Our actions certainly are, and if we think we have free will, we ought to be able to control those. And I think it is possible for us to do so. But on the othe

Our actions certainly are, and if we think we have free will, we ought to be able to control those. And I think it is possible for us to do so. But on the other hand, this isn't about me trying to persuade you, or you trying to persuade me. This is about a corporation (pick one) with a revenue base that matches many countries, spending a good chunk of that revenue on the best persuasive techniques and technologies the human race can produce, microtargeting each one of us to click the link, and draw from our eyeballs seconds of our time. The cost to us is small, that the side-effect is warping our perceptions of the world is something the corporation doesn't care about. We're living in that shadow of H.P. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones - vast, inhuman things that reshape us and our world without any care or understanding.