[njharman]

You're missing a key factor. It's not "knowledge of what they don't have" that advertising brings. Advertising is highly sophisticated psychological manipulation, refined over that lat 100 years, that invents "needs" and "wants" in the target subjects. Much of that manipulation is preys upon and creates in securities, inflicts unhappiness and other manufactured "ills". Then promises to relieve them if you buy.

It's artificial. If they just had knowledge, like say wikipedia or ad blocked internet. They would be wanting real things like education, health care, self-determination, not Nikes.

[wickedwiesel]

There is the obvious plug to the Century of Self documentary, if someone hasn't seen it yet but is interested in the subject of "creating needs and wants": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04 or https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2d29tf

The documentary relates "The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires."