False Advertising

From the first few lines, Rushkoff expresses the impressive power of the advertising corporations. After a brief description of the awe that they inspired in one young shopper, the writing moves on to explain the means by which companies make their sales is not through quality or price of the item, but rather, through mass advertising. Rather pessimistically, the writer claims that despite children growing up desensitized to commercials, their pride only serves to make them even more susceptible to new and improved advertising techniques. As a final point Rushkoff attempts to express how we are all doomed because "Even a consumer revolt merely reinforces one's role as consumer".
Unfortunately, reading this article was not at all pleasant for me. Much like an apocalyptic preacher, the author seemed to give the message that we our utterly powerless and thus doomed. The impression given by Rushkoff is that we have no control over what we buy and are at the complete mercy of our overlord corporations. This end-times message is combined with the very smear tactics and information manipulation that the writer dutifully informs us all advertisers make use of, used by the author himself. For example, he refers to company anthropologists as "the same breed of scientists that used to scope out enemy populations before military conquest" in an obvious attempt to try companies in with destruction and war-like tendencies. He also adds in a convenient second character to add validity to his ideas. The conversation between Rushkoff and a teenage boy who expresses all his emotional insecurities to some random adult who was watching him in a shoe store is pure self support and lies. Along with the seeming lack of point the the article, (does he want us to stop buying things?) I see little too be gained from even reading it.