These elements of our online activities are filtered, sorted, and fed back to us. We are constantly profiled, our tastes mapped, our desires fitted into psychographic categorization systems (Stark 2018). While we’re on what I will call in this essay the ‘Clear Web,’ we are subject to monitoring by corporations (Fuchs 2012).

This is because the magical associations Williams mapped in his essay – beer with manliness, a washing machine with social proof of status – are only intensified and reified in contemporary online advertising, particularly within corporate social media, such as the properties owned by Facebook (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram)or Alphabet (the whole Google suite).

You do not only buy an object: you buy social respect, discrimination, health, beauty, success, and power to control your environment (Williams 2000).ĭespite appearing over 60 years ago, Williams’s condemnation of the emptiness of the magic system seems more relevant today than ever. If the consumption of individual goods leaves that whole area of human need unsatisfied, the attempt is made, by magic, to associate this consumption with human desires to which it has no real reference.

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