This is only tangentially related, but this article reminds me of Galbraith's "The Affluent Society" which should frankly be required reading for undergrad social sciences. In it, he argues that, at the time of writing (late 50s), the industrialized West has largely solved what had previously been the main preoccupation of economics - improved standard of living. As evidence, Galbraith points to advertising.
The argument is simple: when important productivity improvements take place, say the invention of a new way of baking bread, they don't need advertising to gain mass use. Their benefits are so obvious that they don't need to be sold. Demand doesn't have to be created, because demand comes from human existence.
The existence of advertising, in contrast, shows that the thing being advertised probably isn't that important. Indeed, the item is so trivial as to require advertising to create demand for it. This then leads us to wonder what benefit is being served by both creating this product and the demand for it; Galbraith argues that we've essentially fetishized economic growth at all costs (a holdover, in his view, from the early days of econ which was concerned with our metaphorical bread making instead of our metaphorical advertised widget making). He then attacks planned obsolescence as the dumbest outcrop of this process, because now we're purposefully wasting materials on things which we hope to replace in the near future for no reason other than to keep making the things, things which we don't need anyway - as evidenced by the fact that they're advertised.
Anyway I think this fits in perfectly with the whole influencer economy phenomenon, because that's literally all they do. Their raison d'etre is to generate demand for items nobody needs or even previously knew about.
There was a commentary somewhere that while someone in france had discovered the cure to smallpox in the form of variolation, the king of france was dying of it. The reason he died was not because no cure existed, but because his doctors weren't aware of it and thus didn't know to apply it. The spread of knowledge is not magical. It will happen over time, but in that time knowledge will be lost. Variations of variolation have been used for thousands of years, but smallpox was only eradicated after galbraith wrote his book. The application of capital to the spread of useful knowledge can still happen even when the knowledge ought to be obvious and important to everyone that encounters it.
Sure but do we need a push or pull based model. Ads are pushed into our attention. Google searches and "research" are pull based. If you solve the pull based model the king's doctor just looks it up, discovers something exists, and obtains the treatment.
Recommendations are similar to ads in this regard as well. Maybe blurring the lines between the two depending on how the algo is designed. I'd personally be in favor of recommendation type approaches with combinations of human curation, and an adjustable spectrum of push/pull based results; and the ability to swap between these on a whim as needed.
The issue with this is that advertisements don't exist to answer a question, or provide useful information. They exist to sell a product - whose efficacy, usefulness or appropriateness to the buyer is orthogonal to the effectiveness of the advertisement. Anything can be advertised, from a crooked demagogue to a placebo herbal remedy. The only difference is the budget and the regulation. Advertising is not about the spread of knowledge, it's about the promotion of a good or service that's being sold, period.
Comparing "The application of capital to the spread of useful knowledge" to 99% of modern day advertising with a straight face makes me wonder if some people ever use the Web.
advertisers don't solve the transitory period problem, which is what you're describing.
There are lots of things that exist that doctors are not aware of and advertising may fix that for a few projects, it's not going to fix it for more than a few.
There ARE other solutions, but those solutions involve peer review and journals and require doctors to consume the material.
And who says doctors are going to meaningfully consume advertising?
There are two kinds of advertising. One is a grocery store putting signs in the windows that say "Fresh cantaloupes, 99 cents". This was back when food was seasonal. People knew what cantaloupes were, but may have kind of forgotten about them, because it's been nearly a year since they could get them. So the store advertises that they have cantaloupes. This advertising just says "we have this thing".
Now think of Coke and Pepsi ads from during the "cola wars" era, or beer ads from a wider era. It's all about cool people and beautiful women, and you're supposed to think that maybe you could be cool like that and have a girl like that if you drank that. It has nothing to do with the properties of what's being sold; it's all about image.
The first kind of advertising is what you see when things are scarce; the second you see when things are abundant.
I don't have a problem with the first kind of advertising.
I strongly disagree with Galbraith's argument essentially about "the end of quality". We did not reach an absolute zenith of product quality in the 50s.
What did change was the coverage of mass media.
