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> After taking a step backwards you're just exploiting/taking advantage of vulnerable people looking for help and using that to manipulate them into giving you

> After taking a step backwards you're just exploiting/taking advantage of vulnerable people looking for help and using that to manipulate them into giving you money. This describes an uncomfortably large section of our (customer facing) economy. Casinos, tobacco, payday loan sharks, etc are the obvious actors. But if you look more closely, you will see that there are essentially two families of competing in b2c: * productive: quality, service, price. * destructive: bait and switch, seduction through marketing (unrelated to the actual product), etc. All of the destructive forms eventually boil down to: abusing the faults in our human brain. Once you start looking at the world this way, you will see it everywhere. Almost every commercial on tv is destructive. E.g. car commercials never talk about car specs; they just try to seduce your fallible brain. Perfume. Clothing brands. Any food franchising (which are not about food, they are marketing companies who happen to sell food). Etc etc etc. None of these advance society forward. There is an all-out, 24/7 war on your brain. It is what hippies mean when they talk about “buying shit you don’t need”. The only problem with that statement is it puts the blame with the consumer. But we are only human, and fighting a mental war 24/7 is exhausting. The problem is more insidious than mere gluttony / consumerism. The example here is egregious and very clear. But make no mistake about it: it exists, in smaller form, everywhere you go.

