Ads

The earliest known advertisement is an Egyptian papyrus from Thebes, dated around 1000 BCE, in which a weaver named Hapu announces a reward for a runaway slave and promotes his cloth business (paraphrased):

"A slave named Shem has run away from his master Hapu, the weaver. Whoever returns him will be rewarded. Hapu’s shop offers the finest cloth in Thebes."

Before this, commercial communication mostly took the form of listings rather than advertisements. Ancient societies maintained records of merchants, brewers, craftsmen, and services, often on clay tablets or public boards, that functioned less like ads and more like directories. They told you who existed and where, not why you should choose them, the messaging was merely informational, and it respected the continuity of whatever you were already doing.

In Pompeii, frozen in 79 CE by the eruption of Vesuvius, commercial messaging still covers the walls. Taverns advertised the wine, property owners announced rooms for rent, and gladiator games were promoted days in advance, with names, dates, and venues painted directly onto the stone.

These messages still obeyed a strict boundary, that is, they exist only when you look. They do not follow you home, interrupt a conversation, or insert themselves into unrelated activity. Advertising here is spatially bounded. It belongs to the street, the forum, the market and, in general, to places deliberately entered. This spatial boundary remains largely intact until the twentieth century.

The printing press dissolves geographic constraints yet, it preserves attentional ones. What I mean by this is that printed advertisements still require a conscious, voluntary act of reading, because the reader may well postpone, ignore, or skip entirely without disrupting any ongoing activity.

A radical decisive change comes with the broadcast media, as commercial messages acquire control over timing. In the early 1920s, radio stations begin carrying commercial sponsorship, and advertising is now delivered through sound, at moments chosen by the broadcaster rather than the listener. This is crucial, because an ad can now appear in such a way that they interrupt the flow of the ongoing activity, and it imposes itself within an otherwise continuous stream of attention.

Television intensifies this shift by synchronizing attention. Commercial breaks are no longer incidental, they are structurally integrated into programming. The viewer does not merely hear advertising during unrelated activity. The activity itself is designed around interruption.

On the internet, advertising is no longer confined to scheduled breaks or shared time windows. It can appear at arbitrary moments, triggered by user behavior, embedded within content, or activated automatically. Control over timing fragments even further. Commercial messages can interrupt reading, watching, listening, or working, without regard to context or duration.

With smartphones, advertising is no longer associated with a specific activity or place. As the mobile integrates as an extension of human activity, the same device carries work, leisure, communication, and many other activities, the interruptions follow the user across different contexts.

At this point, commercial messaging competes directly with continuity itself. What distinguishes modern advertising is not persuasion, targeting, or volume, but interruption. Specifically, the ability to impose a context switch at a moment not chosen by the recipient.

The Attention Economy

This shift marks a fundamental change in what advertising extracts. Early ads competed for attention within chosen contexts, you walked into the forum, opened the newspaper, turned on the radio. Modern advertising competes for attention as the resource itself.

The economics explain the escalation. Human attention is strictly finite: roughly 16 waking hours per day, minus time for essential activities. When advertising was spatially bounded, it competed only for "shopping time", the hours spent in markets and commercial districts. When it became broadcast-bounded, it competed for "media time", the hours spent listening to radio or watching television.

But when advertising became capable of appearing anywhere, anytime, triggered by behavior, it began competing for all available hours. The total supply of attention did not increase. What increased was the number of contexts where advertisers could bid for it.

This makes attention more valuable per unit, not more abundant. Since the resource is fixed and zero-sum, advertisers must fight harder for each moment.

The result is an arms race in what platforms call "engagement." From the advertiser's perspective, the most valuable ad is the one that drives sales. But platforms don't get paid for conversions, they get paid for impressions, clicks, and time spent. So platforms optimize for what they can measure and monetize: attention capture.

This creates a double misalignment. First, platforms optimize for engagement metrics they can sell: time spent, clicks, video completion rates, regardless of whether that attention leads to purchases. Second, and more fundamentally, the recipient was not looking to buy anything at all. They came to read an article, watch a video, communicate with friends, or learn something. The interruption serves neither the user's intent nor, often, the advertiser's goal of finding interested buyers. It serves only the platform's need to demonstrate "engagement".

Autoplay videos. Unskippable countdowns. Modal dialogs that darken the screen. Push notifications that vibrate your pocket. Each innovation targets attention extraction, not persuasion, and certainly not user intent.

This explains why advertisers increasingly complain about ad fraud, bot traffic, and low conversion rates, while platforms report record "engagement". The intermediary has optimized for interruption because that's what their business model rewards, at the expense of both the user's experience and the advertiser's actual goals.

Users respond with defensive technologies: ad blockers, notification silencing, "reader mode", premium subscriptions to remove ads. The very existence of a market for paying to restore continuity reveals the actual cost being imposed.

The Cognitive Cost

But the cost is not merely annoyance. Younger generations have adapted by maintaining multiple contexts simultaneously, multiple screens, multiple apps, constant partial attention. Whether this represents skillful adaptation or a forced accommodation to an environment designed for interruption is debatable.

What's clear is that the baseline has shifted. Continuous, uninterrupted focus on a single task is increasingly rare, not because people choose fragmentation, but because systems are designed to fragment attention.

What Comes Next

The trajectory suggests two possible directions:

Further intrusion: We already see neuromarketing using fMRI and eye-tracking, AR glasses that could place ads in your visual field, AI systems generating personalized interruptions based on emotional state, and biometric advertising that adjusts in real-time based on physiological responses.

Or a correction: Not through regulation, which I personally oppose, but through building and choosing better alternatives. The solution is not prohibition but optionality. Models that don't require selling attention.

Technological boundaries: Tools that restore user control. Ad blockers, notification management, "reader mode," encrypted communication. Not as workarounds but as first-class features. Devices and operating systems designed for user intent rather than attention extraction.

The parallel to the First Enlightenment is clear: physical autonomy wasn't secured through laws against harassment but through the ability to leave harassing situations. Similarly, cognitive autonomy won't come from defining "acceptable advertising" but from individuals having genuine alternatives.

Continuous attention should be the default for anyone who chooses systems designed around their intent rather than around their extraction. Not a Second Enlightenment imposed from above, but adopted from below, by individuals voting with their attention, their time, and their choice of which systems to use.