Terms and Conditions
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We’re all pawns.
From advertising to television programming to social media algorithms, corporations spend trillions of dollars to learn how to manipulate people. Everything you’re exposed to on a daily basis has carefully been curated for you. Depending on how you look at it, this can be either good or bad. Some things are as innocuous as the “Shopping Cart Theory” but sometimes the stakes are higher and there’s a bit more manipulation at play.
The first step of people manipulation is to learn what psychological needs every person has. The most comprehensive view of this is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which says that every human has three categories of needs. Basic needs are things such as food, water, safety and security. Having a place to rest every day is a basic need. Psychological needs include having friends, intimate relationships and accomplishment. Self-fulfillment needs include things that tap into the true essence of who you are as a person, also known as self-actualization. This includes autonomy, self-esteem, compassion and creativity.
Maslow arranges these in a pyramid, with the idea that you cannot achieve the next highest level until you have satisfied the previous level. This also means that if you have needs that suddenly become unmet, they can take precedence even if you have fulfilled them previously. Understanding these needs means understanding what appeals to the vast majority of people, and learning what they truly desire.
The next step of people manipulation is to study human interactions. These can be between humans and each other or between humans and content or events. All of these interactions are cataloged in various databases that allow data scientists to determine the root cause analysis of how people can be expected to behave to any given thing. This is why websites try so hard to capture and track your cookies, as this is a trail of how you react to the content you’ve landed on. Also this explains geofencing, which is the ability to track your movements and what locations you frequent.
Technology companies have realized that the true value of their applications is not the intellectual property but rather having access to your behavioral data. We are giving intimate access to all of our daily routines to tech giants in exchange for free apps and websites. This is where I would normally spend time discussing internet privacy, but we have no privacy. Data privacy is a myth, but I digress.
If you know what people desire on a human level and you know how they will react to certain stimuli, the next step is to then create targeted content. It doesn’t matter whether the content elicits negative or positive responses because what’s most important is that its consumed. Because of the psychology involved in this targeted content, it’s extremely effective and as a result highly monitored. The FCC controls what is allowed to air on television and radio channels. Advertising prices correlate to how many people are expected to encounter the ad, with the average ad in 2019 costing $105,000.
If you control which information is disseminated to people, and you know how they will react to this information, you can predict and manipulate their responses and reactions. This is referred to as the social media algorithm, as what you consume has been predetermined based on your digital history and behavioral data. If you were exposed to the Netflix controversy surrounding the movie “Cuties” its because you’re likely to be offended by it. There’s a reason your TikTok feed is full of puppies and twerking. If you see tons of “triggering” content chances are someone’s decided you will respond in the desired manner to this stuff. And alternatively, if your Facebook feed increases your anxiety that’s on purpose as well. As long as you are only a consumer and not a content creator you’ll always be at the whims of a larger power.
Maybe we should’ve read those terms and conditions we all agreed to.
