One current ad in particular caught my eye as a very expensive, high-production values film that depicts cool people in cool environments behaving in a pathetic way; but as-if they were instead cool people in a techno-utopia leading an enviable lifestyle.
There is so much to dislike about this advert! From the media-fake-gangster persona of the spokesman, to the fact of its open advocacy of sinful behaviour. Gambling is not, perhaps - for most people, a major sin; but it is certainly a bad-thing rather than a good-thing.
(Indeed, the discouragement of gambling - until recently no advertisement was allowed for bookmakers, and betting shops had no windows - was a strong platform of the Left Wing Labour Party right up until Tony Blair's corrupting leadership. This came from British socialism's roots in Nonconformism; with its teetotal, strict Sabbath-observing, anti-gambling, clean-living requirements. They recognised that 'gamble responsibly' was a stark oxymoron.)
I mean, these advert-people apparently go through life with their faces glued to their smartphones or buried in their laptops, constantly engaged in betting on international sports events - even when they are depicted as inhabiting such iconically beautiful and exciting places as a boat cruising on Sydney Harbour, or at the window of a steroetypically-stylish old apartment in a sophisticated European city (Paris?).
To enhance the suffocating, sinister atmosphere, there is a nimbus of Slytherin-green; and animation is used to surround the plugged-in users with a virtual video display - separating them from human contact, and sealing them from their actual (beautiful) surroundings.
But my point is that this dystopian nightmare scenario is an advertisement - promising this to consumers, advocating this version of virtual reality in preference to some of the most-legendary, most-attractive world tourist destinations and lifestyles! Pseudo-virtual mass-participation in sports is casually depicted as better than living-the-dream in real-life!
The demons have won! Things have come to this - Fake is the new real: Inversion is the new normal.
