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Where do you draw the line between manipulation and culture? Or do you think some cultures are self-manipulating?
by 7373737373 3y ago
Where do you draw the line between manipulation and culture? Or do you think some cultures are self-manipulating?
- coldtea 3y agoIf it happens through an educational system tailored and expanded to produce obidient factory and then office workers, with trillions in advertising spending (around 600 billion just in the US) to get people buying, plus all kinds of experts in customer manipulation, dark patterns, number chunching, and so on, working to get people to buy more stuff, plus an orchestrated early 20th century campaign to create the modern consumer and be done with thriftiness, debt-aversion and self-sufficiency as common prior ideals, plus planned obselence, plus a political system designed to support two party monopoly, allow campaign contributions and lobbying from corporations with big pockets, and discourage active citizen participation aside from voting once every several years (hell, iirc in the US people don't even get a mandatory free day from work to vote)... then it's manipulation...
- monktastic1 3y agoRight, but it's a self-perpetuating process. It's not happening just top-down, but cyclically. The people "at the top" are also caught in the same system. Jeff Bezos isn't just trying to sell you stuff; he really believes that having more stuff is better. That's what the parent meant by "self-manipulating."
- coldtea 3y agoIf he believes it and it benefits him, giving him money and power, then he's not "manipulated".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Zpalmtree 3y agoit's manipulation if it disagrees with my very strict opinion of how society should be
- ashes-of-sol 3y ago[dead]