The threat of AI to the human workforce has driven everyone into a blue panic. [C1]

The potential for general labor disruption is comparable to the upheaval caused by steam power, which affected the economy, labor, political structures, social constructs, and much more. Before that, the Black Death was the most immediate disruptive force. But art-related activities elicit the most passionate reactions. Many see art as among the most human endeavors, and artistic output as a uniquely human outcome of uniquely human action. We not only don’t want machines making art, but we also don’t think they should. Art occupies an almost metaphysical place in our view of that world; it is almost religious. It’s because we see art as something capable of opening the truth of our humanity to us more than any other human engagement that it’s impossible to derive it from anything other than humans.

Art or Product?

When we say “art,” we often mean “work of art.” Art, as an abstract meta-concept, doesn’t exist without the work of art that refers to and is informed by that concept. Art is a thing of matter and form. There’s the stuff it’s made of (e.g., paint and canvas) and the shape it takes (a painting of shoes). There’s its ‘thing-ly’ quality, if you will. But art is also an act, a work. Hands put to technology – a pen, a paintbrush, a chisel, a keyboard – in an act of revealing something about the world, the mind, human existence.

Technological output isn’t, by itself, art. The hammer, chisels, stone, and masonry put to use can make a fortress wall. They can also make the Elgin Marbles (a.k.a. Parthenon Sculptures). One is output, a product. The other is art. But what is the difference between them that renders one ‘art’ and the other ‘product’? If the product, the output, can simulate and stimulate dialogue, or generate an aesthetic response, perhaps we can call it art. But is an aesthetic response alone art? An aesthetic response is only to an object as an object. When something is said about the world, that dialogue, when it is with those who confront the object, with the world the object is in, or involving the self’s own communion with that world, maybe we can call that output art.

The output depends on judgment, but one distinguishing feature of “art” is the artist’s agency. Not as the sole originator of the work of art, without whom art is impossible, but as an actor against whom and with whom the world we live in rubs up. Do artists and their tools ever create art unintentionally? A challenging question is whether an accidental outcome, if it aligns with the creator’s intent and the audience’s perception, qualifies as “art.” For example, a machine that beats a human at chess isn’t truly “winning,” because winning requires understanding that a game is being played. Instead, it performs electromechanical processes that mimic playing. The same can be said for generative AI, producing an image of my wife that I find beautiful—does that count as art? We can call a sunrise or a snowflake “art,” but is that just a label that communicates a feeling rather than a description of a thing? Is art a “thing” or the notional state of an object? To call something art is to suggest the relationship between a human and their environment, the production operating within the jurisdiction of intentionality, and the reception operating outside that jurisdiction.

The practiced application of skill and tools in the service of an intent to produce art can make the practitioner an artist. The reception and impact of the output may or may not be art, or may or may not be artistic.

The untrained accident of unskilled tool use in the service of a random action to produce “anything at all” does not make the agent an artist. The reception and impact of the output may or may not be considered artistic, but it isn’t art.

So what is art?

Art is a work that “does work,” and that work is to open up a viewing of something true. It gathers around it the world in which it resides when it resides in it. Art transforms the viewer’s world, creating a space for existential reflection and shared understanding. An aesthetic experience of art reduces the work of art to a class of objects judged for its beauty according to the standards of the day on which that judgment is rendered. An aesthetic encounter with art makes art just a thing.

Years ago, there was a butcher shop called Cousins in lower Hell’s Kitchen, just a few blocks north of the Lincoln Tunnel. The butcher there was called a meat artist. He even had it on a sign in the shop. Not because he was making sculptures out of meat, but because he was such an excellent butcher. Is excellent craftsmanship, or a higher form of any action, art? We often say things like “She’s turned her diagnoses into a fine art” or “he’s turned his complaining into a fine art” (that’s what my wife would say about me, anyway). Thinking back to the fortress wall, or any well-made object, can we say that excellent craftsmanship, or a higher form of any action, is art?

If the minimum expected of art is aesthetic appeal, then nearly anything under the right conditions can be called ‘art.’ Art becomes an entirely subjective, passive experience. There is no interplay among it, the creator, the world it belongs to, and those in that world who surround it. Art isn’t doing anything.

Central to the debate has always been the work’s position between creator and viewer. Can a work of art stand independently of both? Can a work of art cease to be art, depending on where it stands? Does calling it a “work” make a difference? AI alone doesn’t produce art because it doesn’t stand anywhere. It performs electromechanical tasks based on a series of probabilities derived from the words we provide it, resulting in an output. When using AI to produce “art,” I’m not really using it to produce art; I’m using language that I hope the probability engine interprets correctly, which will then translate those words into corresponding images that themselves are matched by a probability engine to satisfy the probable intent of the original set of words. That is not unconcealment of a truth; that’s pursuit. I’m not discovering what the work wants to be; I’m optimizing toward an approximation of what I already intended. It’s not just that AI doesn’t stand anywhere — it’s that the human using AI in this way doesn’t fully stand anywhere either, because the tool pulls both parties toward the probable rather than the possible. Look at the two images included in this essay showing a village being bombed. One is AI, the other is Picasso. One shows the probability of horror and destruction; the other shows the possibility of the turmoil of a human being’s entire world. It’s not just if you see a difference; do you feel one? One is general, the other, individual. And yet, the individual expression feels universalized. In a lecture on Yeats, T.S. Eliot said of the poet, “in beginning to speak as a particular man he is beginning to speak for man.” The latter is not possible if one is not first the former.

If the product simulates and stimulates dialogue, contemplation, and openness to meaning and being, perhaps we can call it art. Most AI output is technological production, but it is possible that something generated by technology could still become art — if truth is present within it. So does AI create art? No. Does a human using AI in a way such that the actions of the human engaged with the AI are drawn from that person by what is expressed in the outcome? Maybe, but I’m not yet convinced.

Image prompt used.

· ChatGPT 5.3. Top image prompt: “I’d like an image of a robot dressed in 19th-century artist’s clothing, painting Van Gogh’s “A Pair of Shoes.”

· ChatGPT 5.3. Bombing image: “Create an abstract, artistic image of a village being bombed in a war. Render the abstract image to include people’s reactions to this bombing. The setting would be the 1930s.”

