
Capitalism is turning us into addicts - twitti
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/10/17/18647521/capitalism-age-of-addiction-phone-david-courtwright
======
rogerkirkness
I feel like we could all afford to ascribe "ourselves" a little more agency.
There is a dark side to giving the people what they want (ie. make something
people want) and that is that people want things that harm them, are
shortsighted, are unsustainable, etc. You can either make those things or not
but you cannot fight what people want with regulation, you can only make it
harder or easier to access. There's a good argument that some bad things are
too easy to access, and other good things are too hard to access, but there's
no valid argument that people are subjects to issues like these.

------
8bitsrule
Vox is obviously new on the block. That's been going on for a century, ever
since WW1 when Ed Bernays worked for the Committee on Public Information (CPI)
and learned how to get people to line up.

[http://igpub.com/propaganda/](http://igpub.com/propaganda/)

In 1928 he wrote, "If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group
mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our
will without their knowing about it?" ( _Propaganda_ , page 10)

At about the same time he was helping out Lucky Strike by convincing more
women to smoke cigarettes.

~~~
natmaka
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Engineering_of_Consent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Engineering_of_Consent)

Gustave Le Bon was a precursor.

Those are generic tool/approaches, used by capitalists (not all of them) and
also by non-capitalists (not all of them)

