American late-stage hyper-capitalism is dominated by marketing, and advertising is its instrument.

We're talking about the cursed viewership "metrics" that suck the life out of corporate entertainment, the metrics the advertisers demand to close the three-sided loop of their twisted economic arrangement. Those metrics are no different than Facebook's "Like" button. Nielsen et al metrics are reactive, because they measure what people choose to watch out of the crapchoices before them; and the Like buttons, everywhere, record people reacting to what's placed before them on the Internet.

A Like button provides an immediate readout on the user's emotional state, the thing advertiser care about to choose the "content" to back that best disarms the rational faculties of the viewer. They love the immediacy of Like buttons, because with viewership metrics they had to wait weeks and watch the trends to see if people "liked" the crap they chose from the menu.

The debasement of entertainment and the debasement of news and information, I think, both owe a lot to the blind and mechanical use of this simple-minded "metric", in both arenas.

People talk about how Facebook's "algorithm" produced "fake news", but I think the problem is deeper, it's literally garbage in: One single bit describing an emotional state. They can tinker with the algorithm all they want, but the solution is to ditch the Like button.

And for TV to ditch the advertisers and go full a la carte. Eff the corporations and their "free speech rights". Let viewers directly influence what gets produced, not corporate third-parties with an agenda of avarice.