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Every day we are bombarded with targeted advertising from the moment we engage with the internet. Our actions online form a constantly evolving digital personality that is widely shared with hundreds if not thousands of vested interests. Before we are eighteen years old these online personalities have tens of millions of data points. This information is used to predict our future actions and can be unerringly accurate. How many times have you been convinced your phone is psychic when adverts for a new accessory you’ve been thinking about appear on a web page? Marketing algorithms know you make decisions emotionally, justify them with facts, are mostly self-obsessed, value scarcity highly, will follow the crowd and are hapless and helpless in the face of a "good" deal. They also know your nephew’s birthday, what he likes and what you know he likes. For-profit social media companies are addicted to a business model that is hard wired to prioritise and marry sensationalism to psychologically targeted advertising. At worst this poisonous brew of extremism is a loaded gun for fractious communities and coupled with despair in children who ‘body-idolise’ it is quite literally deadly. Mindfulness teaches us to be always present with our emotions. This awareness of our mental processes is a major pillar of our agency. Invoking this awareness could help us to ignore advertising and instead contact those we know and love for their actual learned experience. In this, we quite literally call on our older generations. So, remember, if it feels like you are under attack it’s because you are. Fight back. Seek out your desires from your own real-world resources. It can be as easy as picking up an old book, or the telephone and calling a club, university, store, friend, associate or relative. Let’s reach out to each other, pool our experience... ...and talk!
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