Tourist frustrated after noticing worsening trend at amusement park: 'Can't escape'

Rampant advertising began in America with three ads in the Boston News-Letter in May of 1704, according to the Massachusetts Historical Society. It's been a snowball rolling down the mountain ever since. 

As a comment in the r/Anticonsumption subreddit observed, "Can't escape advertising." 

The complaint was in response to a photo of a flag advertising yet another product in the photographer's city at what appears to be an amusement park. It is one of an endless parade of examples demonstrating that modern Americans can hardly turn around without seeing an ad.

Rampant consumerism, manipulation, and exploitation are injected into every data stream. At the same time, yesterday's technology still plasters its marketing on billboards, posters on windows, flags in the sky, and ads cover-to-cover in magazines.

It takes subscriptions, VPNs, and private browsers to escape the onslaught of advertising on social media or your favorite website. But there's always a new wrench in the gears, with VPN blockers, updates, and backroom deals opening doors to more marketing. 

Many sites lean on advertising revenue almost entirely, while Meta platforms raked in $41 billion in Q1 of 2025. 

It's a relentless barrage, in the sky and homes, on the ground, the web, or smartphones, in theaters, magazines, TV, and radio, all driving a negative mental health impact that has yet to be properly calculated. 

And the impact on our lifestyles, and on our planet, is obvious. Environment America reports that each American generates nearly five pounds of waste each day. 

As the trash piles up, natural resources are depleted to keep the snowball rolling. Demand drives extraction as new resources are needed to build new products. Most of these resources are nonrenewables, while recycling still lags behind consumption.

For instance, only 9% of the 400 million tons of plastic waste generated globally is recycled, according to the United Nations Development Programme. That's an astonishing disparity, and it's only including plastics. 

What confuses you most about recycling protocol? Which materials I can recycle 📦 How clean the material needs to be 🧼 What the plastic numbers mean ♻️ Nothing at all 😇 Click your choice to see results and speak your mind.

"Can't even escape ads when looking at the sky," another comment responded. 

But perhaps the most disquieting response was at the top: "At least they haven't figured out how to broadcast them into our dreams." 

Not yet.

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