Instead of relying on long and expensive genuine user feedback loops to generate positive buzz around a product, advertising manufactures that buzz directly. This is why is it everywhere, and influencers are just the latest innovation. Not because product quality/QoL reached a high point.
> I strongly disagree with Galbraith's argument essentially about "the end of quality". We did not reach a zenith of product quality in the 50s.
As someone who actively seeks tools, furniture and other consumer products from that period, I tend to disagree.
Let's take furniture. Mine was made during this period by Stickley in New York state. One cannot find commensurate quality today unless you wish to commission handmade pieces.
We have devolved to the point of disposable $5 extruded-plastic chairs, which may provide service for a time, knowing full well that the inevitable trip to the landfill is just around the corner. I reckon we're a ways past said zenith.
That and the shift toward psychological advertising in the wake of
Bernays. Closing the quality/opinion loop only makes sense if quality
is really a concern. Post-Bernays the gig switched to manufacturing
desire by attacking the self-esteem of the "consumer". The product
itself became largely irrelevant.
The critique of advertising rings some bells; however, planned obsolescence is not always a bad thing because the advances in new versions might outweigh the energy necessary to produce a better version.
So something like a bread toaster probably suffers from planned obsolescence; LCDs (or generic display technology) likely benefit from planned obsolescence.
Before Telecommunications deregulation everyone had pretty much the same telephone that was leased from the phone co. It was electromechanical with sizeable transformers and magnets in there. Compare that to the sets that were available after deregulation with miniaturized components.
Basically it's not always cut and dried and there is nuance especially when it comes to energy efficiency. On the other hand, it's really annoying to buy kitchen appliances that are poorly manufactured.
To whom? We now have floating islands of plastic from obsolescent devices. That plastic blender I bought 3 years ago is now in the trash heap. My mother's blender she bought 40 years ago is still going. Obsolescence is terrible for the environment in the entire lifecycle of a product. In my opinion, obsolescence are rarely good for the society, never good for the customer. It is only good for the manufacturer.
> Before Telecommunications deregulation everyone had pretty much the same telephone that was leased from the phone co. It was electromechanical with sizeable transformers and magnets in there. Compare that to the sets that were available after deregulation with miniaturized components.
Just to be clear, are you suggesting that deregulation brought in the "not always bad" obsolescence? I know it brought innovation and customer choice, but can you unpack further how it brought obsolescence?
> The argument is simple: when important productivity improvements take place, say the invention of a new way of baking bread, they don't need advertising to gain mass use.
I mean, to look at your example again, in the United States, where technology gets adopted the quickest, 99% of bread sold is utterly disgusting (and expensive) and would be illegal to sell in many countries. A $100-150 automated bread maker fixes this, and yet they do not have mass adoption. Everything is marketing driven.
The reason you like the bread that you eat in your country is because it's the bread that you grew up with. While there are certainly some breads in the US that I don't like (mostly the mediocre-quality mass-produced stuff[0]), the variety of good bread is pretty amazing. If you don't like it, that's fine, you do you.
[0] Which is undoubtedly made by an automated bread maker, so I don't think using a machine "fixes" bread.
The last time I was at CES I went to one of the outer wings of the event where they had all the random booths of people shilling cheap backpacks, cheap cell phone cases, cheap Bluetooth speakers, etc. etc. etc. Every booth basically the same as the next and each one promoting what was definitely nothing more than near-future landfill filler.
I remember having two really clear thoughts.
1) CES is mostly a megachurch dedicated to buying crap we don't need with money we don't have.
2) It's a special kind of existential debasing that goes into being a person who has to tend one of those booths and stand there pretending like your hot pink camouflage backpacks are so much better than the ones that look exactly like them in the booth next to yours.
A lot of people get really excited to go to CES. I've had to go for work several times, and it always just makes me depressed.
When I did consulting landing gigs was mainly based on knowing tools others didn't. From frameworks to speedup the project to knowing of existing software that filled their need that others simply didn't know about.
