How Digital Marketing Has Broken SocietyAnalysing how digital marketing techniques have damaged well-being & affected society as a whole
 With the coming of the television came the rise of advertising on TV. Ads on TV once gripped society, with many arguments at the time suggesting that it was hampering well-being, but that seems like aeons ago now & it’s a far cry from what we’re seeing today. With the coming of the internet, we’re seeing a far more aggressive and manipulative form of advertising that has broken society at large. Advertising has morphed into something catastrophic, which is manipulating millions who consume content on social media apps, unwillingly tapping into their behaviour & psyche using data, algorithms and further “dark” techniques. The more time spent online, the worse it gets. Adolescents who cross the three-hour mark per day are far more likely to fall into the "very severe" range of depression than those who stay under two hours. In 2019, 28% of American adults reported being "almost constantly" online. That number jumps to 50% among young adults aged between 18-29. Social media has cast its iron claw on us, making us endlessly doomscroll in an unforgiving dopamine loop. We consume more, read less, and engage our brains in an endless stream of viral videos designed to keep us engaged, enraged, and addicted. We are lonely, reactive, and more prone than ever to lash out at total strangers. The world feels broken, divided by misinformation and fear, spiraling into either a global backslide or a slow, inevitable decay. I explored how we’re slowly heading towards Aldous Huxley’s fictional world he depicted in his book Brave New World in an older post linked below.
You could attribute the internet as a whole for this burgeoning issue; the easiest scapegoat is the internet itself. The Boomers and the likes suggest that the world was better & rich in experience before the internet. However, the internet, in itself, is not the problem. We’ve created this super-highway of information and established a means of transferring knowledge into the far reaches of the future. We’ve got this wealth & bank of knowledge ready for anyone to tap into in whatever time or place. Apart from that, open-source projects, personal websites, blogs, Wikipedia, YouTube and now AI, have opened up more possibilities. But technological progress comes with its pros and cons. And yes, social media is another part of the internet that has become almost parasitic. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok & the likes have all played a role in the psychological decay of the collective. But that’s still only part of the puzzle. If you look close enough, at the center of this newly established nightmare is the vile form of consumer targeting and advertising that weilds its web in the shadows—digital marketing. In a nutshell digital marketing is based on total extractivism: It’s an industry engineered to extract the maximum amount of value from human consciousness while providing the bare minimum in return, i.e. other than the return (ROI) to corporations using digital marketing agencies & their black box techniques to sell their products & services. It’s a trillion-dollar industry built on the systematic exploitation of human psychology. The Gradual Rise Of Attention TargetingThe early Internet had ads, but they were crude. Banner ads, pop-ups, clunky sponsored links which were easily ignored, often annoying. Then came the realisation: data was more valuable than ad space. Google’s AdWords was the first major shift, introducing targeted advertising based on user intent. Suddenly, ads weren’t just being shown—they were being personalized. Then came social media. Facebook took it further, pioneering a new era of data harvesting at an unimaginable scale. No longer were companies targeting broad demographics. They were targeting individuals. Your habits, your emotions, your fears—all mapped, categorized, and sold. By the early 2010s, advertising had transformed into a science of psychological manipulation. Algorithms tracked everything, predicting behaviour before you even realized you had made a decision. Retargeting followed you across the web, serving ads for products you had merely glanced at. A/B testing evolved into complex machine learning, fine-tuning ad copy, colors, and timing to trigger maximum emotional response. Digital marketers weren’t just selling products. They were engineering addiction. The Dark Psychology of Digital MarketingEnter the more complex derivatives. Enter behavioural economics. Enter addiction science. Enter cognitive psychology. Marketing teams brought in experts, not to understand people, but to control them. They studied the mechanisms of addiction and applied them to engagement. They learned from casinos, from slot machines, from the ways dopamine cycles keep gamblers hooked. They built "nudges" into apps, leveraging cognitive biases to increase compulsive behavior. They designed systems of intermittent rewards—scrolling for the next post, the next like, the next validation hit. Technology meanwhile grew even more sophisticated, with things like eye-tracking, sentiment analysis, and even biometric responses being incorporated into marketing analytics. Marketing firms specializing in these “dark social” strategies quote premium rates to companies to amplify their targeted ads, reach and engagement. Every decision—colors, fonts, notification sounds, timing are all optimized for one thing: to keep you locked in. They call it “personalization.” They call it “enhanced