Beyond Fake News: Hidden Persuaders Shifting the Ground beneath Our Feet
Fifty years ago, Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders drew attention to the methods by which advertisers manipulated the psyches of consumers to desire certain things—in part to gain advantage over competitors selling things people needed (food, medicine, soap), and in part to get people to desire what they did not desire until the advertiser influenced them to (Caribbean vacations, cars with enormous fins, hula-hoops).
The advertising game has not changed a lot since then, and many of the devices used to influence consumers have become so transparent you’d think most of us would simply laugh—making an association between a car and an ocean wave, a candy bar and a seduction. But somebody’s not laughing, otherwise sponsors would not be dishing out humongous gobs of money to keep the games going. (For now we leave aside the question of sponsors themselves being duped, forking zillions over to ad agencies for advertisements that don’t get proportional results.)
Nuh-uh. That’s not the game to focus on, nor is the “Fake News” which currently agitates us, according to Robert Epstein, whose analysis of Big Tech’s rise to psychological dominance was published in The Hill on May 28th: “Is it still possible to stop ‘Big Tech’ from killing democracy? The short answer is, probably not, but I leave you to tap into Epstein’s acumen in the link at the end of this post (I encourage you to explore the links Epstein cites for a fuller picture). Epstein’s launch pad is a sort-of review of a book by Jonathan Taplin, but Epstein’s slant on the thesis of mind control seems at least as interesting as Taplin’s book. See:
Deceit is Natural, and the Most Effective Deceivers Operate out of Sight
Now that you’ve read Epstein (what I’m about to say may not make much sense unless you have), here’s my take on the subject of the 21st Century Hidden Persuaders. My take is greatly influenced by a recent National Geographic lead article: Why We Lie (June 2017). It’s short on deep substance, but the central propositions hold: lying is natural, has many advantages in a social context (thus its evolutionary success), and effective lying requires quite a bit of brainpower. Lying is built into our brains. In fact, good liars have been shown to have greater connectivity between neurons in the cerebral cortex than the most of the rest of us (e.g., me ). For which read: the Persuaders are smarter than we naive truth-tellers.
Extend “lying” to mean deception by those who filter information to enlarge their own powers and advance their chosen interests, and we have Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Larry Page. These are dangerous people, despite their ostensibly benevolent intentions. They have power that exceeds their moral compass, they have values in keeping with an elitist worldview that may or may not conduce to happiness for humankind in general. They have disdain for “the common man,” however you define it—that’s the man or woman whose judgement, however flawed, is the basis of 19th and 20th Century politics. From their lofty perch, they survey the blatant advocacy of both Fox News and MSNBC with amused tolerance.
They view the U.S. Congress as an unwieldy, self-contradictory, obsolete means of adaptation, as clumsy to respond to technological advances as royalty, in the 18th and 19th centuries, was to mass production newspapers, railroads, and the telephone. They embrace disruption. They perceive a fluid socio-political landscape, wholly transformed from the stodgy pre-Internet landscape of fixed boundaries, national sovereignties, and bilateral trade agreements.
Whence Democracy in the Really New World?
I’m not sure where the aforementioned Masters of the (Human) Universe stand on the “Wisdom of the Crowd,” but I’ll hazard a pretty safe guess: it’s fine within limitations. Those limitations are shaped by what information they make available to us, and how they prioritize it with methods as simple as skewing search results (largely unnoticed; you can’t notice what you don’t see). The irony of these libertarian technological leaders is that they espouse individual freedom and autonomy, whereas their actions—slanting information available to the public, pitching products and services to us based on our fleeting desires and their corporate profitability rather than deep moral principles—say the opposite. And they are succeeding because their methods are largely hidden.