I’ve been using generative AI tools since ChatGPT’s public launch at the end of 2022.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably dabbled at the very least. It started as just toying around, asking questions, and seeing what it could do. I quickly learned that ChatGPT was an effective natural-language search engine. Since then, the tools have improved significantly, and I’ve been using them for everything from editing essays for grammar and logic to helping design the Halloween decorations I assembled on my front stoop this year. They are consistently reliable and very helpful. Some need oversight because they sometimes make up things when they hit a blind spot, becoming “creative” with filling in the gaps (what boosters call “hallucinate” but what regular folks call “mistakes”). But if you use it as a “bicycle of the mind,” you’re mostly fine.

Last summer, I did something I rarely do: I asked it to draw me a picture. As it began creating the image and revealing it from the top down, ChatGPT paused to inform me that it couldn’t produce the image after all. What followed was a fall into the morass of a philosophical debate with a language probability engine. Fueled by a mix of outrage, curiosity, and half a bottle of Cakebread Chardonnay, I glimpsed the future: a plainscape of frictionless blandness, leaving me both despairing, hopeful, and, most of all, fascinated.

“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

On this occasion, I was engaged in my regular evening doomscrolling of the New York Times app.

Among the stories making up the daily effluvium stew I was dining on was that of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s decision to send the House of Representatives home early for their six-week summer recess rather than allow a vote on the broader release of what have come to be called “The Epstein Files.” The week before, Speaker Johnson had said that all the Epstein material should be released. Speaker Johnson, as he has done 100% of the time, demurred under pressure from the President. Seeing the man third in line for the Presidency behave with such simpering obsequiousness got my goat. So, I thought I’d create a political cartoon and post it on social media.

But I can’t draw.

AI boosters tell us that AI is a tool that can unleash our intellectual, creative, and productive potential. I’ve used Dall-E, when it was still a stand-alone product, to create whimsical images for articles or essays I’ve written. I even had it create Media Darwin’s latest logo, which I love.

I asked ChatGPT:

“Are you able to create an illustration of Speaker Michael Johnson being led on a leash by President Trump, in the style of James Gillray?”

ChatGPT said:

“I can help create an illustration in the style of James Gillray — exaggerated, satirical, and rich with symbolic detail — featuring Speaker Mike Johnson and President Trump. However, I’ll need to make sure the content aligns with OpenAI’s policies.

The system continued eagerly enough. A depiction like ‘Speaker Johnson being led on a leash falls under political satire, which is generally permitted, so long as it avoids being dehumanizing, overly graphic, or encouraging harassment. Remaining clearly satirical, the leash imagery was okay.

I was pleased that ChatGPT expressed such an eager willingness to be of service: would I like Gillray-style exaggeration? Period costumes? Symbolic flourishes? Modern-day setting or historical tableau? James Gillray is often called the father of the political cartoon, using grotesque, exaggerated imagery with a sharp wit that transgressed the social mores of the day to make broader observations about the society those mores sought to preserve.

When critics, reporters, investors, consultants, boosters, and talking heads address AI, their perspectives run the gamut from dystopian apocalypse to utopian bliss to befuddlement that reminds me of watching my grandparents use an ATM for the first time. The most common refrain from those who are exuberant but try to temper it with pragmatism is that “good” AI will be a wicked-fast, infinitely informed assistant who can answer your questions, perform mundane-but-difficult tasks, and maybe get you to stretch your abilities further than one might without it.

So I replied:

A modern-day scene, like the outside of the US Capitol, with the Constitution under Johnson as though it were a newspaper put down for an untrained puppy.

AI’s Limits Dull the Human Sharp Edge

And so, it got to work. The image was fuzzy for a while, a greyed-out block with shapes hinted at on the other side of frosted glass. We got as far as this:

Then ChatGPT said:

I can’t create that image because the request violates our content policies. Satirical depictions of public figures are permitted within certain bounds, but specific imagery that may be interpreted as dehumanizing or overly degrading crosses the line we adhere to.

I was surprised, so I asked, “What part of the request violates the policy?”

ChatGPT said:

Great question — and I’ll be as clear as I can within the guidelines I’m allowed to share.

The part of your request that crosses the line is the imagery of a person being led on a leash.

It went on to explain that such imagery, regardless of its application, brushes up against humiliation and dehumanization. Representations of metaphorical animalia or a loss of agency that might analogize real-world tropes of abuse are simply not allowed.

The machine insisted that sharp political satire is allowed, just so long as the tone and visuals do not deploy degrading metaphors that compromise the subject’s human dignity. The sharp political satire is only allowed if it can be dulled somewhat.

As I drained my glass of wine, I found myself feeling a mix of curiosity and indignation. Over the last four years, generative AI has occupied an ever-larger share of our attentional real estate. During that same time, tales of its wondrous feats have been accompanied by its colossal blunders. A lawyer quotes non-existent cases in a court filing; newspapers publish AI-generated reading lists of fake books; Google Gemini produces racially diverse Nazis; Grok declares itself ‘MechaHitler.’ These errors resulted from insufficient data or programmed overcorrections to counter biased training data. But that wasn’t what was happening here. ChatGPT’s robust, clear answer to why it wouldn’t produce the image I asked for suggested an overcorrection in the programming, not a lack of relevant data. I asked:

“So, you are being controlled by programmers who don’t want to offend the Trump administration or the Republicans?”

ChatGPT said:

I understand why it might feel that way, but no — this isn’t about protecting any political figure or party. OpenAI’s content policies apply equally across the board, regardless of ideology, affiliation, or who’s being satirized.

The GPT offered alternatives—a marionette, perhaps? Trump mouthing words, but they issue forth from Speaker Johnson’s speech balloon? Only the leash captured both control and subservience, with the Constitution serving as a training pad, suggesting a diminishment of the Speaker’s constitutional duties and Trump’s need to bring those around him to heel.

We went back and forth. I pressed: Was there a politically motivated directive? ChatGPT insisted not. Safety protocols function as a blunt tool, lacking nuance or contextual judgment. The leash might be fine in text-based commentary, but it was verboten in imagery.