cryoshon 8y ago
yeah, i read a book on what you're talking about. it's real. the book is called phishing for phools: https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10534.html https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10534.html especially on products we're not knowledgeable about, we're vulnerable to get phished.
- 13of40 8y ago
  Not to be too meta, but the hardcover is $10 off right now if you get it from Amazon Prime. Great impulse buy.
phkahler 8y ago
"They Live" is a cheesy sci-fi movie on this topic that should be mandatory viewing.
- wpietri 8y ago
  Absolutely. I've often thought that this is the right time to remake it. It's definitely an artifact of its time, focusing on 80s economic struggles and the rise of the yuppies. You'd have to update it to more modern concerns, but given rising inequality, it wouldn't be hard at all. An ersatz Mark Zuckerberg, for example, would almost have to appear. This movie also contains one of the best action hero bravado lines ever. I won't quote it here, as I think it's worth discovering in context, but I promise you'll be saying it after.
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    If you played Duke Nukem 3D you already know most of the lines of the movie.
  - rinze 8y ago
    I rewatched this movie a few weeks ago with some friends that hadn't watched it before. They absolutely loved it. I'm not fan of remakes, and I think this movie is overly very critical to be remade today. Today, viewing the original one should be mandatory.
  - RHSeeger 8y ago
    I love that quote.
- reshie 8y ago
  another aptly named is branded. basically bringing capitalism and big marketing to russia has some fantasy elements.
- rotexo 8y ago
  SPOILER ALERT in my mind, a sequel to They Live would pick up ~30 years after the events of the first film, where it becomes obvious that everyone saw the ghouls in their midst and responded by essentially shrugging. it seems to me that's pretty much what happened irl.
maxxxxx 8y ago
"There is an all-out, 24/7 war on your brain." And the sad part is that a lot of our brightest people work at Google, Facebook and others to win that war for the seducers.
- lyzan 8y ago
  As long consumers keep paying more to be advertised to (buying) than they're willing to pay to not (donations, subscriptions, boycotting) it'll stay a lopsided game. It seems to me like there's plenty of good people willing to fight the good fight, but their lifestyle comes first and ideals second.
  - salawat 8y ago
    That only works if companies actually support that option. Many don't, because it would cut into the data that could be collected and remarketed. Furthermore, try sitting down with a teen, twenty, thirty, or heck, anyone not technologically inclined and try to explain the causes and ills that "marketing" causes. It is difficult. However, many are aware of and despise it, but have no idea what to do about it. I'm sorry, but GP is right. Advertising has gone too far. It really is just customer predation at this point. It is no longer about making sure your business is out there if the consumer comes looking, it is about exploiting every heuristic that can be used to short circuit the consumer making a conscious decision to see anyone else but you. At some point, the intrusion and attention manipulation has to end.
    - sidr 8y ago
      > Many don't, because it would cut into the data that could be collected and remarketed. The reason advertising companies collect all this data is to use it for marketing/advertising (among other things). The truth of the matter is that Google et. al. would lose users if they charged them what it actually cost to run and continually improve their services and make a profit (which is their prerogative/duty as for-profit companies). Consumers may say that they'd be open to paying for services, but I have a strong suspicion this is not true at a large enough scale to be even worth exploring. People paying for online streaming services versus cable may be a counter to that argument, although then it seems like it takes decades for the ad-fatigue to set in...or the ratio of ads to content has to steadily keep increasing until it reaches the tipping point where people would rather pay (and still throw a fit when Netflix raises their prices).
closeparen 8y ago
A very small handful of cars on the market are competing to be a transportation appliance. The rest exist because people are willing to buy driving enjoyment, subjective quality, lifestyle projection, etc. above and beyond point A to point B transport.
- Retric 8y ago
  This is largely an outgrowth of the used car market. People that are price sensitive tend to buy used, so car companies only survive by convincing people to make bad decisions.
infogulch 8y ago
Computers and the internet have given us unprecedented tools to introspect human psychology and perform hyper-targeted campaigns more fine-grained than even just individuals. Companies are weaponizing these tools to hijack our collective brains and alter our behavior for profit via marketing and advertising. One could argue that we've been influenced by ads for centuries, and the concept of targeting isn't new. But this is one of the cases where a change in amount (how detailed targeting gets) becomes a change in kind. Yes, it looks like the same thing as before just with more data, but it's actually a fundamentally different kind of thing. Every time we make a discovery or invent a new tool we play around with it for a while, exploring its uses and implications, and find its boundaries. Atomic energy for example. Before we knew exactly what radioactivity was Marie Curie carried around bottles of highly radioactive stuff in her pockets, she was so nonchalant about it that now her notebook has to be kept in a lead box, 100 years later. Since then we've created power sources and weapons and had disasters. Now everything highly radioactive is regulated and tracked. We're in the "Marie Curie" stage with our advertising tools. We will need to dial back how nonchalant we are about employing these tools against others eventually. Either it comes from within the industry, or it comes from regulation, or we devolve into a dystopia where companies more and more literally own your mind.
- MandieD 8y ago
  This comment makes me feel both hopeful - we did learn about the dangers of atomic energy and have found a pretty stable balance between the useful and harmful aspects of it (weapons stockpiles aside), and hopeless - I don't think we'll come to grips with computers and the internet before the powerful have weaponized our brains against ourselves so thoroughly that reining them in is impossible.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
andrepd 8y ago
People sneer when I say I would categorically ban all advertising, but the more I observe the more convinced I am of this. Advertising is brain manipulation, nothing more. It's unreservedly evil and harmful, and we would all be much happier without the constant bombardment.
- ggg9990 8y ago
  Advertising can help people become aware of products they never though could exist. One recent example is a baby toy that sticks onto the high chair tray with a suction cup. I bought this $10 toy from an advertisement and because my daughter loves to play with it so much, mealtimes go much faster. I have probably already recovered 20 hours of cleanup time because of this toy, and an advertisement was the only way I’d know about it.
- hinkley 8y ago
  I don't know if we have to ban advertising, but we should stop giving people a tax break on it for sure.
  - dnautics 8y ago
    how do you categorize business activity as advertising or not?
    - hinkley 8y ago
      Businesses already categorize this stuff. It's just another color of money. It's more a case of them labeling lots of things as advertising that a might cause a reasonable person to narrow their eyes. Buying ads and ad services for one. Not sure how I feel about 'market research'.
- BeetleB 8y ago
  >Advertising is brain manipulation, nothing more. It's unreservedly evil and harmful. I'm no fan of advertising (canceled cable decades ago, happily use Ad Blocker, etc). But these sweeping statements do not sit well with me. Any time I try to persuade someone to do something, I am engaged in brain manipulation. As someone who in the last few years decided to take up subjects like negotiation and communications, most effective communication is brain manipulation - and not in a way that is significantly different from advertising. As the GP said - once you learn these topics, you begin to see it everywhere - in all the ways people talk. For most of my life, I tried to convince people with purely objective means, and for the most part, it was a failure. If you want to achieve good for most people, brain manipulation is not just a nice-to-have - it is a must. So declaring it to be brain manipulation is not, in my mind, a negative. It is unfortunate, but not unreservedly evil. Certain applications of it are evil. But banning advertising wholesale is just a lazy way of not dealing with the problem.
hinkley 8y ago
Do you remember the Michelin commercial that's just a baby sitting in a tire? A little on the nose, there. My libertarian coworker used to say to me, "well, you don't have to buy the product". He didn't buy my explanation, which was this isn't people just asking you to buy their product in an annoying manner. Its straight up psy-ops (psychological warfare) at this point.
- dnautics 8y ago
  can you give a specific definition of what constitutes psychological warfare or not, that you can present to a jury and get a reasonable judgement from reasonable people. Let's make it a standard that is specific enough that a jury would be less likely to be swayed, for example, by the color of the skin of the defendant or plaintiff.
  - hinkley 8y ago
    I don't have much hope for us finding a legal definition of what psychological strings you are and aren't allowed to tug on and how hard. War crimes set a line for tugging until they break. It's a lot easier to define "way too much" than "too much". This discourages me from wanting to go into long thought train about what I would like to outlaw. What I feel more confident about is adding lots of friction to the system.
  - ggg9990 8y ago
    A specific definition of what is psychological warfare is required only if you're trying to enforce it by law.
hinkley 8y ago
I don't know what we do about the bigger part of this problem, which is that the only people 'exploiting' the virtuous side of this equation (manipulating your brain to get things that build you up instead of break you down) consists almost entirely of non-profits. That is, if you are in the business of giving people a legitimate reason to feel good about themselves, you're either not 'in business' or soon won't be.
Dirlewanger 8y ago
>The only problem with that statement is it puts the blame with the consumer. There's nothing wrong with that. You have to. It's where the change will most immediately happen. Grandstanding about how society is at fault etc etc won't change anything in the near-term. Corporations don't give a shit about the ethics of the situation. A more informed citizenry is the only way anything will realistically change. Edit: Thinking about it more, it's 100% the fault of citizens. If everyone decided "you know what, fuck McDonald's" and stopped going to them the following day, the company would be sent into a death spiral that would have rippling effects of various degrees across the entire global economy.
- thatcat 8y ago
  The problem is that its hard to find more calories/$ without investment in ingredients and a kitchen; it's hard to fault the poorest people for buying what seems economically rational in the short term.
  - carapace 8y ago
    People eat at McD's because they want a burger and a quart of carbonated sugar water for five bucks and don't give a shit about their health, not because they are poor. The bulk of their customers have kitchens and could make better meals choices.
- PeterisP 8y ago
  You could say that the solution is that citizens should ensure a legal system that protects customers, prohibits predatory practices, and has a strong enforcement system. But that's still up to citizens to make that happen, it won't happen by itself.
BadassFractal 8y ago
Not just for selling products and services. The very same techniques are constantly applied to get someone on your side of a political divide. Persuasion tricks warfare with every tweet.
LinuxBender 8y ago
There is a great BBC documentary that talks about this war on the brain called "Century of the Self" [0]. It's four hours long, but the first hour covers the gist of it. It goes into the want vs need and how businesses have been taught to utilize this part of our mind. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
aorloff 8y ago
Mind your wants because somebody wants your mind.
rosser 8y ago
> There is an all-out, 24/7 war on your brain. And so alarmingly many of the "trust the market" crowd with whom I've spoken simultaneously hold the position that if you've been taken advantage of by marketers who are leveraging the flaws in your brain against you, that's your fault. I'm just, "Buh?"

