Who this is for
Anyone who has ever been marketed to and thought "why". Why the mall is laid out so you walk past 30 shops to reach the one you came for. Why a TikTok trend you didn't care about is suddenly in your kitchen. Why the feed knows what you wanted before you did, and why the price of a thing changed depending on who was asking and when. You don't need to be a marketer to read it, and most of the people I wrote it for aren't. You need to be curious about the systems you're inside, and honest enough to ask who set their defaults.
I wrote it because I spent 15 years building those systems for other people, a printing company, a mortgage brokerage, an ecommerce brand, a few more I won't name, and at some point I noticed I couldn't explain the world to my own kids without using the job. Everything was marketing. Not the ads, the systems of persuasion underneath them, and nobody had written the plain version down.
What it isn't
It isn't a manual. The operational depth, the frameworks and the diagnostics, lives on 4 separate sites, each built for a specific kind of overwhelmed person. The book is the story of how they came to exist and the lens they came out of. There is no course behind it, no consultancy, no premium tier. Once you've bought it I have nothing else to sell you, which is the only reason nothing in it is held back.
What's inside
The 2nd edition is substantially a new book, rewritten as 13 essays in 3 movements. It's also how this book will keep working: one book, improved edition after edition for as long as the ideas hold up, rather than a shelf of new titles that each get a fraction of the attention.
It starts at the till of a stationery shop, where I was paid $7 an hour and the adult beside me was paid $12 for the same shift. From there it goes through the flyer rounds, a church, the BookPrint years, the platforms, the noise and AI, and it ends on democracy and competition read as machines like the rest.
Every essay has its own page with the opening and the clips, posts and books behind it.