Back in the day, it was sex that marketers relied on to drive sales and I'm the social media age, drama and outrage are the weapons of voice to reel in an audience, before funneling them through the channels the algorithms have selected. However, at the core, it all pretty much comes down to one thing, power.
Power sells.
It is the power of choice, or the power of giving up choice and often, it is the power over others. I think this is especially true in today's society where a lot of people feel powerless and lacking agency to manage themselves, so they claw on to group identities to pool resources and wield their power over others. A lot of the cancel culture is illustrative of this, where the group can punish an individual for the slightest indiscretion, destroying their lives with glee - where the "victims" become the oppressors.
Power is addictive for many and the promise of it has become the new marketing tool, where the consumer is given the power to choose their path, their product, their poison. But it is an illusion, just like the promise of sex or the attention from drama - it is engineered to drive sales and it is compelling, but it offers little of what true power requires, as it comes without ownership or responsibility.
With great power, comes great responsibility.
But that power has to be owned and the power on offer is not, it is fed power. It can only be used in the way it has been dictated, otherwise the true source of the power will turn off the tap, cut and extract those who abuse the power, with "abuse" being anything that the issuing authority deems as such. This is the life of a dependent, not an owner, a follower, not a leader.
Followers will end up where they are led.
We are greedy and self-absorbed, which is the perfect baseline for the selling of the illusion of power and grandeur, where we get to choose for ourselves and what we choose, is to see our own reflection in a thousand selfies, to bury ourselves in the content we already agree with, put ourselves beside the people we want to be like, buying what they buy in the hope that we can capture some of the power they possess, the power of attention.
Consumers drive the economy and as a group, dictate precisely what is supplied, as without a market, every product and service fails. We do have power as consumers, but when we are influenced into using our power to support the illusion of having power, we end up slaves to the suppliers. We see this daily on social media, where we are served a diet curated specifically for us and designed to get us to perform at our best as a consumer, not a person. There is no "person" in the data-fed digital avatar of us, it is just a number, with more numbers linked to represent who we are as a market segment and how we can best be targeted to increase sales figures or, nudged to behave in a particular way, our interactions and actions sold to the highest bidder.
We are made to feel that we are in control over what we watch, what we read and who we talk to, but we are blind to how so much of the content came to be in front of our face, how we ended up reading this article over another, talking with one person, instead of the other. There is very little random in the digital world, with just about everything engineered and leveraged to improve a bottom line somewhere. Increase profits for the owners.
It is all marketing and the power of it is in the hands of those who control the flow of information, the owners of the platforms, the businesses, the gateways. The pitch is the illusion of freewill, the power to choose and decide, without a single option that hasn't already been predicted and had a pricing model applied to it. We feel powerful as we have a platform, a voice and a choice, yet it is just a feeling, like the warmth of a happy ending in a romantic comedy, until the realization sets in that it was fiction and there we are, sitting on the sofa, alone.
How much power do we have if we can't even find the strength to control our emotions and actions? And if we do have the power to decide how we feel and act, how come we act in the way we do? Who would choose depression, anger, bitterness and violence?
But, power sells and while we pay attention to applying it within the constraints provided and in the direction designated, we are getting robbed of our ability to own, to actually have power.
We opt into feeling powerful, while remaining powerless - one purchase at a time.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]