Tech wise one of the biggest drawbacks to no longer living in the Bay Area is that lack of exposure to what most consider the unimportant stuff. I used to go to all kinds of meetup style events and learned as much just from watching people work and seeing the tools they used and ways they used them I never thought of versus the main point of the meetup. That almost made the drive over 17 worth it.
Better advertising would have killed that niche for me, instead it was left to the unaffordability of healthcare when you are self insured at have a family to do me in.
I think looking at a single metric is a mistake, though. Certainly, there was a lot more poverty, especially in areas where we've made giant strides, like elderly poverty. And we've made other huge strides in some areas of health, like reduction in smoking rates in the US.
But, if I look at my parents, who were raised in "average" middle-class families in the US, there are many ways today's families' "standard of living" is worse, despite the fact that they can buy a lot more shit. 2 simple examples:
1. There is a ton more obesity today, and it has a disastrous effect on standard of living.
2. There is a ton more anxiety about maintaining a standard of living. My grandfather worked for "Ma Bell" for 47 years and raised 4 kids on that single salary. They ate dinner together as a family every night. Today your "average" middle-class family has both parents working and still with a constant undercurrent of economic anxiety.
Look, I'm in no way arguing the 50s were some idyllic "Leave it to Beaver" utopia, but I am arguing that once you get to a "comfortable" middle class existence that focusing on "ability to buy more stuff" as the primary driver of "standard of living" is a mistake.
And the remedy (if you believe the status quo needs a remedy) is right in the closing sentence of the article:
> The promoters want our attention more than our cash.
Try to avoid mass media, minimize exposure to advertising, question externally imposed values.
Our human status-seeking rat race is real, but individual degree of participation optional.
(I say "optional" but it may be in the same category as "simply choose to stop shooting heroin", for some psychological profiles, I realize.)
Even here on HN I see comments celebrating that culture of demand-generation driven innovations, apparently the staple of progress in our society. Without which value discovery would collapse overnight. As if inventing a car was on the same level as producing a bottle of Clooney's Casamigo. Which is what the OP is really about, it's a lengthy but fairly focused article.
Interestingly enough you are spreading word about his work on social media to people (incl. myself) who have not heard about him. I wonder if that makes you an influencer.
I agree with the general observation that "needs" are a more powerful means of making a sale. Advertising tends to focus on "wants".
Yet, at the huge risk of getting downvoted into oblivion isn't rejecting "wants" as a legitimate source of growth a bit Marxist? If the economy only served needs and not wants we would be living in a very bleak and oppressive world.
Hasn't advertising been around since way before the 50s? But anyways, I think the capitalist society cannot keep churning unless there are new products/services being created regularly...the whole thing is like a house of cards. If production slow down, people lose jobs, no disposable income, consumption goes down, etc...
Yeah this is the argument I usually hear for why things are this way.
You have to keep the guy in the factory slaving away making widgets so he can afford the Mercedes that the ad promised would make him happier so that the girl in the lab will slave away on the cure for cancer to pay for the widgets the guy in the factory made that the ad told her would make her happier.
The above sure sounds sad to me, and I can imagine another system might be better for many people in many ways, but I think it's at least an argument worth acknowledging that there is still meaningful progress to be made, and economic growth might contribute to it.
this assumes humans are capable of understanding the value of things. They aren’t and values shift over time. advertising helps to inform and influence these changing values
Why do humans need advertising to understand the value of things?
I'd agree with you if your statement was more along the lines of, "people may not know that widget X exists and solves their problem well." But that's wholly different from understanding the value of things.
If I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses
There was genuine skepticism over the horseless carriage when it was first becoming available. Vaccines wouldn't be in widespread today use if significant money and resources weren't spent convincing people of their safety. Lots and lot of useful technological innovations requires advertising before people were convinced to use them.
You know, I often see this faster horses thing quoted to point at how dumb consumers are.
Wouldn't you agree, however, that a car which doesn't drive itself home after you've had a bit too many drinks at the local saloon is a downgrade? A car which doesn't graze its own food is a downgrade? A car which doesn't automatically make more cars is a downgrade?
Perhaps if someone had figured out 'faster horses' sooner we wouldn't have literally millions of people dead from car crashes. Perhaps we wouldn't have an atomized society with little social interaction.
