and even if they don't succeed in selling directly to you, some amount of the information is going to be retained in your subconscious, which may very well affect your decisions in the future without you knowing about it.

but that's not what bothers me most. what bothers me most is watching the trained teenagers of my generation consciously absorb commercial messages, process them, and converse about them around me, and to know that i'm powerless to stop this on a small-scale, let alone the world.