"I like being manipulated so I think everyone should be manipulated" is certainly A Take in 2026.

In that case you don't want advertising, you want better product discovery. Advertising is fundamentally incompatible with usefulness because it's based on how much cash someone can fork over. A company can make the best product in a market segment, but if they don't have the money to advertise it, they will lose to the hot garbage offered by their competitors. The only recourse is people organically recommending the product to one another - so the most useful venue is not even advertising. Letting companies pay for your attention is actively hostile to you, because there is no guarantee they're presenting you with the best option, just THEIR option.

I'll repeat an idea I had a while ago, but if countries just had national networks where companies could list their products and services in a way that is highly structured and as systematically scrubbed of bias or psychological manipulation as possible, we would get the best of both worlds. Effortless and non-favoring lookup of what you want, fair comparisons between products, no favoritism to the wealthy, no FOMO or mind tricks.