It seems to me that once people know that something exists, which is possible through way more methods than the constant cognitive assault of our advertising-based culture, then they can do just fine at figuring out if the thing is useful to them.
But yeah, keep gloating about how dumb people are for not just wanting a better version of what works.
> Lots and lot of useful technological innovations requires advertising before people were convinced to use them.
Fortunately, we have had a parallel universe, called the Soviet Union, where advertising was more limited (but still present, of course), and as anyone who lived there will tell you, nobody there needed to be convinced by advertising that they wanted a car, or a fridge, or a color television.
> This is only tangentially related, but this article reminds me of Galbraith's "The Affluent Society" which should frankly be required reading for undergrad social sciences.
Oh? What ideological indoctrination does it provide?
> In it, he argues that, at the time of writing (late 50s), the industrialized West has largely solved what had previously been the main preoccupation of economics - improved standard of living. As evidence, Galbraith points to advertising.
Oh right, taking the stated goals of an established field which has been central in the shaping of modern nation states at face value—its advertising.
It’s not social science but I find the narrative of The Century of the Self to be convincing. It makes a lot more sense to sell things by way of manipulation than it does by just stating facts.
But then you ask, why manipulate instead of just selling things that people more or less organically want? Because the economy has to grow. Into infinity. Is this a controversial point to make? And further, what is the current iteration of capitalism called? Consumer capitalism. It is not merely a culture of consumption since the system itself is built on consumption.
> He then attacks planned obsolescence as the dumbest outcrop of this process,
Planned obsolescence is an economic myth. There is very little evidence that it actually exists in the real world, unless you are really willing to stretch the definition. It's just not possible to successfully pull it off in a competitive market.
I guess "selling things that will wear out soon even though it wouldn't be hard to make better ones that last way longer" is stretching the definition? Because that's everywhere.
The assumption that markets are mostly competitive is deeply flawed. Markets are controlled, managed and monopolized more often than not, via strategies like control of chokepoints (computer chip production is a case example), interlocking boards of directors of major corporations, government subsidies for specific industries (and import tariffs as well), etc.
Case example: acceptable cell phones could be produced today that would last for 20 years using the same internal structure, with decent audio/video capabilities and memory storage, if they were designed to be easily repairable, i.e. if the components that are likely to wear out could be easily replaced (battery, touchscreen, etc.). The operating systems could be locked-in to a standard format, or OS upgrades could be made backwards-compatible.
Major phone manufacturers really are not interested in making such devices, because new sales would fall:
PS "not possible to pull it off in a competitive market" is not a meaningful statement. The fact that it is possible to pull off implies it's not a competitive market already.
This seems like a pretty strong claim given that 4 billion Android phones are made each year with <2 years of kernel support. Where are you even getting this from?
> In terms of bang for your buck, influencers have quickly become the gold standard for marketing products and creating fast wealth.
I had a personal frustration with the moniker "influencer", because I am pretending I am not influenced. Harrumph.
But, indeed they influence and if I take step back, it is the most appropriate name for these marketers. Whatever they push, be it shampoo, bourbon, or politics, they are just advertisements; fancy billboards; placard (sandwich board) man; and now the "influencer".
The thing that bugs me about "influencers" is that it seems in a lot of cases the content is formulated as a host for ads and monetization, rather than the creator focusing on creating worthwhile content first with advertising as a secondary concern (in a lot of cases non-endemically.)
Obviously, what is considered "worthwhile" is entirely subjective - people wouldn't be following, say, Kylie Jenner on social media if they didn't see some sort of value in it. Also I'm pretty sure a lot of people just don't care about being advertised to, or even enjoy it, if it's in a niche that they follow.
To me, it feels more insidious, especially when the line blurs between what is and ad and what is not. I hate being marketed to in such a way that it is so interleaved with the "actual" content - it starts making me question the validity of the content. By example, I used to browse Pinterest every now and again (mostly as a time waster) - it was interesting to search certain keywords and save things that looked interesting or sparked my curiosity. There were ads spaced every several tiles, but in general they seemed more or less separated from user-submitted content. Now, there are ads seemingly every third or fourth tile, and many "normal" tiles are ads as well, submitted by corporate accounts. I've pretty much stopped using it entirely.
