Life & Wisdom Quote by Carrie P. Snow

Advertising, in Carrie P. Snow's telling, isn't just annoying noise; it's a slow theft of agency. The sentence is built like an accusation, not an observation. "Degrades" is moral language, the kind you use for social hierarchies and humiliation, implying a power relationship: advertiser above, audience below. The target isn't merely persuaded, it's reduced.

The line turns sharper with "the people it appeals to". Snow isn't condemning advertising in the abstract; she's pointing at its selective opportunism. Ads don't speak to our best selves. They flatter impatience, insecurity, status hunger, the little internal levers easiest to pull at scale. The subtext is that the market doesn't just meet desires; it manufactures a narrower kind of person who can be reliably managed.

Then comes the real charge: "deprives them of their will to choose". Not "ability" but "will" - meaning the damage happens upstream of decision-making. Choice still exists on paper (thirty brands of the same detergent), but the inner muscle that makes choice meaningful gets weakened. If degradation is the social injury, deprivation is the psychological one: repeated cues, repetition, and engineered envy teach people to outsource judgment to whatever looks confident, glossy, inevitable.

As a writer, Snow is also defending language itself. Advertising doesn't only sell products; it colonizes attention and vocabulary, replacing deliberation with slogans. The context is a modern economy where persuasion is industrialized - and her point lands hardest now, in an era of targeted feeds that don't just predict preferences but quietly train them.