How Digital Marketing Broke Society

25.9% of teenagers who spend four or more hours daily on screens experienced depression symptoms in the past two weeks. 27.1% reported anxiety symptoms.

Higher durations of Internet use increases depression levels. Adolescents who spend more than three hours online daily are more likely to fall into the "very severe" range for depression compared to those who spend less than two hours online.

Approximately 28% of American adults reported being "almost constantly" online in 2019, with about half of young adults (ages 18 to 29) reporting the same.

We are, increasingly, a cross-generational society of extremely online, screen-tapping, doomscrolling depressives. And it's having an impact. More than ever, we are divided by misinformation and disinformation, driven by and vulnerable to ignorance, hate-mongering, and bullshit, reactive more than proactive, caught in what is either a global backslide or a cycle of decay. We're lonely, scared, and more likely than ever to take it out on total strangers. We read less. We watch more, and what we watch is short-form, viral videos designed to tap into the dopamine-fueled, base parts of our brains.

There are a lot of places to lay the blame for this. The easiest is the Internet as a whole. "The world was better before we were online," etc. But that's not fair. There is nothing innately wrong with the Internet itself. A web that connects humans. Personal sites, blogs, open-source projects, RSS, Wikipedia, and Mastodon. These are good things.

What about social media?

Absolutely. We can lay a chunk of the blame there. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. They've all played a part in the forced decay of our world. I could write thousands of words on that topic, and - going back over my work from the past year - I have.

But it can't stop there. Social media is just one part of a bigger problem. These platforms weren't built in isolation—they were designed as vehicles for something more insidious:

Digital marketing.

An insipid, vile, and humanity-destroying industry.

If that sounds dramatic, bear with me.

Digital marketing is a system engineered to extract maximum value from human consciousness while providing minimal return. This isn't by accident; it's by design.

The evolution of digital marketing represents one of the most profound shifts in commercial manipulation in human history.

In the early days of the Internet—circa 1994 to 2004—digital marketing existed in a rudimentary state. Sponsored links. Banner ads flashing across GeoCities pages. Pop-up windows, uninvited on screens. Companies purchased keyword placements on early search engines with little targeting capability. These methods were crude, interruptive, and easily dismissed by users who quickly developed "banner blindness" as a psychological defense mechanism.

As surviving companies looked for "sustainable" business models following the dot-com crash, they discovered that user data is a valuable product on its own. Google pioneered AdWords, introducing the concept that ads could - and should - be matched to user intent. And the advertising industry's focus shifted from random exposure to targeted intervention.

The next watershed moment: the rise of social platforms around 2004-2008. Facebook, and then other networks, created unprecedented opportunities to harvest behavioral data at scale. Marketing evolved from targeting demographics to targeting psychographics—psychological profiles constructed from digital breadcrumbs. Companies no longer marketed to general populations but to specific individuals based on personality traits, emotional states, and vulnerability patterns.

By 2010-2015, sophisticated retargeting systems emerged, allowing brands to hunt users across the Internet with products they had merely glanced at. Machine learning algorithms began predicting purchasing behavior with unsettling accuracy. A/B testing evolved into multivariate testing of dozens of variables simultaneously, optimizing emotional triggerrs.

Digital marketers employed behavioral economists and cognitive psychologists to architect "nudges" that exploited cognitive biases. They studied and implemented techniques from addiction science, designing for compulsive engagement rather than rational choice.

An entirely new system of influence came into being, operating largely beneath conscious awareness. Dark patterns increased, making it harder for users to protect their privacy or limit their exposure. Intermittent variable rewards—the psychological mechanism that powers slot machines—became standard practice.

The industry successfully reframed this surveillance and manipulation as "personalization" and "enhanced user experience"—linguistic legerdemain that positioned exploitation as a service.

And we all believed them, buying into their bullshit and their lies.

Meanwhile, the technology enabling the manipulation grew increasingly sophisticated, with eye-tracking, sentiment analysis, and even biometric responses being incorporated into marketing analytics.

The modern digital marketing apparatus doesn't just attempt to persuade—it creates comprehensive systems designed to override rational decision-making and autonomy. It's nothing less than applied behavioral control.

The digital marketing machine now demands - and more often than not, is granted - our total psychological surrender. It employs sophisticated techniques to bypass rational thought, targeting our insecurities, fears, and subconscious desires.

Algorithms, driven by and created in service to digital marketing, maintain our attention through negative emotional triggers. We’re caught in a persistent state of agitation and inadequacy engineered to drive consumption. The constant exposure to idealized representations and expertly targeted messaging exploits our insecurities, building on an amplification loop of social comparison and perceived deficiency.

The psychological toll can be measured in clinical outcomes: I pointed to some of the numbers above. But there are more. Studies show that heavy exposure to these manipulation systems correlates with increased cortisol levels, disrupted sleep patterns, and neurological changes consistent with anxiety and depression. Digital marketing doesn't simply sell products; it sells a perpetual state of lacking while degrading the cognitive resources needed to resist its influence, leaving us psychologically depleted, chronically dissatisfied, and unable to distinguish between authentic desires and implanted commercial imperatives.

Digital marketing has industrialized hatred. The algorithmic architecture designed to maximize engagement is a supercharger for bigotry, creating unprecedented pathways for misogynists, transphobes, and fascists to reach an audience and give them the tools to attack vulnerable people. And before any hand-wringing or buck-passing begins, this was completely predictable. It is, in fact, the inevitable outcome of systems that reward emotional intensity over factual accuracy, that prize time-on-platform over user wellbeing.