There's also the fact that many of these influencers are deliberately cultivating parasocial relationships - causing their fans to create false emotional attachments as a marketing strategy. It's wildly unethical and often quite harmful to their victims.
It works on all of us, doesn't it? I know I clicked this article because it was on page 2 of HN and not really because it was something that I actually wanted to read. I know it's not exactly the same as someone posting a picture of a pair of shoes on picture/shortmovie-app, but it's still driven by the social network algorithm of popularity = more popularity.
It strikes me as naive to think that "real life becomes ads" would in any way preclude the acceleration of tracking and the continued destruction of privacy.
This was a real trend, but it's not going to survive the current collapse in VC valuations. It's all well and good selling a puffed up valuation on capital in a bull market but now investors care about profits and fundementals again and most of these businesses aren't designed for that world. RIP.
Readit News
The argument is simple: when important productivity improvements take place, say the invention of a new way of baking bread, they don't need advertising to gain mass use. Their benefits are so obvious that they don't need to be sold. Demand doesn't have to be created, because demand comes from human existence.
The existence of advertising, in contrast, shows that the thing being advertised probably isn't that important. Indeed, the item is so trivial as to require advertising to create demand for it. This then leads us to wonder what benefit is being served by both creating this product and the demand for it; Galbraith argues that we've essentially fetishized economic growth at all costs (a holdover, in his view, from the early days of econ which was concerned with our metaphorical bread making instead of our metaphorical advertised widget making). He then attacks planned obsolescence as the dumbest outcrop of this process, because now we're purposefully wasting materials on things which we hope to replace in the near future for no reason other than to keep making the things, things which we don't need anyway - as evidenced by the fact that they're advertised.
Anyway I think this fits in perfectly with the whole influencer economy phenomenon, because that's literally all they do. Their raison d'etre is to generate demand for items nobody needs or even previously knew about.
Recommendations are similar to ads in this regard as well. Maybe blurring the lines between the two depending on how the algo is designed. I'd personally be in favor of recommendation type approaches with combinations of human curation, and an adjustable spectrum of push/pull based results; and the ability to swap between these on a whim as needed.
So it’s not advertising rather journalism which is required.
There are lots of things that exist that doctors are not aware of and advertising may fix that for a few projects, it's not going to fix it for more than a few.
There ARE other solutions, but those solutions involve peer review and journals and require doctors to consume the material.
And who says doctors are going to meaningfully consume advertising?
Now think of Coke and Pepsi ads from during the "cola wars" era, or beer ads from a wider era. It's all about cool people and beautiful women, and you're supposed to think that maybe you could be cool like that and have a girl like that if you drank that. It has nothing to do with the properties of what's being sold; it's all about image.
The first kind of advertising is what you see when things are scarce; the second you see when things are abundant.
I don't have a problem with the first kind of advertising.
What did change was the coverage of mass media.
Instead of relying on long and expensive genuine user feedback loops to generate positive buzz around a product, advertising manufactures that buzz directly. This is why is it everywhere, and influencers are just the latest innovation. Not because product quality/QoL reached a high point.
As someone who actively seeks tools, furniture and other consumer products from that period, I tend to disagree.
Let's take furniture. Mine was made during this period by Stickley in New York state. One cannot find commensurate quality today unless you wish to commission handmade pieces.
We have devolved to the point of disposable $5 extruded-plastic chairs, which may provide service for a time, knowing full well that the inevitable trip to the landfill is just around the corner. I reckon we're a ways past said zenith.
That and the shift toward psychological advertising in the wake of Bernays. Closing the quality/opinion loop only makes sense if quality is really a concern. Post-Bernays the gig switched to manufacturing desire by attacking the self-esteem of the "consumer". The product itself became largely irrelevant.
So something like a bread toaster probably suffers from planned obsolescence; LCDs (or generic display technology) likely benefit from planned obsolescence.
