Advertising in the matrix

I hate the growth economy. Hate it.

There. I've said it. I think it disrupts happiness, destroys communities, and demolishes ecosystems. And I hate a lot of the things associated with it including all of the niche advertising and the weird shadow techno-bureaucracy that's been built up around it on the internet.

While a lot of people might not despise the cancerous globalized economy as much as I do, they don't want it tracking their every move. The New York Times reports:

ABOUT two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking by advertisers — and that number rises once they learn the different ways marketers are following their online movements, according to a new survey from professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley.

The professors say they believe the study, scheduled for release on Wednesday, is the first independent, nationally representative telephone survey on behavioral advertising.

The topic may be technical, but it has become a hot political issue. Privacy advocates are telling Congress and the Federal Trade Commission that tracking of online activities by Web sites and advertisers has gone too far, and the lawmakers seem to be listening. Representative Rick Boucher, Democrat of Virginia, wrote in an article for The Hill last week that he planned to introduce privacy legislation. And David Vladeck, head of consumer protection for the F.T.C., has signaled that he will examine data privacy issues closely.

Good. I am tired of having corporate interests governing us. If we are a nation of individuals, then let us make up our own minds about things instead of being narrowed and winnowed by technocrats into becoming ever more mindless consumers of ever more stuff. We need to recover from our "affluenza," not have the fever kicked higher.

I find it so odd that there are people who will argue about this as an arm of the alleged free market - that this will give people more of what they want. Look behind the curtain and you find a wizard of command economies controlling you. It's a consumerist Big Brother. It's not the government. It's worse. It's a thing that tells you that it fulfills your desires with flash and pizazz and black top and plastic and shiny gold and lots and lots of beautiful sounds. And all of it leads you straight away from your neighbor, your family, good soil, clean water, and fresh air. It's as if the simple fulfilling of immediate desires with material objects is going to satisfy our hopes, our social commitments, or our desire for meaning. In this most Christian of nations (as some wish us to believe) we are crammed full of more unnecessary garbage in a socially Darwinian rat race that pits us all against one another.

Will the FCC actually work for us or will they work for the corporate matrix? Does the matrix already have them? [Is that link just me catering advertising to myself?] I'll take the red pill please.

Or does the matrix have me anyway?