user experience.” What it really is, is industrial-scale mind control. A systemic behavioural modification system. And we bought into it. The Cost: Anxiety, Misinformation, and Social DecayThe consequences of this? It’s made a world that feels more divided, more hostile, more broken than ever before. The damage is measurable. Heavy exposure to these manipulation systems correlates with increased cortisol levels, disrupted sleep, and neurological changes linked to anxiety and depression. Digital marketing doesn’t just persuade—it overrides rational decision-making, replacing autonomy with behavioural control. Algorithms keep us engaged through negative emotional triggers, locking us into a cycle of outrage, insecurity, and comparison. Every scroll deepens the sense that we are not enough. Every targeted ad suggests that happiness is just one more purchase away. Every engagement fuels a system designed to keep us dissatisfied and addicted. Algorithms thrive on engagement, and nothing engages like outrage. Social media amplifies the most extreme voices because extremism keeps people scrolling. Fear, anger, moral panic—all are monetized. Fake news spreads faster than facts. Misinformation becomes a business model. The more divided we are, the longer we stay online, the more data they collect, the more ads they sell. Digital marketing hasn’t just shaped consumer habits. It’s reshaped culture itself. Hate became profitable as well. Right-wing influencers, conspiracy theorists, and reactionary media empires mastered the algorithmic game. They refined the techniques of digital marketing—A/B-tested fear-based messaging, micro-targeted radicalisation funnels, outrage-driven engagement to the extent of even swaying political elections, of course. Meanwhile, ad networks, data brokers, and tech giants profited. The system was designed to fuel polarization—because polarization means engagement, and engagement means revenue. Even well-intentioned organizations trying to spread awareness or raise funds for good causes are forced to play the same game. If they don’t exploit these psychological levers, their messages get drowned out. The system is so broken that even those trying to fix it must operate within its exploitative logic. The Endgame: Cognitive ColonizationThis isn’t just about advertising anymore. This is about control. Digital marketing has evolved into something beyond persuasion. It has become a system of behavioral engineering, a way to systematically override human autonomy. People’s attention isn’t theirs anymore. Their decisions aren’t entirely their own. They’re not just being sold products—they’re being shaped, manipulated, guided down pathways designed for maximum profit extraction. The human sense of self-worth is under attack and users’ insecurities are fuel for a trillion-dollar machine. Economist Yannis Varoufakis touched upon this kind of algorithmic behavioural modification which I covered in an old post on ‘Techno-feudalism’ linked below That was economics. But every time people open an app, scroll a feed, or watch a recommended video, they’re feeding an algorithm designed not to serve the people, but to keep people consuming. This is the business model. And it’s not going away. What’s The Solution?What is the solution? — that’s an imperative question right there. Perhaps some kind of regulation of digital marketing that doesn’t exploit human psychology or damage well-being could work for the moment. Or maybe building ethical alternatives or differently run social media apps entirely as compared to the unchecked ads that anybody can run at the moment could be the answer. Of course, the most immediate solution is to get off social media entirely but the irony is that with cookies & data tracking even using other apps could see these kinds of ads show up while browsing the internet. But maybe, you could argue that, that is far less harmful. We as a society need to be more mindful about the extent to which we’re being targeted and manipulated & raise a voice of concern against it. But the fact that this is so subtle & widespread makes things worse. More people need to be aware of the dangers this kind of behavioural modification & while taking to the streets isn’t going help (or happen), maybe raising your voice digitally and online could be the way forward, especially to spread awareness & to warn people that, “Ok, look this is happening while you’re using any social media app, so beware”. We’ve come leaps and bounds as a race, especially in the last century, as I explored in an old post titled “Is The World Getting Better or Worse?” linked below. Those macroeconomic trends reveal just how far we’ve come & it’s a promising picture. But while the solutions to the evils of digital marketing could take a while as time progresses, the first step is awareness and recognising the trap we’re in, in the first place. It’s a long road forward, but things need to change. Until then keep reading on Substack ;) Thank you for being a valuable subscriber to my newsletter Light Years! If you liked this post & found it informative, feel free to share this publication with your network by clicking the button below… I hope you found this post informative & it helped you in some way. As always, feel free to subscribe to my publication Light Years & support it & also share it if you’d like. Get it in your inbox by filling up the space below! 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Sunday, 9 March 2025
How Digital Marketing Has Broken Society
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