Before Telecommunications deregulation everyone had pretty much the same telephone that was leased from the phone co. It was electromechanical with sizeable transformers and magnets in there. Compare that to the sets that were available after deregulation with miniaturized components.
Basically it's not always cut and dried and there is nuance especially when it comes to energy efficiency. On the other hand, it's really annoying to buy kitchen appliances that are poorly manufactured.
To whom? We now have floating islands of plastic from obsolescent devices. That plastic blender I bought 3 years ago is now in the trash heap. My mother's blender she bought 40 years ago is still going. Obsolescence is terrible for the environment in the entire lifecycle of a product. In my opinion, obsolescence are rarely good for the society, never good for the customer. It is only good for the manufacturer.
> Before Telecommunications deregulation everyone had pretty much the same telephone that was leased from the phone co. It was electromechanical with sizeable transformers and magnets in there. Compare that to the sets that were available after deregulation with miniaturized components.
Just to be clear, are you suggesting that deregulation brought in the "not always bad" obsolescence? I know it brought innovation and customer choice, but can you unpack further how it brought obsolescence?
I mean, to look at your example again, in the United States, where technology gets adopted the quickest, 99% of bread sold is utterly disgusting (and expensive) and would be illegal to sell in many countries. A $100-150 automated bread maker fixes this, and yet they do not have mass adoption. Everything is marketing driven.
[0] Which is undoubtedly made by an automated bread maker, so I don't think using a machine "fixes" bread.
Dead Comment
I remember having two really clear thoughts.
1) CES is mostly a megachurch dedicated to buying crap we don't need with money we don't have.
2) It's a special kind of existential debasing that goes into being a person who has to tend one of those booths and stand there pretending like your hot pink camouflage backpacks are so much better than the ones that look exactly like them in the booth next to yours.
A lot of people get really excited to go to CES. I've had to go for work several times, and it always just makes me depressed.
Tech wise one of the biggest drawbacks to no longer living in the Bay Area is that lack of exposure to what most consider the unimportant stuff. I used to go to all kinds of meetup style events and learned as much just from watching people work and seeing the tools they used and ways they used them I never thought of versus the main point of the meetup. That almost made the drive over 17 worth it.
Better advertising would have killed that niche for me, instead it was left to the unaffordability of healthcare when you are self insured at have a family to do me in.
But, if I look at my parents, who were raised in "average" middle-class families in the US, there are many ways today's families' "standard of living" is worse, despite the fact that they can buy a lot more shit. 2 simple examples:
1. There is a ton more obesity today, and it has a disastrous effect on standard of living.
2. There is a ton more anxiety about maintaining a standard of living. My grandfather worked for "Ma Bell" for 47 years and raised 4 kids on that single salary. They ate dinner together as a family every night. Today your "average" middle-class family has both parents working and still with a constant undercurrent of economic anxiety.
Look, I'm in no way arguing the 50s were some idyllic "Leave it to Beaver" utopia, but I am arguing that once you get to a "comfortable" middle class existence that focusing on "ability to buy more stuff" as the primary driver of "standard of living" is a mistake.
> The promoters want our attention more than our cash.
Try to avoid mass media, minimize exposure to advertising, question externally imposed values. Our human status-seeking rat race is real, but individual degree of participation optional.
(I say "optional" but it may be in the same category as "simply choose to stop shooting heroin", for some psychological profiles, I realize.)
Even here on HN I see comments celebrating that culture of demand-generation driven innovations, apparently the staple of progress in our society. Without which value discovery would collapse overnight. As if inventing a car was on the same level as producing a bottle of Clooney's Casamigo. Which is what the OP is really about, it's a lengthy but fairly focused article.
https://wcsa.world/news/world-almanac-event-academy/wcsa-on-...
Yet, at the huge risk of getting downvoted into oblivion isn't rejecting "wants" as a legitimate source of growth a bit Marxist? If the economy only served needs and not wants we would be living in a very bleak and oppressive world.