cryoshon 8y ago

yeah, i read a book on what you're talking about. it's real. the book is called phishing for phools: https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10534.html https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10534.html especially on products we're not knowledgeable about, we're vulnerable to get phished.

13of40 8y ago
Not to be too meta, but the hardcover is $10 off right now if you get it from Amazon Prime. Great impulse buy.

phkahler 8y ago

"They Live" is a cheesy sci-fi movie on this topic that should be mandatory viewing.

wpietri 8y ago
Absolutely. I've often thought that this is the right time to remake it. It's definitely an artifact of its time, focusing on 80s economic struggles and the rise of the yuppies. You'd have to update it to more modern concerns, but given rising inequality, it wouldn't be hard at all. An ersatz Mark Zuckerberg, for example, would almost have to appear. This movie also contains one of the best action hero bravado lines ever. I won't quote it here, as I think it's worth discovering in context, but I promise you'll be saying it after.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  If you played Duke Nukem 3D you already know most of the lines of the movie.
- rinze 8y ago
  I rewatched this movie a few weeks ago with some friends that hadn't watched it before. They absolutely loved it. I'm not fan of remakes, and I think this movie is overly very critical to be remade today. Today, viewing the original one should be mandatory.
- RHSeeger 8y ago
  I love that quote.
reshie 8y ago
another aptly named is branded. basically bringing capitalism and big marketing to russia has some fantasy elements.
rotexo 8y ago
SPOILER ALERT in my mind, a sequel to They Live would pick up ~30 years after the events of the first film, where it becomes obvious that everyone saw the ghouls in their midst and responded by essentially shrugging. it seems to me that's pretty much what happened irl.

