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<\/p>\nAaron Ross Coleman is an essayist covering race, business, and economics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
During the Super Bowl<\/span>, Anthropic<\/a> 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 <\/a>ran a commercial for its AI assistant Alexa+<\/a> 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<\/a> ran an ad titled \u201cRICH PEOPLE LIVE LONGER\u201d in which oligarchs access such healthcare luxuries as facelifts, bespoke IVs, and \u201cpreventative care\u201d to live longer than the rest of us. It was an anti-billionaire ad by a multibillion<\/a>-dollar healthcare company.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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<\/a> where parents sell their children\u2019s naming rights a la sports stadiums for the money to raise them or the Robinhood ads<\/a> where a white-haired older man, perhaps meant to evoke Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, curses the \u201cmen of means with their silver spoons eating up the financial favors of the one percent\u201d from the deck of a yacht.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019s all a winking sleight of hand meant to corral us back into engaging with the same capitalism they portray as a hellscape \u2014 but with new and improved privatized solutions. In another widely reviled Super Bowl ad, the video doorbell company Ring<\/a> tells us that every year, 10 million family pets go missing, and by opting into a web of mass surveillance, the company has reunited \u201cmore than a dog a day\u201d with their families.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cThe Conquest of Cool,\u201d<\/a> midcentury advertisers constructed \u201ca cultural perpetual motion machine in which disgust with the \u2026 everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption.\u201d<\/p>\n The machine has hummed on ever since, retrofitting capitalism\u2019s reprimands into its rationales. It churns out commercials reframing the precariat\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s lunacy.\u00a0Buying Levi\u2019s won\u2019t give you deep pockets. Brand promises, like all promises, are made to be broken. As AI anxiety fueled fears of mass layoffs, Coca-Cola<\/a> soothed American workers\u2019 worries about \u201cAI coming for everything\u201d 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<\/a>, replacing the actors they\u2019d paid to soothe our worries about being replaced by AI with AI itself.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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, \u201ccommercial fantasies of rebellion, liberation, and outright \u2018revolution\u2019 against the stultifying demands of mass society are commonplace almost to the point of invisibility in advertising, movies, and television programming.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n No matter how disingenuous or cynical, there is a secret wish expressed in these ads and the ways they resonate with consumers.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n 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\u2019s \u201cSend Help\u201d fulfill employees\u2019 dark fantasies of murdering their boss on a deserted island, as Carnival<\/a> ads show weary lumber workers hammering their phone in a fit of fury. Promotions for smash rooms<\/a>, axe-throwing alleys, and gun ranges generate billions, as big business charges pent-up proletariats to \u201cunleash\u201d in rage rooms and\u00a0\u201cthrow, hit, punch, and swing at inanimate objects<\/a> as a means to release your pent up frustrations and anger.\u201d It might seem cringe to invoke \u201c1984\u201d and its \u201cTwo Minutes Hate,\u201d where subjects of the totalitarian regime yell for two minutes, if businesses weren\u2019t doing it for us.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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?\u00a0<\/p>\n ?At its core<\/span>, today\u2019s advertising offers a repressed radicalism, a strange plea to revolt against the indignities corporations impress upon us.<\/p>\n After all, aren\u2019t Heineken\u2019s reminders to \u201cdrink responsibly\u201d just bids for public transportation? Aren\u2019t E*Trade ads with octogenarian wage slaves<\/a> 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\u2019t Uber partially right, too? We should be our own bosses. But instead of shackling drivers as gig serfs, what if Uber\u2019s sharing economy gave drivers their share of the company\u2019s profits? What if we didn\u2019t have to shop at places we didn\u2019t get to own and didn\u2019t have to work at places where we couldn\u2019t afford the shop? What if we weren\u2019t so beat up and knocked down that E*Trade<\/a> ads had to remind us that \u201cTHERE ARE DOGS WITH BETTER LIVES THAN YOU\u201d?\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n There are, of course, other places one could find truly revolutionary art. There are the Adbusters McDonald\u2019s spoofs reading<\/a> \u201cEAT FAST, DIE YOUNG<\/em>.\u201d There are the Black Workers Congress vintage 1971 labor posters <\/a>with Haiti\u2019s Toussaint Louverture rallying Black autoworkers in Detroit to strike at Dodge. There are the Paul Beatty satires<\/a> where characters wore \u201cNike Cortez sneakers so fucking new that if they had taken one shoe off and placed it to their ear like a conch shell, they\u2019d hear the roar of an ocean of sweatshop labor.\u201d 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\u2019ve long yearned for America\u2019s prime-time advertisements, already dripping with populist contempt, to finally fulfill their revolutionary promise.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n