You have to keep the guy in the factory slaving away making widgets so he can afford the Mercedes that the ad promised would make him happier so that the girl in the lab will slave away on the cure for cancer to pay for the widgets the guy in the factory made that the ad told her would make her happier.
The above sure sounds sad to me, and I can imagine another system might be better for many people in many ways, but I think it's at least an argument worth acknowledging that there is still meaningful progress to be made, and economic growth might contribute to it.
I'd agree with you if your statement was more along the lines of, "people may not know that widget X exists and solves their problem well." But that's wholly different from understanding the value of things.
There was genuine skepticism over the horseless carriage when it was first becoming available. Vaccines wouldn't be in widespread today use if significant money and resources weren't spent convincing people of their safety. Lots and lot of useful technological innovations requires advertising before people were convinced to use them.
It seems to me that once people know that something exists, which is possible through way more methods than the constant cognitive assault of our advertising-based culture, then they can do just fine at figuring out if the thing is useful to them.
But yeah, keep gloating about how dumb people are for not just wanting a better version of what works.
Fortunately, we have had a parallel universe, called the Soviet Union, where advertising was more limited (but still present, of course), and as anyone who lived there will tell you, nobody there needed to be convinced by advertising that they wanted a car, or a fridge, or a color television.
Oh? What ideological indoctrination does it provide?
> In it, he argues that, at the time of writing (late 50s), the industrialized West has largely solved what had previously been the main preoccupation of economics - improved standard of living. As evidence, Galbraith points to advertising.
Oh right, taking the stated goals of an established field which has been central in the shaping of modern nation states at face value—its advertising.
It’s not social science but I find the narrative of The Century of the Self to be convincing. It makes a lot more sense to sell things by way of manipulation than it does by just stating facts.
But then you ask, why manipulate instead of just selling things that people more or less organically want? Because the economy has to grow. Into infinity. Is this a controversial point to make? And further, what is the current iteration of capitalism called? Consumer capitalism. It is not merely a culture of consumption since the system itself is built on consumption.
Planned obsolescence is an economic myth. There is very little evidence that it actually exists in the real world, unless you are really willing to stretch the definition. It's just not possible to successfully pull it off in a competitive market.
Case example: acceptable cell phones could be produced today that would last for 20 years using the same internal structure, with decent audio/video capabilities and memory storage, if they were designed to be easily repairable, i.e. if the components that are likely to wear out could be easily replaced (battery, touchscreen, etc.). The operating systems could be locked-in to a standard format, or OS upgrades could be made backwards-compatible.
Major phone manufacturers really are not interested in making such devices, because new sales would fall:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/zmd9a5/tim-cook-to-investors...
Where is the competitive market providing the long-lived alternatives?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
PS "not possible to pull it off in a competitive market" is not a meaningful statement. The fact that it is possible to pull off implies it's not a competitive market already.
I had a personal frustration with the moniker "influencer", because I am pretending I am not influenced. Harrumph.
But, indeed they influence and if I take step back, it is the most appropriate name for these marketers. Whatever they push, be it shampoo, bourbon, or politics, they are just advertisements; fancy billboards; placard (sandwich board) man; and now the "influencer".
Obviously, what is considered "worthwhile" is entirely subjective - people wouldn't be following, say, Kylie Jenner on social media if they didn't see some sort of value in it. Also I'm pretty sure a lot of people just don't care about being advertised to, or even enjoy it, if it's in a niche that they follow.
To me, it feels more insidious, especially when the line blurs between what is and ad and what is not. I hate being marketed to in such a way that it is so interleaved with the "actual" content - it starts making me question the validity of the content. By example, I used to browse Pinterest every now and again (mostly as a time waster) - it was interesting to search certain keywords and save things that looked interesting or sparked my curiosity. There were ads spaced every several tiles, but in general they seemed more or less separated from user-submitted content. Now, there are ads seemingly every third or fourth tile, and many "normal" tiles are ads as well, submitted by corporate accounts. I've pretty much stopped using it entirely.
Deleted Comment
Here is what people have been asking for. Instead of tracking people and invading their privacy, real life becomes ads. Better?
Ad companies: "¿Por qué no los dos?"