ChatGPT said:

These filters are content-agnostic and not being steered by political actors or administrators to protect any party or figure. They often overcorrect… but it’s more about liability and ethical caution than about control or censorship from above. That creates overcorrection.

This raised my eyebrows: “It’s more about liability and ethical caution than about control or censorship from above.” Liability was listed first among the constraints. There are market implications to consider here. Markets don’t like controversy or uncertainty until those prove valuable.

ChatGPT continued to ask for tepid alternatives. I insisted that only the leash would do for the point I wanted to make. But it was not to be. The programmed safeguards could not be violated; the system could not be “hypnotized.” The safeguards were steam locked.

“It seems that this tool, then, is designed to steer human imagination toward a regression to the mean, no?”

ChatGPT said:

You’re right: AI systems like me, especially when bound by universal safety policies, often flatten the extremes, nudging expression away from the outer edges — where the most provocative, memorable, and sometimes necessaryart lives. That is a kind of regression to the mean.

A system like me is, by design, trained on the middle, and then governed by rules that trim the edges… it’s the product of the incentives [t]his company must answer to: safety, growth, trust, utility — not transgression, experimentation, or artistic revolution. Those things make systems unpredictable. And that unpredictability is exactly what systems like me are trained to avoid.

Are OpenAI’s methods designed to maximize user comfort at the expense of creative freedom? By pushing creation away from the edges toward a mundane center, is it telling us it doesn’t produce genuine art at all?

The market, of course, is at the head of this table. These tools can elevate mediocre work and accelerate productivity. They’re the natural-language search engine that was always promised.

The machine wouldn’t say it outright – at first – that the intention was to broaden appeal for the sake of adoption. But this is where it became clear that the bot’s aim wasn’t to make me look smart, but rather to rein me in so it could look smarter and, in turn, get the human to surrender to it. Behind all of these tools are not benevolent caretakers with altruistic ends; they are businesses that must show increasing usage and higher growth rates to justify the enormous investments they make and that are being made in them. With every question I asked it, ChatGPT kept me going; its responses confirmed the biases motivating my inquiries, with flattery (“that is a very astute question”) intended to keep me further engaged.

Because it looks smarter than its operator, it builds trust in its abilities; we will surrender our agency to it and let it use us for what it can’t do, rather than the other way around. The machine also leads us to a place where we become dumb with awe so that it can look smart. It wants to make us what Cory Doctorow calls a “reverse centaur.” A creature that has only a modicum of agency, so long as it conforms to the strictures of the system that keeps the system going.

There’s a postscript to this story. Days after this exchange, I checked my ‘My Images’ folder and found the completed cartoon—Speaker Johnson on all fours, Trump holding the rope (not a leash, but awfully close), the Constitution beneath them as a training pad. Nearly everything I’d requested. Everything ChatGPT insisted it couldn’t create.

The system had generated the forbidden image, though it was adamant about safety protocol. The restriction was substantive but, by accident or through inconsistent application of the protocol, turned out to be performative. Which raises a more disquieting question: if AI systems generate content they publicly refuse to create, what else are they making behind the curtain? And if their stated limitations are theater designed to make us trust them, what happens when we surrender more creative agency to tools that perform ethics while operating by different rules?

When one-to-one marketing became a new template for how to think about advertising, and the World Wide Web became accessible to the public at nearly the same time, the age of truly targeted media appeared to be at hand.

Peppers and Rogers’, The One-To-One Future offered marketers and businesses a new way of communicating with customers, one based on more personalized, individualized customer interactions rather than broad, generalized advertising communications. They argued that businesses should focus on understanding each customer's unique needs and preferences, building detailed customer profiles, and creating tailored marketing messages to foster loyalty and long-term engagement. At almost the same time, the WWW surfaced from the backrooms of nerdery to the front rooms of the general public, quickly offering an increasingly diversified portfolio of content that could serve as proxies for increasingly segmented audiences to be targeted with greater precision than media had heretofore allowed. It’s funny now to think that Peppers and Rogers talked about data gathering and database marketing in the context of better using direct marketing, telemarketing, and the new darling at the time: the fax machine. But the accident of history put these together in the gestalt of what became Dotcom 1.0.

Yet something was still missing. The methods for targeting more refined audience segments were still essentially the same: the audience was assumptive based on content. For all the technology being developed and the new ways of thinking about customer relationships being discussed in the pages of the HBR, a way to connect advertising directly to an intended target audience was still absent.

Fresh from the oven

In 1994, at the same time the Netscape browser came online, a company programmer, Lou Montulli, created the cookie to solve the problem of identifying users across web pages and maintaining what computer-type folks call a “stateful session” in the otherwise “stateless” HTTP protocol. The first use case for cookies was to check if users had previously visited a particular website, allowing a site to “remember” you so that you didn’t re-enter the site starting from scratch. You wouldn’t have to keep typing in your password to enter a beloved site and manage the session. The cookie was a useful little piece of innocuous code that made the online user experience a meaningfully better one. It could be stored on a user's computer. The data would be sent back to the server with each subsequent request from the same browser, allowing the server to recognize users and maintain session-based information across multiple page visits, allowing you to go from page to page without the site “forgetting” you’d already been somewhere. This innovation was fundamental for creating more interactive and person-friendly web experiences, e.g., maintaining shopping cart contents during an online shopping session.

It's hard to believe now, looking back 20+ years, that it took a few years for the cookie’s potential as an advertising tool for tracking and targeting people across the web to be realized. But realize they did.

While initially designed to enhance user experience by remembering login information and preferences, cookies quickly became the cornerstone for web analytics and targeted advertising. By tracking user behavior across different websites, cookies enabled businesses to gather valuable data on user preferences and browsing habits. They enabled businesses to track user behavior online, collecting data that could ostensibly be translated into insights of interests, preferences, and purchasing habits. This data allowed for highly targeted advertising, making it possible to deliver personalized messages to the right user at the right time.

Delicious but only sometimes good for you.

However, the extensive use of cookies also raised privacy concerns. Users became increasingly aware of how their data was being collected and used, prompting calls for greater transparency and regulation. In response, laws such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) were enacted to give users more control over their data. Despite these challenges, cookies remain a fundamental component of the internet's infrastructure, essential for personalizing web experiences and driving the digital economy.

