The best possible taste

In adverts, cliché is king. Even when it's being wittily subverted, it's being invoked because that's what "appeal" is all about—latching on to something that's already deep inside your targets' heads. Google's adverts, it increasingly seems to me, are the ultimate evolution of this process: a global repository of stock associations wrapped almost subliminally around the edges of websites and email. Google ads operate via an automated "reading" of the text on a web-page, in response to which a selection of adverts deemed appropriate are displayed. As a google email-user, it often feels as though the adverts running down the right hand side of my screen are a slit-width window onto the world's unconscious: glimpses of the bottomless mess of received ideas.

Every good Freudian knows that unconscious associations are as often tenuous and perverse as they are conventional. Similarly, when I'm in the middle of an email exchange about (for example) the middle east, for every offer of rugs, incense, tours of the pyramids, camel-rides and belly-dancing lessons displayed within the ad-section of my screen, there'll be something utterly left-field: a designer yurt company, a musicianship instructor, discount womenswear. It's never just random, though—the algorithms see to that. Instead, the word-searching google robot is a master of serendipity and irony. Thanks to its implacable quest for connections, rationalist websites teem with creationist puffs; concerned environmental forums offer discounted flights to Goa; and emails from my wife, Catriona, are frequently accompanied by enticements from premier pet-food suppliers.

There's an associative, anarchic kind of energy to all this. But it can also be disconcerting. Earlier this year, I had to send a number of emails about arrangements for a funeral, and remember that the adverts on my screen included the suggestion that I put my loved one's ashes into a giant firework and set it off as a memorial gesture, as well as the unbeatable offer of "Human Remains at Amazon: Low prices on popular products. Qualified orders over $25 ship free." I was also dazzled by an American firm's suggestion of "extra-large body bags for the morbidly obese" and by eBay's offers of "new & used Vomit," "Discount Vampire Blood" and "low priced innards." The back of someone's mind is not always a pretty place to be.