maxxxxx 8y ago

"There is an all-out, 24/7 war on your brain." And the sad part is that a lot of our brightest people work at Google, Facebook and others to win that war for the seducers.

lyzan 8y ago
As long consumers keep paying more to be advertised to (buying) than they're willing to pay to not (donations, subscriptions, boycotting) it'll stay a lopsided game. It seems to me like there's plenty of good people willing to fight the good fight, but their lifestyle comes first and ideals second.
- salawat 8y ago
  That only works if companies actually support that option. Many don't, because it would cut into the data that could be collected and remarketed. Furthermore, try sitting down with a teen, twenty, thirty, or heck, anyone not technologically inclined and try to explain the causes and ills that "marketing" causes. It is difficult. However, many are aware of and despise it, but have no idea what to do about it. I'm sorry, but GP is right. Advertising has gone too far. It really is just customer predation at this point. It is no longer about making sure your business is out there if the consumer comes looking, it is about exploiting every heuristic that can be used to short circuit the consumer making a conscious decision to see anyone else but you. At some point, the intrusion and attention manipulation has to end.
  - sidr 8y ago
    > Many don't, because it would cut into the data that could be collected and remarketed. The reason advertising companies collect all this data is to use it for marketing/advertising (among other things). The truth of the matter is that Google et. al. would lose users if they charged them what it actually cost to run and continually improve their services and make a profit (which is their prerogative/duty as for-profit companies). Consumers may say that they'd be open to paying for services, but I have a strong suspicion this is not true at a large enough scale to be even worth exploring. People paying for online streaming services versus cable may be a counter to that argument, although then it seems like it takes decades for the ad-fatigue to set in...or the ratio of ads to content has to steadily keep increasing until it reaches the tipping point where people would rather pay (and still throw a fit when Netflix raises their prices).

closeparen 8y ago

A very small handful of cars on the market are competing to be a transportation appliance. The rest exist because people are willing to buy driving enjoyment, subjective quality, lifestyle projection, etc. above and beyond point A to point B transport.

Retric 8y ago
This is largely an outgrowth of the used car market. People that are price sensitive tend to buy used, so car companies only survive by convincing people to make bad decisions.

infogulch 8y ago

Computers and the internet have given us unprecedented tools to introspect human psychology and perform hyper-targeted campaigns more fine-grained than even just individuals. Companies are weaponizing these tools to hijack our collective brains and alter our behavior for profit via marketing and advertising. One could argue that we've been influenced by ads for centuries, and the concept of targeting isn't new. But this is one of the cases where a change in amount (how detailed targeting gets) becomes a change in kind. Yes, it looks like the same thing as before just with more data, but it's actually a fundamentally different kind of thing. Every time we make a discovery or invent a new tool we play around with it for a while, exploring its uses and implications, and find its boundaries. Atomic energy for example. Before we knew exactly what radioactivity was Marie Curie carried around bottles of highly radioactive stuff in her pockets, she was so nonchalant about it that now her notebook has to be kept in a lead box, 100 years later. Since then we've created power sources and weapons and had disasters. Now everything highly radioactive is regulated and tracked. We're in the "Marie Curie" stage with our advertising tools. We will need to dial back how nonchalant we are about employing these tools against others eventually. Either it comes from within the industry, or it comes from regulation, or we devolve into a dystopia where companies more and more literally own your mind.

MandieD 8y ago
This comment makes me feel both hopeful - we did learn about the dangers of atomic energy and have found a pretty stable balance between the useful and harmful aspects of it (weapons stockpiles aside), and hopeless - I don't think we'll come to grips with computers and the internet before the powerful have weaponized our brains against ourselves so thoroughly that reining them in is impossible.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

andrepd 8y ago

People sneer when I say I would categorically ban all advertising, but the more I observe the more convinced I am of this. Advertising is brain manipulation, nothing more. It's unreservedly evil and harmful, and we would all be much happier without the constant bombardment.