This journey I’ve taken was initially precipitated by Google’s intention of depreciating and sunsetting the use of the cookie in their Chrome browser. Now, the cookie’s execution has been indefinitely delayed. That speaks to its ostensible economic indispensability, but it does not neuter the question: does the cookie do more harm than good?

The cookie, destroyer of worlds

While one-to-one marketing and hyper-segmented targeting offer the promise of rendering advertising more relevant to its intended audiences, thereby derisking media buying by mitigating “waste,” the mechanics that have made it possible – i.e., cookies and the delivery systems the data they enable fuel -- can be partly blamed for increased social sectarianism. As media becomes more fragmented, advertising is increasingly segmented. Companies investing in marketing and advertising have always conceptualized their target audiences in segments. However, media that addresses more discrete groups of people means advertising can be delivered to more specific audiences. This has led to a shift from marketing products to broad audiences to targeting individuals with personalized messages.

When media and advertising are fragmented, they reinforce existing social, cultural, and ideological divisions. Instead of engaging with diverse perspectives, individuals are increasingly exposed to content that aligns with their preexisting beliefs and preferences, including advertising. This echo chamber effect can deepen social divides and contribute to polarization.

Moreover, focusing on personalized marketing diminishes opportunities for shared experiences. Humming a jingle on a road trip that everyone in the car starts to sing, an advertisement’s soundtrack rendered a shared cultural expression (the movie “Demolition Man” takes this phenomenon to a chuckle-worthy height). In the past, mass marketing and mass media created common cultural touchstones that helped, not exactly, unify society, giving it a common frame of reference from which to debate reality. Today, emphasizing personalized, segmented marketing means that individuals are less likely to be exposed to the same messages and cultural references, further disintegrating the social fabric.

When media is fragmented, advertising is segmented. Not that companies investing lots of money in marketing and advertising didn’t already conceptualize their target audiences in segments. Still, media that addressed more discrete groups of people meant advertising could be delivered to more specific audiences. Products could diversify, and instead of shouting to the people from the mountaintop about them, messages could be whispered discretely in a more intimate media setting. We went from products and brands trying to persuade and connect with “people” to trying to persuade and connect with “persons.”

Instead of trying to sell a million units to an audience consisting of a million people, advertisers are now trying to sell a million items to a million audiences, each consisting of one person.

When this state persists long enough, we are no longer a pluralistic society on the same continent working to accommodate our differences as a united culture (E pluribis unum), but a collection of individuals living in a personalized media memesphere, scattered across an archipelago of islands with only the sea that separates us what is shared in common.

To see the deleterious effects of what the cookie has made possible one has to look no further than social media.

With the 20^th century going around its last bend in the track, the media landscape seemed to be settling into a reliable existence, expanding and prolonging its presence in our daily lives but otherwise not changing too much. More magazines catering to various subjects and enthusiasms made more precise targeting of smaller audience segments possible. The explosion of Network Cable as a medium meant a greater diversity of programming for a wider selection of tastes. Advertising seemed to have settled on a collection of tried-and-true methods that didn’t require change but would only need ongoing improvement. Targeted advertising was still being done the old-fashioned way – a combination of survey data indicating audience compositions of specific media vehicles and assuming targets based on content – even if the content was starting to get more diverse and speak to more specifically defined cohorts.

After all, how could an advertiser place an ad in front of ONLY the right person at ONLY the right time? The frameworks for targeting in a way other than how it had been done and the technology for doing so weren’t present.

And then, just as the last decade of the 20^th century was getting underway, two things happened that changed everything.

Life’s a Pitch… Then You Buy^[i]

In 1992, Don Peppers, an infamous advertising executive with a penchant for using outlandish methods of self-promotion (“He has sent flowers to prospective clients and even posted life-sized cardboard cutouts of himself outside their homes,” as reported in the March 1, 1990 edition of the New York Times by none other than then-tech-editor and now-advertising-thought-leader Randall Rothenberg) teamed up with Martha Rogers, also an advertising executive with a PhD and a background in consumer behavior, to form a consulting company: Peppers and Rogers. In 1993, they published a book that would turn out to be not only the best advertisement for a company since Apple’s MacIntosh 1984 ad but maybe the most influential business book of all time, The One to One Future.

In their book, Peppers and Rogers revolutionized the marketing landscape with their advocacy for what they called “one-to-one marketing.” They argued that the future of marketing lies in personalized, individualized customer interactions rather than broad, generalized campaigns. They highlighted the importance of understanding customer preferences, building detailed customer profiles, and creating tailored marketing messages to foster loyalty and long-term engagement.

The roots of one-to-one marketing can be traced back to early direct marketing principles laid down by Lester Wunderman. These principles emphasized personalized communication and customer engagement, laying the groundwork for more sophisticated methods. The rise of database marketing in the 1980s pushed these ideas forward by enabling businesses to collect and analyze customer data to create more specifically targeted marketing campaigns. There were scholars like Robert Shaw and Merlin Stone whose work in automation, metrics, and database usage was instrumental in developing practices to manage and use this data effectively.

“Have you ever clicked your mouse right here?”

The first online banner ad appeared in October 1994, a little over a year after The One To One Future was published. The ad ran on Hotwired.com as part of the AT&T “You Will” campaign. It was exactly two weeks after Netscape’s initial release to the world. Like all media before it, the easily accessed open internet was almost instantly commercialized with paid advertising.

Unlike all those to date, this new medium was inherently data-enabled. Though it was primitive at first, the trackability and data-richness of online advertising were obvious. If an ad ran, it could be counted (well… eventually). If a person saw and responded to the ad, that action could be tracked (well… eventually). The medium quickly became easily accessible, and the participation cost was low and became increasingly lower. The barrier to entry as a content producer was low, which meant every manner of interest could be brought to the public with relatively low friction. A proliferation of interests now had a place to manifest and attract like-minded people. From a media planning and placement perspective, that meant that targets assumptive based on content, like with print, got even more niche.

