The Panopticon Artists

This is clever and (for those of us who are in on the jokes) witty. I think too much time is spent on pointing out that Leff's world contained non-zero marginal cost goods, for which some resource inputs must be shown in a legit deal, and intangibles of uncertain but potentially infinite value like God's grace. The intermediate form of zero marginal cost good of ascertainable value he knew not in his tragically short life. I like to think he would have appreciated some of what I did with his ideas in that world, as you are doing now. But it takes fewer sentences to adjust his ideas than you spend raising valid but fixable objections.

The "and in the end it's only advertising" position is one way of thinking about what's happened. But if one tries to see it from the other side, where the Parasite with the Mind of God is, advertising is a metabolic product—emissions to stimulate more behavior. These collaterally produces metabolic input, revenue, for its helper cells in the interstitial body of the superorganism that is humanity plus the network plus the parasite.

In this case, "swindling" and "selling" are biological processes as well as social ones, representing the share of overall welfare taken by the parasite, the global resources it consumes—which a human moralist would consider a swindle—and all the selling that constitutes the "in the end it's only advertising" ecology.