I have a hunch that gullible people are one of the biggest problems humanity faces today.
It seems like used car sales persons have had a bad reputation since time immemorial, and what’s perhaps even more surprising is that time immemorial seems to go back no further than the invention of the automobile. Which people had the bad reputation before anyone could sell used cars? Horse traders? Snake oil sales persons? While one prominent idiom that remains from earlier eras is “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”, there is a clear implication that you should indeed look a horse in the mouth if you are paying money for it.
Yet although several centuries ago Benjamin Franklin observed (and wrote) that “time is money”, and even though there have already been decades of lip service about the so-called “attention economy”, it is astonishing how few people actually are aware that their own attention is a significant economic factor. People generally believe they are immune to any attempts made to manipulate their minds — even after the CoVid history (let alone the multitude of military invasions based on shoddy so-called “facts“) clearly shows the opposite is actually true.
Probably the clearest tell-tale sign that manipulation is booming is the value of the companies most engaged in it — the so-called FAANG group (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) are soaring like there is no tomorrow. These companies are so full of hot air, that their prices ought to be referred to as balloons, not mere bubbles. Yet when I talk with the teenagers (who are the primary target audience for such manipulative marketing schemes), they almost always mention that they do indeed recognize that such manipulation is taking place. The problem is that these young people are apparently too naive to recognize that such observations are simply the few isolated cases of manipulation gone wrong, and that the mainstream cases (of manipulation gone quasi-“right”) are what the skyrocketing stock prices based on bullshit are evidence of.
The blind faith in progress remains astoundingly widespread — it is now (yet again) another well-known fact that “it’s getting better all the time”. All of the FAANGs are incessantly fiddling around with their so-called algos (i.e., algorithms) to provide NEW and IMPROVED services day after day. Most people simply assume that this means the NEW and IMPROVED news must be more trustworthy than ever … they apparently still can’t fathom that the true reality is that the investors are actually investing ever more resources into making the news more manipulative than ever.
Socio Business blog 