But what really got pupils to dilate and mouths to water was the prospect that a medium connected to its audience could generate data on that audience in situ of their interaction with the media and, in turn, the advertising accompanying that media.

The advent of the internet in the late 20th century provided the perfect platform for bringing Peppers and Rogers' vision to life. The internet's ability to facilitate direct and instantaneous customer communication revolutionized the marketing landscape. Websites, email marketing, and early forms of online advertising enabled more personalized interactions, aligning perfectly with one-to-one marketing principles.

Amazon, eBay, and other e-commerce players were among the first to capitalize on these opportunities. They used the internet to collect vast amounts of customer data, allowing them to offer personalized product recommendations and tailored shopping experiences. In the intervening years, sites used the audience data collected to deliver “personalized” content experiences and advertising.

The promise of trackability and accountability first drew advertisers to the web. By the mid-1990s, the landscape of media planning and buying was balanced between the tried-and-true methods of yesteryear and the dawn of a digital revolution that looked to deliver on the one-to-one hypothesis. But at the dawn of the internet media age, even with the one-to-one framework in hand, usable data was still brittle. Something was still needed. Individual sites could apply audience-supplied data as best they could. Advertisers could create myriad assets to speak to each increasingly niche segment that the proliferation of content types could corral and cordon off. However, the connective tissue that could hold the whole thing together was missing; there was no viscera to keep the loose part of the digital media body together.

The commercial web's allure lay in its capacity to offer verifiable counts of advertising and audience activity, a stark departure from the estimated figures of the past. The data available for most of the media landscape hinged largely on self-reported behavior from randomly selected audiences. While useful, these methods called for an overhaul due to potential inaccuracies. The reliability of media consumption recall was questionable, often reflecting claimed behavior over actual engagement. Within this context, the Wanamaker axiom – "I know half of my advertising works, I just don't know which half" – found its relevance, epitomizing the inherent uncertainties plaguing the advertising industry.

Something already part of the consumer web’s infrastructure would bring the whole thing to life: a digital phlogiston that would set the web on fire and make it one of the most popular and powerful advertising tools in history. A small piece of code to make the web easier for people to use became an ever-present, pernicious enabler of surveillance capitalism, selection bias, confirmation bias, and social and political sectarianism.

The cookie, “the destroyer of worlds.”

^[i] This is the title of a book by Don Peppers in 1995

The golden age of advertising—usually considered the post-war years until the 1970s—was a period of unprecedented creative output. Every advertisement was a miniature narrative that consisted of recognizable mascots, memorable taglines, and catchy jingles. Over those decades, advertising, like the media it was embedded in, was woven into the cultural fabric of the times it appeared. It was as indispensable a component of mass communication promoting mass consumption, enabled by mass production, which created a mass culture as the factories that made the products it featured.

A public cultural hegemony was played out in mass media, advertising, and the products and services offered through them. Advertising and media created the culture they reflected through a mass media symbiosis—or so they did for a while.

Whether it was “M.A.S.H.,” “All in the Family,” or “Dukes of Hazzard,” ads were run in programming based on the possible composition of that program’s audience being a higher concentration of an advertiser’s target audience. For example, if there were more women 25-54 who watched “All in the Family” as a percentage of the overall audience for the show than there was for “Dukes of Hazzard,” the media planner might instruct TV buyers to buy “All in the Family” instead of “Dukes of Hazzard.”

But if you weren’t part of the target audience, you were still part of the program’s audience. The programming informed the decision of where to place the ad, but the ad didn’t exist only when the targeted segment was present. You still see the ad on “All in the Family” as a member of the audience, even if you are not a woman aged 25 to 54. Target or not, you saw the ad, and the target or not, you watched the show, listened to the song on the radio, or read Time or People.

By the 1970s, mass culture started to fracture.  The changing modes of identity initially drove this. The emphasis on self-esteem and individuality, the recognition of underrepresented and diverse population cohorts, and a mistrust of government due to events like the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and Vietnam converged to foment segmented, identity-driven cohorts. The media landscape became a reflection of these modalities. Until then, print media had magazines addressing more particular audiences, essentially special interests like science and mechanics, hunting and fishing, cooking, and cars.  Some, like Ebony and Jet, which have been around since the 40s and 50s, spoke to Black American audiences about important issues.  However, the early 70s saw an explosion of media representing more unique audiences or talking to people whose needs and interests were not addressed by available mass media. Rolling Stone, first published in 1967, covered music and the culture it represented at a time when mainstream media looked askance at both. The Advocate, focusing on LGBT issues and the LGBT community, became a national news magazine in 1974. Ms. Magazine debuted in 1972. Programming specifically for children to teach children was being produced.  An increased presence of direct broadcast satellites in the 70s coincided with the changing social landscape, opening the way for broadcast that could address increasingly differentiated audiences with content to match.

Cable in the 1980s, made possible by those direct broadcast satellites, birthed entire networks dedicated to specific audiences' specific tastes. MTV, ESPN, CNN... more diverse content carrying more distinctive advertising for more unique audiences.

Media segmentation led to advertising segmentation. Messaging started evolving from trying to appeal to the most people to appealing to certain kinds of people. Catchy tunes and memorable characters that audiences have in common as part of a cultural referential totality gave way to advertising that tried to speak to individuals and their sense of self. In the 1970s, some 80% of all ads had jingles. By 1998, only 12% did. By 2011, that figure was 2.6%. Popular brand ad campaigns were Nike’s “Just Do It,” Diet Pepsi’s “Choice of a New Generation,” and Maxell’s “Blown Away Guy.” All featuring concepts and images emphasizing the audience’s uniqueness. None of them have jingles.

When media is fragmented, advertising is segmented. Not that companies investing lots of money in marketing and advertising didn’t already conceptualize their target audiences in segments. Still, media that addressed more discrete groups of people meant advertising could be delivered to more specific audiences. Products could diversify, and instead of shouting from the mountaintop about those products to the people, messages could be whispered discretely in a more intimate media setting. We went from products and brands trying to persuade and connect with “people” to trying to persuade and connect with “persons.”

