There is no free will, all our opinions are constructed, and freedom of choice is preferably freedom from choice.
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These are not the crazed ravings of a person trying to avoid house maintenance during lockdown.
These are ideas discussed in "The Attention Merchants - The Epic Scramble To Get Inside Our Heads" by Tim Wu, which charts the rise of modern advertising. It's a book I've been reading lately instead of doing that home maintenance and it's a fascinating take on what I used to think I thought and what my opinions might be in the future, once someone gives them to me.
As any advertising guru knows, you need access to minds to get people to act on information, like buying toothpaste, cigarettes or anything Donald Trump Tweets.
Technological advances have been key to that, says Wu, blunting the powerful human ability to ignore stuff. Billboard posters, cinema, radio, TV, computers, social media, the internet etc - they've all been about getting our attention so it can be harvested for commercial and political ends.
British Field Marshall Lord Kitchener was the first to apply saturation advertising techniques at a state level when he convinced millions to run voluntarily into German machines guns during World War 1. Other governments eagerly copied him and it wasn't long before the commercial world wanted YOU too! generating many an outrageous ethical issue.
Lucky Strike cigarettes, for example, paid models to smoke at Suffragette marches in the early 1920s to not only reinforce the pitch that smoking eased a sore throat (cough cough) and kept you slim but also lit a torch for women's rights. When the penny later dropped that women, now smoking in vast numbers, make the majority of household purchasing decisions, the advertising industry hired Suffragettes to target female consumers.
The ultimate advertising success is not about making a consumer choose one product over another, but making the consumer believe there is no other choice but that product.
Some call it selling, others disinformation but everyone agrees the ability to distribute it has expanded exponentially.
Indeed, there is a theory that only the truly ignorant - the illiterate, off grid and/or offline - are capable of exercising free will in the modern world because their minds have not been monitored and manipulated.
It's not exactly new fake news but Wu gets you second guessing how vulnerable a population is.The basic warning is if you can't tell what the product is when you're online, chances are you're the product.
In light of cyber security issues and the use of personal data to track and influence behaviour, the next chapters of the advertising industry have a distinct Tik Tok about them. Anyone set the alarm?
