and by opting into a web of mass surveillance, the company has reunited “more than a dog a day” with their families.

Modern advertisers descend from those ad men of the 1960s who first perfected the art of channeling our angst with society writ large into buying more junk. As historian Thomas Frank wrote in his book “The Conquest of Cool,” midcentury advertisers constructed “a cultural perpetual motion machine in which disgust with the … everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption.”

The machine has hummed on ever since, retrofitting capitalism’s reprimands into its rationales. It churns out commercials reframing the precariat’s pain not as the product of plutocracy but as the product of buying the wrong products. Advertisements pitch that the good life is to be secured by procuring high quality goods, by curating the right combination of AI assistants, locally crafted beer, paraben-free dryer sheets, Jimmy Dean breakfast biscuits, Capital One Venture X points, BetMGM spreads, Coinbase crypto wallets, on and on.

It’s lunacy. Buying Levi’s won’t give you deep pockets. Brand promises, like all promises, are made to be broken. As AI anxiety fueled fears of mass layoffs, Coca-Cola soothed American workers’ worries about “AI coming for everything” with a glossy 2025 Super Bowl ad, featuring Lauren London, where the gleaming actress flexed her dimples and told us everything would be all right. Ten months later, Coke automated its advertising with generative videos, replacing the actors they’d paid to soothe our worries about being replaced by AI with AI itself.

This cynicism undergirds all modern advertising. Commercials clinically diagnose the painful side effects of living under a despotic capitalist regime, only to prescribe meaningless placebos of Doritos and Pepto-Bismol. And should those cheap calories and antacids fail to placate us, should we find homelessness and hunger so revolting that we crave revolution, then conglomerates will sell rebellion, too. As Frank wrote almost 30 years ago, “commercial fantasies of rebellion, liberation, and outright ‘revolution’ against the stultifying demands of mass society are commonplace almost to the point of invisibility in advertising, movies, and television programming.” As economic angst threatens to boil over, production only ramps up. Corporate creatives feverishly manufacture transgression to keep up with populist-fueled demands for prepackaged dissent.

No matter how disingenuous or cynical, there is a secret wish expressed in these ads and the ways they resonate with consumers.

No matter how disingenuous or cynical, there is a secret wish expressed in these ads and the ways they resonate with consumers.

Day by day, Hulu and Netflix roll out new swashbuckling tales of scrappy revolutionary insurgencies to enrich their IP regimes. In 2026, trailers for Rachel McAdams’s “Send Help” fulfill employees’ dark fantasies of murdering their boss on a deserted island, as Carnival ads show weary lumber workers hammering their phone in a fit of fury. Promotions for smash rooms, axe-throwing alleys, and gun ranges generate billions, as big business charges pent-up proletariats to “unleash” in rage rooms and “throw, hit, punch, and swing at inanimate objects as a means to release your pent up frustrations and anger.” It might seem cringe to invoke “1984” and its “Two Minutes Hate,” where subjects of the totalitarian regime yell for two minutes, if businesses weren’t doing it for us. 

Yet, no matter how thin, one can see cracks in this hulking machine. No matter how disingenuous or cynical, there is a secret wish expressed in these ads and the ways they resonate with consumers. Rituals are funny like that. Repeat them enough, and they sprout roots. In America, sedition is now a mantra. Mutiny, a popular sentiment. Populism is winning the war for hearts and minds. Billionaires who once spurned talk of class war now finance fiction about eating the rich. Just as advertisers who once fashioned consumerism as orgasmic fantasies now portray shopping in a dreaded wasteland. What are we to make of this capitalism forced to confess its contradictions? 

​At its core, today’s advertising offers a repressed radicalism, a strange plea to revolt against the indignities corporations impress upon us.

After all, aren’t Heineken’s reminders to “drink responsibly” just bids for public transportation? Aren’t E*Trade ads with octogenarian wage slaves a rallying cry for a robust social safety net? Coinbase is right, on some level, that the financial system is broken. But what if instead of more speculative crypto scams, they were boosting public banking? And Isn’t Uber partially right, too? We should be our own bosses. But instead of shackling drivers as gig serfs, what if Uber’s sharing economy gave drivers their share of the company’s profits? What if we didn’t have to shop at places we didn’t get to own and didn’t have to work at places where we couldn’t afford the shop? What if we weren’t so beat up and knocked down that E*Trade ads had to remind us that “THERE ARE DOGS WITH BETTER LIVES THAN YOU”? 

Advertisers always stop one step short, never allowing themselves to say the quiet part aloud, always walking us right up to the edge of a radical insight, yet remaining too afraid to incite working people to rise up.

There are, of course, other places one could find truly revolutionary art. There are the Adbusters McDonald’s spoofs reading “EAT FAST, DIE YOUNG.” There are the Black Workers Congress vintage 1971 labor posters with Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture rallying Black autoworkers in Detroit to strike at Dodge. There are the Paul Beatty satires where characters wore “Nike Cortez sneakers so fucking new that if they had taken one shoe off and placed it to their ear like a conch shell, they’d hear the roar of an ocean of sweatshop labor.” Yet these auteurs all feel niche compared to the pop art of Super Bowl and NCAA tournament ads. No matter how ridiculous it may seem, I’ve long yearned for America’s prime-time advertisements, already dripping with populist contempt, to finally fulfill their revolutionary promise.

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I’ve only seen it happen once, kind of. In the early 2020s, I was zoning out to hours of NFL when one of those inspirational Marine recruitment promos popped on — the one where jackbooted Gen Zers with square jaws punched through digital emoji clouds to transform into real men. After the ad flipped off, it was immediately followed by a nightmarish PSA where glassy-eyed, sweat-drenched veterans lurched, sobbing in empty parking lots and extended stay hotels, struggling to stave off PTSD-induced suicide. I was floored. The jump cut felt like something approaching truth, felt like ads finally reckoning with how imperialist wars for blood and oil squandered youth’s promise down into a pit of stubbled, middle-aged mania.

Perhaps America can never tell the whole truth within ads, but perhaps we could tell the truth between them. Call it The Honesty in Advertising Act. From now on, every military recruitment ad could be attached to a PSA about homeless veterans. Every Kool-Aid ad could be melded with dialysis ads. Every Taco Bell ad would have to be followed by ads for Pepto-Bismol and funeral homes. Smash them all together, and they’d work like the disclaimers on cigarette cartons and liquor bottles. Surgeon General’s Warning: Capitalism causes poverty, desperation, alienation, and concentration of global wealth in the top 0.0001%. Quitting now greatly reduces risks of premature death, medical debt, eviction, and environmental catastrophe.

IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.

What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. 

This is not hyperbole.

Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation.

Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.” 

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IT’S BEEN A DEVASTATING year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.

We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.

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I’M BEN MUESSIG, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. It’s been a devastating year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.

We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.

In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.

That’s where you come in. Will you help us expand our reporting capacity in time to hit the ground running in 2026?

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