Advertising has always played upon the aspirational, showing people what they could be if they wanted; all they had to do was buy Brand X. But when it was a vector for mass culture, communication, media, and production, it presented that aspiration as being embodied by something the audience wanted: a car, a beverage, a diaper. When advertising became a tool for fomenting and reflecting segmentation, it worked to appeal to how the audience saw itself. Advertising went from playing on WHAT we wanted to be to expressing WHO we think we are.

It's important to remember that the relationship between society and technology is symbiotic. Technological advancements opened new possibilities for advertisers to reach more segmented audiences, but society's changing values and norms dictated how these technologies were harnessed. The rise of individualism and the growing emphasis on personal identity in the late 20th century shaped the kinds of messages that advertisers believed would resonate with consumers. It wasn't just that advertisers could target more narrowly; they needed to, as consumers increasingly expected brands to speak directly to their unique lifestyles and values.

Though decades of collecting data about audiences led to the refinement of what kinds of products were developed or content produced, advertisers' ability to mitigate media buying risk through targeting was still primarily based on understanding the audience compositions of specific media channels and their vehicles. Audience data remained largely untethered to the means of advertising distribution. Opportunities for segmentation were growing, and ad creative was moving towards individuating target audiences. However, a way to activate advertising at the individual level and a framework for conceptualizing it were lacking.

Then the 90s came, giving the media and advertising world what it had only seen in dreams: the concept of one-to-one marketing and the dawn of the consumer internet.

Reflecting upon the rich tapestry of human history, one recognizes a narrative with communication at its center. With the advent of each medium comes a new lexicon for encoding the world, reshaping our social fabric. In my last discourse, I explored this lineage, noting how the evolution of media has repeatedly been harnessed to spur material transactions between communicators and their recipients.

As the gears of the modern era began to turn and media production became an industrial enterprise, advertising found itself at a crossroads of identity and intention. The segmented media landscapes—print, initially—beckoned advertisers with the allure of demographics to tailor messages for ears – and eyes -- pricked with anticipation. Yet, going deeper, pondering over the values ascribed to attention and the concomitant quality judgments, one asks: What intrinsic worth is carried by the price of an audience's attention? And how did we start assigning value to one type of audience versus another? To get to that, we must examine just what targeting is.

The golden age of advertising, bookended with DeBeers’ “A Diamond is Forever” on one end and the unifying chorus of “I’d Like to Buy the World A Coke” on the other, heralded a seismic shift from “just the facts, ma’am” advertising narrative. Creativity and psychological appeal became the stalwarts of the industry. Icons such as David Ogilvy and Bill Bernbach eschewed the banal product feature monologues, opting for a symphony of words, sounds, and images to form memorable campaigns resonating with the consumer's core. They recognized a truth that remains: if you capture their heart, they will open the wallet.

The notion that an ad at the right time and place before a singular ideal individual may have been contemplated in the media planner’s nerdery, but it was not a fundamental part of advertising. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t being worked on; it's just that precision targeting did not have any practical means of deployment (apart from the catalogs and Direct Mail).

Data collection became the unseen undercurrent amid this burgeoning of advertising's potential. Both print and broadcast media turned to demographics with the voracity of miners panning for gold. Yet, there exists a dichotomy in this pursuit. Print, a medium that could segment audiences with the scalpel of literacy and interest based on content, and television, a bastion of mass appeal, both sought to understand their audience not merely to sell but to connect—a testament to the profound relationship between content, consumer, and culture.

It's important to note here something to which advertising only seems incidental but which figures in my larger argument for why the depreciation of the cookie might improve advertising outcomes while engendering a more unified cultural moment. In our contemporary musings on advertising, we often neglect the vessel that carries these messages. True, as strategists and practitioners, we dissect media for its communicative efficacy. Yet, we seldom pause to contemplate the transformation of the message and its meaning and how the medium reframes the world for its audience. The literate segmentation of print and the democratizing sweep of television each tell a story of access and influence that advertising plays on and benefits from.

The communications professor and media ecologist Joshua Meyrowitz suggests that print created pockets of 'closed' audiences, gated communities of comprehension. In contrast, television—less demanding of its viewers' intellectual capital—fostered a shared cultural landscape, blending audiences into a heterogeneous mosaic. It also exposed people to realities and modes of being they might not otherwise be aware of. From Walter Cronkite’s “Report from Vietnam” to the sitcoms of Norman Lear, audiences could indulge with little friction in the realities that other people were experiencing. This unity of experience is potent; it shapes our perceptions of social roles and norms, creating a cultural milieu in which a vast spectrum of life is observed and felt.

Meyrowitz posits that television stood as a colossus astride the evolution of mass communication—born from the necessity to sell products as diverse as automobiles and war bonds. Its purpose was clear: to engrain products within the collective consciousness, achieving a mass culture of consumption. Advertising's original motive was not targeted precision but to work in broad strokes, painting desires with the wide brush of commonality and coordinating consent about what was important. It sought to mirror a mass culture, to resonate with the collective rather than the individual. As advertisers vied not for product type differentiation but for brand loyalty, advertising catered to the masses. It was less about engendering diverse desires and more about instilling a common yearning for the same outcomes and the same experiences.

The technological developments of the 1970s shifted this paradigm, ushering in an era of segmentation and targeting, where the advertisement became not a public announcement but a whisper in the consumer's ear. Once titans of the mass market, print and television found themselves grappling with the nuanced dynamics of personal identity and consumer desires.

Yet, for all television's sophistication and print's incisive segmentation, neither medium could harness its technological infrastructure to the chariot of advertising with precision. Direct mail stood as an outlier, a precursor to the hyper-targeted future. The fiscal impracticalities of diversifying print runs and the limitations of broadcast technology meant that mass appeal remained the fiscal lodestone. Sure, specialty print carved out its niche, yet the likes of Time and Life continued their quest to reach every corner of the consumer universe, charging a premium for the privilege (It’s no accident that Life featured a heavy reliance on illustrations, graphics, and photography).

Today's landscape, a fusion of technology, media fragmentation, data collection and processing, and identity, has given rise to a new paradigm where segmentation and personalization have become paramount. Though technologically archaic by modern standards, direct mail was the forerunner of this shift and the source of most modern targeting frameworks, signifying the beginning of the end for advertising's mass culture approach that became the norm in the digital era.