ggg9990 8y ago
Advertising can help people become aware of products they never though could exist. One recent example is a baby toy that sticks onto the high chair tray with a suction cup. I bought this $10 toy from an advertisement and because my daughter loves to play with it so much, mealtimes go much faster. I have probably already recovered 20 hours of cleanup time because of this toy, and an advertisement was the only way I’d know about it.
hinkley 8y ago
I don't know if we have to ban advertising, but we should stop giving people a tax break on it for sure.
- dnautics 8y ago
  how do you categorize business activity as advertising or not?
  - hinkley 8y ago
    Businesses already categorize this stuff. It's just another color of money. It's more a case of them labeling lots of things as advertising that a might cause a reasonable person to narrow their eyes. Buying ads and ad services for one. Not sure how I feel about 'market research'.
BeetleB 8y ago
>Advertising is brain manipulation, nothing more. It's unreservedly evil and harmful. I'm no fan of advertising (canceled cable decades ago, happily use Ad Blocker, etc). But these sweeping statements do not sit well with me. Any time I try to persuade someone to do something, I am engaged in brain manipulation. As someone who in the last few years decided to take up subjects like negotiation and communications, most effective communication is brain manipulation - and not in a way that is significantly different from advertising. As the GP said - once you learn these topics, you begin to see it everywhere - in all the ways people talk. For most of my life, I tried to convince people with purely objective means, and for the most part, it was a failure. If you want to achieve good for most people, brain manipulation is not just a nice-to-have - it is a must. So declaring it to be brain manipulation is not, in my mind, a negative. It is unfortunate, but not unreservedly evil. Certain applications of it are evil. But banning advertising wholesale is just a lazy way of not dealing with the problem.

hinkley 8y ago

Do you remember the Michelin commercial that's just a baby sitting in a tire? A little on the nose, there. My libertarian coworker used to say to me, "well, you don't have to buy the product". He didn't buy my explanation, which was this isn't people just asking you to buy their product in an annoying manner. Its straight up psy-ops (psychological warfare) at this point.

dnautics 8y ago
can you give a specific definition of what constitutes psychological warfare or not, that you can present to a jury and get a reasonable judgement from reasonable people. Let's make it a standard that is specific enough that a jury would be less likely to be swayed, for example, by the color of the skin of the defendant or plaintiff.
- hinkley 8y ago
  I don't have much hope for us finding a legal definition of what psychological strings you are and aren't allowed to tug on and how hard. War crimes set a line for tugging until they break. It's a lot easier to define "way too much" than "too much". This discourages me from wanting to go into long thought train about what I would like to outlaw. What I feel more confident about is adding lots of friction to the system.
- ggg9990 8y ago
  A specific definition of what is psychological warfare is required only if you're trying to enforce it by law.

hinkley 8y ago

I don't know what we do about the bigger part of this problem, which is that the only people 'exploiting' the virtuous side of this equation (manipulating your brain to get things that build you up instead of break you down) consists almost entirely of non-profits. That is, if you are in the business of giving people a legitimate reason to feel good about themselves, you're either not 'in business' or soon won't be.

Dirlewanger 8y ago

>The only problem with that statement is it puts the blame with the consumer. There's nothing wrong with that. You have to. It's where the change will most immediately happen. Grandstanding about how society is at fault etc etc won't change anything in the near-term. Corporations don't give a shit about the ethics of the situation. A more informed citizenry is the only way anything will realistically change. Edit: Thinking about it more, it's 100% the fault of citizens. If everyone decided "you know what, fuck McDonald's" and stopped going to them the following day, the company would be sent into a death spiral that would have rippling effects of various degrees across the entire global economy.

thatcat 8y ago
The problem is that its hard to find more calories/$ without investment in ingredients and a kitchen; it's hard to fault the poorest people for buying what seems economically rational in the short term.
- carapace 8y ago
  People eat at McD's because they want a burger and a quart of carbonated sugar water for five bucks and don't give a shit about their health, not because they are poor. The bulk of their customers have kitchens and could make better meals choices.
PeterisP 8y ago
You could say that the solution is that citizens should ensure a legal system that protects customers, prohibits predatory practices, and has a strong enforcement system. But that's still up to citizens to make that happen, it won't happen by itself.

BadassFractal 8y ago

Not just for selling products and services. The very same techniques are constantly applied to get someone on your side of a political divide. Persuasion tricks warfare with every tweet.

LinuxBender 8y ago

There is a great BBC documentary that talks about this war on the brain called "Century of the Self" [0]. It's four hours long, but the first hour covers the gist of it. It goes into the want vs need and how businesses have been taught to utilize this part of our mind. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s

aorloff 8y ago

Mind your wants because somebody wants your mind.

rosser 8y ago

> There is an all-out, 24/7 war on your brain. And so alarmingly many of the "trust the market" crowd with whom I've spoken simultaneously hold the position that if you've been taken advantage of by marketers who are leveraging the flaws in your brain against you, that's your fault. I'm just, "Buh?"