Rightwing influencers and manosphere figures mastered these exploitation mechanisms with ruthless efficiency. They recognized that digital marketing's core techniques—fear-based messaging, in-group/out-group dynamics, artificial scarcity, and constant crisis framing—could be repurposed to build lucrative hate-based empires. Figures like Andrew Tate and Ben Shapiro weaponized A/B-tested headlines, retargeting funnels, and engagement-optimized inflammatory content to radicalize millions. They perfected sophisticated pipelines that convert male insecurity into a monetizable rage.

Marketing firms have profited immensely from this ecosystem of hatred—consultancies specializing in "dark social" strategies command premium rates to amplify reactionary messaging. Ad networks continue serving advertisements alongside increasingly extreme content, claiming algorithmic neutrality while pocketing revenue. Data brokers sell behavioral profiles that enable precision-targeting of disaffected young men for radicalization. Major platforms maintain policies permissive enough to retain hateful content that drives engagement metrics while employing armies of underpaid content moderators to maintain plausible deniability.

Meta's internal research found that divisive content generates significantly higher engagement, translating directly to advertising revenue. YouTube's recommendation algorithm precisely drives users toward increasingly extreme content because it maximizes watch time and ad impressions. Marketing technology companies have built their entire business models around the commodification of attention - regardless of its social consequences.

Digital marketing is capitalism at its most predatory—a system where deliberately amplifying society's worst impulses becomes a rational business strategy. The industry has created a machine that converts social discord into shareholder value. In an attention economy, hatred isn't just profitable; it's the optimal product.

The economic model and the foundational worldview of digital marketing operate on the premise that human consciousness exists primarily as a resource to be mined, refined, and sold. It's a form of cognitive colonization—claiming and exploiting mental territory that once belonged to human beings.

You can read it in the language of the industry: users are "captured," attention is "harvested," and engagement is "extracted."

Rightwing political operations have weaponized these methodologies with devastating precision, creating an unprecedented assault on democratic processes. The Republican party and its aligned organizations have built a propaganda apparatus that would make Goebbels envious, deploying data-driven manipulation at scales previously unimaginable.

It began with micro-targeting but rapidly evolved into something far more insidious. Conservative strategists systematically mapped the fear responses, tribal identities, and cognitive vulnerabilities of potential voters, then developed content expressly engineered to bypass critical thinking.

MAGA-appealing campaigns now operate sophisticated fear-triggering systems that A/B test hundreds of variations of inflammatory messaging, scientifically optimizing for maximum outrage and tribal activation, precision-guided psychological operations that induce manageable states of paranoia, resentment, and cultural grievance.

The manufactured moral panics about "critical race theory" and transgender rights didn't spontaneously appear out of thin air. They were meticulously built for and algorithmically distributed to specific audiences identified as susceptible to particular forms of cultural anxiety. You know, like racism and intolerance.

Extremist media empires maintain their engagement through crisis fabrication—manufacturing a continuous stream of threats to keep audiences in a state of high emotional arousal that inibits critical thinking.

Meanwhile, dark money networks funnel billions into black-box influence operations that operate under the regulatory radar, using the tools of behavioral prediction to identify and exploit psychological pressure points in the electorate.

The folks who work in the field - and profit from it - point to its use for charitable causes and public health campaigns. But their cherry-picking commits the fallacy of selective attention; it's like praising a factory that pollutes an entire river because it occasionally produces medicine. The argument collapses entirely as soon as you remember that these "positive" applications only exist because the digital marketing apparatus created the very conditions that necessitate them.

Charitable organizations and "worthy causes" are forced to use the same psychological exploitation techniques to compete for attention because the attention economy has engineered a zero-sum battle for cognitive resources. The organic reach of genuinely valuable information is deliberately suppressed to create artificial scarcity—forcing anyone with a message to participate in the manipulation marketplace.

It's a perverse system where we have to poison information channels to deliver antidotes to that same poison. The need to "market good things" is not a justification for the system; it's an indictment of it; if we weren't trapped in an ecosystem designed to prioritize engagement over value, we wouldn't need sophisticated manipulation techniques to amplify beneficial messages in the first place.

I spent fifteen years in digital marketing. Building campaigns, funnels, and content. But over the last month, I shut down my marketing business. The decision was both ethical and existential. I can't continue participating in an industry that has evolved from persuasion - harmful enough - to psychological exploitation and the deliberate destruction of our social order.

Every optimization, targeting refinement, and engagement metric has brought us closer to a world where human autonomy is systematically undermined for commercial gain. The techniques I learned and taught others—the psychological triggers, the attention-capturing mechanisms, the behavioral prediction models—have escaped their commercial confines to taint our information ecosystem and devour the foundations of political discourse.

Digital marketing is a fundamental threat to human flourishing, cognitive autonomy, and democratic governance. The industry has normalized a state of perpetual surveillance and manipulation that would have been unthinkable just decades ago. Its methodologies have created a world where attention is constantly hijacked, emotions are continuously manipulated, and reality itself is customized in pursuit of extraction value.

For those still working in this field, your skills and knowledge are needed elsewhere. The same understanding of human psychology and behavior that makes you effective at driving conversions could be redirected to design systems that protect instead of exploit human capacities.

I don't know what that looks like yet.

I'm in a transitional phase now. I'm disillusioned, tired, and worn out.

My career in marketing and comms is over.

My pivot back to journalism - my original calling, the profession I studied in College - is taking its toll.

But I'm locking in. I have to.

Because digital marketing has destroyed too much of the world I love, and it's on all of us to undo the harm.