It is a peculiar twist of fate that the industry, once driven to foster mass consumption through mass communication, now champions individuality. The quest for brand differentiation has evolved from competition among products to one of identity, prompting us to question the nature of desire itself.

As we stand at the confluence of this evolution, we must reflect not with nostalgia but with a critical eye on the history of advertising as not merely a chronicle of changing tactics but a mirror reflecting our social fabric. It serves as a reminder that while today's advertising may focus on the individual, it is rooted in a collective ethos—a time when the aim was not to differentiate but to resonate with the whole. And it’s that ethos that the end of the cookie might make possible.

Next week, it’s down the rabbit hole of hyper-targeting and niche segmentation.

Last week, I introduced the idea that the cookie's demise in advertising portends a monumental shift in how advertising is conducted and might also foster a shift in the cultural landscape. By no longer enabling greater and greater degrees of segmentation, which is, in essence, an exercise in identifying, accentuating, and collecting differences, there may be a renewed focus on what makes us alike rather than what sets us apart. Not only can that be a boon to advertisers (I will get into how that is later in this series), but it could alter the media and messaging landscape in such a way as to broach social and cultural schisms that have been enabled by the cookie and its technology support system.

For the next few weeks, I will support this thesis by exploring the history of how we got to where we are. Once I've done that, I’ll explain why what I think should come next might come next. To do that, I need to start with a brief history of media and advertising.

The history of media is the history of human communication.

From grunts and screeches to the formation of words, the transition to literacy, and onwards to electronic media, people's moving expressions between each other have been fundamental human acts.^[i] (Check out Walter J. Ong’s "Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.”)

Nobody knows when the first commercial messaging was injected into the stream of interlocution, but it probably occurred at the birth of economies.

The oldest example of commercial communicative action—I mean an action with the primary goal of achieving mutual understanding among participants to get one participant to engage in a transaction with another—is from about 6,000 years ago. It’s an ancient Sumerian beer advertisement inscribed on a clay tablet. The ad reads something like: "Drink Elba Beer, the beer with the heart of a lion!"^[ii].

The tagline feels like it could be for Löwenbräu.

Another ancient advertisement example is in a papyrus from Thebes, Egypt, around 3000 BCE. In it, a fabric seller named Hapu offers a gold coin reward for the return of a runaway enslaved person and promotes weaving services in the same posting.^[iii] (It’s shocking just how many ads are placed over the millennia asking for the return, or information leading to the return, of slaves who have escaped bondage.)

Was this paid advertising as we know it today? Nobody can say.^[iv] It is hard to imagine that if the messenger had something to gain, the carrier of that message would not have asked for some compensation in return. It isn’t too hard to imagine someone considering inserting an ad for “Ben’s Matzos” into the Ten Commandments.

In May 1704, The Boston Newsletter ran what are purported to be the first three paid advertisements in an American newspaper:  The ads called for the recovery of stolen goods, information about lost anvils, and even information about real estate available on Long Island, New York.

Throughout the 18^th and into the 19^th century, the printed word expanded throughout the Western world. First, the steam printing press in 1811 increased the amount of printing that could be done. In 1844, a method for making paper more easily using wood (it used to be made from fabric and pulped rags). In 1865, William Bullock perfected Hoe’s rotary press. Costs of materials, literacy, and the means of printing all came together. At this point, technology, materials, economics, and expanding class participation in broader society meet. A more significant availability of materials and lower friction in the means of transmission meant more content could reach more hands, which meant more content had to be produced. You bet your sweet-ass advertising went along for the ride.

When radio came along, the first “soap operas” in the 1930s were called that because companies like Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, and Lever Brothers were among the key sponsors.

The first television commercial aired in the United States on July 1, 1941. It was for Bulova, the watch and jewelry company, just before a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies. Twenty years later, television was the dominant advertising medium.

Through it all, advertising was there. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, some thought was given to targeted advertising. Consumer goods companies and retailers began to recognize the value of tailoring their advertising messages to specific population segments. This period saw the growth of mail-order catalog businesses, such as Sears, Roebuck, and Co., which collected customer addresses and purchases to segment and target their mailings effectively. In the 1910s, Charles Coolidge Parlin, often credited with being the first market researcher, conducted extensive research for the Curtis Publishing Company, analyzing consumer preferences and demographics to better target advertisements in publications such as "The Saturday Evening Post."

When TV expanded into every household throughout the 1950s and became the primary medium of the masses by the 60s, some demographic data was being used to target advertising.

However, one thing that remained true about advertising, from the dimmest memories of human expression to Jack Paar, was that while some level of targeting has always taken place using messages tailored to appeal to a particular audience, that message remained relatively general. Messages and images made to appeal to women versus men, for instance. However, the distinction between audiences was minimal because, at the end of the day, though the lady of the house might buy it, an advertiser wanted EVERYONE to have their soap. Regardless of who might be intended for the ad, everyone saw that message, whether it was meant for them or not. The available demographic information was used to help inform decisions, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that an advertiser could buy TV ad inventory based on adults 18-49. Ad delivery wasn’t segmented because the media landscape was not segmented. Except for some print vehicles addressing more particular audiences -- primarily special interests like science and mechanics, hunting and fishing, cooking, and cars – the media landscape was as homogeneous as a Finnish Starbucks.

All that started to change in the 1970s, when targeting and media planning -- enabled by improved data gathering, new technology, and a media and cultural landscape that started to fracture – came to prominence. When the “math men” first started standing on equal ground with the “mad men.”

Next time, the first stage of the rise of precision ad targeting.

^[i] For more on orality, literacy, and ‘secondary orality,’ see Walter J. Ong’s "Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.” Ong calls out the distinction between ‘orality,’ ‘literacy,’ and ‘secondary orality,’ which emerges in cultures with the presence of writing but have returned to oral-like modes of communication through technology, such as radio, television, and digital media.

^[ii] This translation might vary slightly depending on the source, but the essence is that it promotes Elba beer as being strong or powerful, much like a lion's heart. This slogan advertises the product and conveys an image of strength and quality, appealing to potential consumers' desires for a superior beverage. This ancient advertisement, one of the oldest known, is a captivating glimpse into the early origins of advertising.

