the architecture of collapsed desire

For over a century, advertising was the architecture of desire.

It manufactured attention and meaning. Advertising served the purpose of promotion to new markets and validation to existing customers.

In the broadcast age, brands spoke from on high, as it were. The message was crafted, polished and distributed. There was distance, and with that, a certain type of power. This spatial distance mirrored a psychological one. Ads lived within a layer above us, between us and around us. There was room between viewer and message, space to interpret, resist, or absorb. That space made persuasion possible. But then, that distance collapsed and inverted.

The rise of social media folded the stage into the crowd, as it were. What was once broadcast became dialogue. The architecture of media collapsed inward through the proliferation of the smartphone, just a glowing rectangle in our palms. The feed flattened out all of the media space. Everything now happens in the same compressed dimension. Brands became people. People became brands. And the feed became the medium where everything collapsed - message and messenger, identity and image, product and performance. We stopped watching ads when we started watching each other.

Previously, ads lived between things. Interrupting a TV or radio show, punctuating a commute, or waiting on the next page. That between-ness gave advertising its rhythm. It lived in the intermission, the commercial break, the white space. It interrupted, but it also structured experience. Ads were punctuation, not content. Now, in the endless scroll, there is no space left between; it's fused with content. And if everyone is an ad, then ads become invisible.

Brands then set about to chase authenticity, and in doing so, they lost authority. In mimicking people, they eventually became parodies. Advertising didn't die suddenly with a bang. It drowned in sameness and a lack of skilled execution in the age of self-service ad managers. So now, the platforms that once carried it are flooded with its residue. Content marketing, influencer-sponsored content and "collabs" that read like soft fiction. 

Direct marketing evolved into performance advertising. More of a marketing automation sequence and science of test, tweak, reframe, repeat. Effective but distinctly removed from what advertising once was. There was previously a shared experience. Now there is just a backend dashboard. Clicks, conversions, and funnels within a flattened logic. Advertising became physics without poetics.

By the 1960s, advertising displaced art. Advertising redefined what culture looked like. Ads became art. Pop artists like Andy Warhol weren't satirizing this shift through screen printings of soup cans, they were documenting it as it happened.

Advertising became the dominant aesthetic and communicative force of the modernist age. It not only shaped consumer behavior but also became the central medium through which people experienced beauty, identity, aspiration, and time. Now, 60+ years on, we live in a time when anyone with Internet access and a credit card can create advertising, sunsetting the Mad Men-as-artist era. That’s not a bad thing. Today, advertising is no longer art. Its function has shifted in the age of performance metrics and ecommerce. Ads are now an individual experience, not a shared experience. Art is now something else, but that’s for another day.

We no longer create ads. We create systems that behave like attention.

And here’s the next turn, the one still unfolding on a daily basis. As AI mediates more and more of our experience, advertising is losing its last human subject. We don’t browse. We prompt. We don’t scroll. We ask.

The feed gets replaced by the interface. A blank box. And in that shift, advertising faces its most existential crisis yet.

Who are you advertising to when the user is an AI?

What does SEO look like when the searcher is a large language model? What does targeting mean when there is no longer a timeline, no impulse scroll, no algorithmic suggestion? There is only a conversation with a machine.

When AI becomes the gateway, it stops being the channel and becomes the gatekeeper. The interface becomes the curator. And your product? It has to fit the model’s logic, not the consumer’s longing, at least for the present time. That is no longer performance marketing. It’s protocol marketing. Prompt-space branding. Optimization for the non-human eye.

Google and Meta built their empires on attention by interrupting it, refining it, and reselling it. But what happens when human browsing behavior fragments, and synthesized AI traffic replaces it?

Advertising will mutate and change once again. Into something stranger. Perhaps less visible. Perhaps less emotional. Perhaps more infrastructural. Baked into the interface. Less of a message and more of a shadow or a curated memory.

And in that world, brand lives as metadata.