Publicity and the Feed

In the AI Story

Berger's mechanism — publicity is always about the future buyer — operates in the algorithmic feed at a scale and precision he could not have imagined. Where the billboard addressed a general audience with a general message, the feed addresses a specific individual with a specific message, calibrated to her browsing history, her purchase patterns, her demonstrated vulnerabilities. Where the billboard could be walked past, the feed follows. It is in the pocket, on the nightstand, present at every meal, audible in every silence.

The AI attention economy extends this mechanism in a specific direction. Traditional publicity manufactures the desire to consume. The AI attention economy manufactures the desire to produce. This inversion looks like progress — production is more admirable than consumption, building more dignified than buying. The Silicon Valley narrative of the builder carries a moral authority the consumer narrative does not. But Berger's framework cuts through the moral distinction to reveal the structural identity. The consumer who cannot stop buying and the builder who cannot stop building are both responding to a manufactured inadequacy. The consumer feels inadequate because she does not possess enough. The builder feels inadequate because she has not produced enough. In both cases, the inadequacy is maintained by a system that profits from the anxiety.

The Berkeley researchers' finding of task seepage — the tendency for AI-assisted work to colonize previously protected spaces — is the publicity mechanism applied to attention itself. Workers prompt on lunch breaks, during meetings, in the elevator, filling every gap. The AI tool says: you could be more productive. The structure is identical to the billboard that says: you could be more beautiful. The present self is inadequate. The tool offers a bridge to the future self. The use temporarily satisfies the manufactured desire, but the satisfaction generates a new desire: if I shipped one feature today, why not two tomorrow? The anxiety is self-renewing.

The Orange Pill's author captures this dynamic with unusual honesty in describing writing at 3am on a transatlantic flight: I was not writing because the book demanded it. I was writing because I could not stop. The exhilaration had drained out hours ago. What remained was the grinding compulsion of a person who has confused productivity with aliveness. This is the voice of someone who has seen through the publicity of productivity — who has recognized that the compulsion to build is not different in kind from the compulsion to buy. The recognition is brief. He returns to building, because the building is also genuinely satisfying, genuinely valuable. Berger would have understood this tension better than most.

Origin

The argument is developed in the fourth essay of Ways of Seeing, which remains the most widely cited single analysis of advertising in cultural studies. The extension to algorithmic systems appears in the work of Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and others; the specific extension to AI-era productivity anxiety is developed in Chapter 4 of this volume.

Key Ideas

Publicity sells anxiety, not products. The purchase is what the anxiety produces; the anxiety is the product the system actually delivers.

The feed is publicity with a model of you. Algorithmic personalization allows the mechanism to operate at the level of the individual rather than the audience.

AI-era productivity is publicity's logical extension. The anxiety is no longer that you do not possess enough but that you have not produced enough. The aesthetic is heroic rather than consumerist, but the mechanism is the same.

The aestheticization of productivity makes the publicity harder to see. Building is morally more admirable than buying, and the moral halo obscures the structural identity with the earlier mechanism.

The productivity is real, which is what makes the publicity powerful. A beautiful image grounded in genuine capability is more compelling than one grounded in fantasy.

Debates & Critiques

Defenders of the AI productivity narrative argue the framework is unfair — that tools which genuinely amplify capability cannot be reduced to advertising mechanisms, and that the comparison trivializes both the tools and the critique. The framework's reply is that Berger never dismissed the beauty of the publicity image; he insisted the beauty was part of the mechanism, not a counterargument to the analysis. AI tools can be genuinely transformative and simultaneously operate within the structure of manufactured inadequacy. The task is to see both, not to choose between them.