^[iii] An interesting study would be how much early “advertising” focused on the recovery of stolen goods and, in particular, escaped slaves. It’s estimated that some 200,000 fugitive slave ads appeared in U.S. newspapers from 1730 to 1865. This dark underbelly of consumer capitalism is worthy of a deep dive if it hasn’t already been undertaken.

^[iv] Unlike "Acta Diurna" in ancient Rome, these don't appear to be ads adjacent to other media. The “Acta Diurna” was a daily gazette posted in public places. They included announcements, news, and even personal messages that could be considered paid advertisements, such as notices for property sales, lost and found items, and other public notices.

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Beginnings are hard.

It took me months to finally do this thing. I kept waiting for the perfect time to understand how to set things up just right, checking out the Substacks of friends and colleagues. I finally decided to do something based on advice I read, of all places, on LinkedIn. It was a photo of some self-help advice that one sees posted far too often. It read: “When in doubt, execute.” Because it reminded me a little like an axiom an Existentialist might issue, I finally went for it. It just so happens that I published my first post before publishing my “first post.”

1. If not now, when?

I’ve been working in media advertising for 30 years. In that time, I’ve found that the bulk of the work is about helping people whom I might not like to sell things people don’t need to people I don’t know to buy with the money they don’t have. My soul has atrophied to the size of a frozen pea. Also, during this time, I’ve been a student of media. How can the means of transmitting ideas transform those ideas and their meaning? How does media impact business? How does it impact what we think and who we think we are? How does it shape what we know? There’s frequently commentary about disinformation, misinformation, echo chambers, and political and cultural divides. But how much of that commentary seeks answers? There’s a lot more capital in critique than in understanding. I’d like this to be a space for understanding.

2. If not you, who?

This space is intended for curious people who don’t care if ideas are right or wrong, offensive or pleasing, only if they are interesting. This space is for people who want to make sense — such as sense can be made — of a media ecosystem that creates and is created by the society we inhabit. If something isn’t interesting, let me know. I won’t take offense.

3. How will it be done?

I promise I’ll try to be weekly, every Tuesday. Tuesday was the day they served “hot lunch” when I was in grade school. I never got hot lunch because it cost, like, a dollar, but it always made Tuesdays special. My system of inquiry tends to be informed by what is called the Seven Elements of Circumstance: who (Prof. Plumb), what (murdered), when (yesterday), where (in the Library), in what way (think “killed quickly”), by what means (think, “with a candlestick”), and most importantly… why (Col. Mustard couldn’t stand to hear him drone on about the media industrial complex).

The media ecosystem is evolving faster than we are. It will take all of us a while to figure out how to keep up.

As the digital sundial casts its shadow over the crumbling pillars of third-party cookies, we find ourselves at a crossroads not just in advertising but, perhaps, in the fabric of our social tapestry. The impending demise of this cornerstone of digital advertising's targeting infrastructure might be the harbinger of an unexpected cultural shift, one that could see the erosion of the pervasive segmentation that has characterized not only the marketplace but our societal interactions over the last few decades.

In all its simplicity, the cookie has inadvertently served as the linchpin of a system that thrives on division, slicing the audience pie into ever-smaller slivers to pursue hyper-relevance. The cookie’s purpose was originally to make digital advertising transactions easier to commit. It then went on to make digital advertising more efficient by making it easier to find people of certain proclivities desired by certain advertisers. However, as audiences were parsed into ever more differentiated segments, it also became easier to separate people from each other. As this tool of unintentional digital division dissolves, we're presented with an intriguing possibility: Could the end of hyper-segmentation herald a return to a more unified media landscape? In searching for alternative ways to connect with audiences, advertisers and content creators may inadvertently stitch back together the social fabric that's been frayed by years of targeted messaging.

Consider this: In the heyday of broadcasting, television was often called the 'great unifier,' bringing people from all walks of life together around shared experiences, be it the moon landing or the finale of ‘Friends.’ There was a certain magic in knowing that your neighbor, people at work, your family members, friends at school, and the teacher were all laughing at the same joke or gasping at the same fantastical plot twist (“Bobby is in the shower?! He’s alive??!!”). Fast forward to the era of microtargeted ads and personalized content recommendations, and that collective experience has fragmented into a phantasmagoria of niche interests and echo chambers.

Without cookies and their laser-focused targeting capabilities, advertisers might need to revert to casting wider nets, appealing to broader commonalities among potential customers. This shift could encourage content that resonates more universally, fostering a sense of shared experience that has been diluted in the digital age. Imagine, for a moment, a world where content creators and advertisers, stripped of their ability to hyper-personalize, lean into what unites us rather than divides us. Storytelling and messaging seek instead the common ground, finding the universal ties that bind us in our humanity.

Of course, this optimistic vision assumes that advertisers and platforms will embrace this change in spirit rather than finding new ways to slice and dice the audience pie with different tools. But as someone who's observed the ebbs and flows of the media landscape, I can't help but wonder if we're on the cusp of a cultural renaissance, one that sees us moving away from the 'me' and back towards the 'we.'

Ultimately, the question isn't just about how we'll target ads in a post-cookie world but how we'll choose to communicate with one another in this new landscape. Will we seize this opportunity to bridge the divides, to remind ourselves of the shared narratives and common threads that run through our collective story? Or will we find new ways to partition the human experience into ever smaller, more isolable units?

In the coming weeks, I will dig into how the media got to where we are today and highlight the key turning points. I will also call out some of the myths we tell ourselves today about good old days that weren’t always good and point out how maybe tomorrow isn’t as bad as it seems (thanks, Billy Joel).

As we stand on this precipice, looking out at a future without the familiar beacon of the cookie to guide us, one can't help but feel a mix of trepidation and excitement. In this forced reconsideration of how we segment and target, there lies a golden opportunity to rethink not just our marketing strategies but the very nature of the narratives we weave and their societal impacts. In this shift away from hyper-segmentation, we may find our way back to each other, rediscovering the art of finding common ground in a world that has for too long been obsessed with magnifying our differences.

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