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 ]
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Power sells and Sex are still in used, although a greater number may go for the sex aspect, therefore, i think is in human nature and looking at it all they all have one aim to achieve at the end.
I see it that sex sells because of the power undercurrent, not the sex itself.
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You are right
Sheesh! tell me about synchronicity. Hahahaha
Pretty curious and unexpected that you have come today to publish an article like this. Since at first glance it seems that while you were writing and publishing this interesting post, I was also redacting and writing this other one on a similar topic.
In the case of the one I just posted, this is just the first part of a series of five different posts on the subject that I hope to post daily throughout the week. But since you have also approached the subject from your own perspective, perhaps I dare to invite you to read and consume mine as well. I reckon these would probably serve as a great source of more Ad hoc material that possibly will provide us with further inspiration & new ideas to develop on the issue for both of us. :)
Cheers!!
Do you think the nobodies are victims, or products of their own choices?
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Definitely both circumstances play a big and important role in their situations.
The nobodies are indeed victims of themselves for their passive/poor choices & superstitious beliefs as well as they are also victims of those in power who submit them and prevent them from seeing the reality as it is. Such as somehow, you've also highlighted the same issue in your own post.
We all have the ability to make choices of some kind to change our outcomes.
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Yep, that's right. That also explain why some individuals out there opt to wear a belt or attach a hidden backpack full of explosives to their bodies and then try take with them two, three or a handful of unprepared innocents with them to visit their 72 betrothed virgins.
This I think is where the power of the block chain from a social perspective can really achieve new heights. We the people , (the consumers like myself), can make real choices. Where the content providers can make real content, content that fills their heart.
I will use music as an example. Where I live I no longer listen to the radio in the car or in the house, at a guess I would think maybe I had 8 hours of total radio listening time last year. I like the old music the music that I grew up with and aged with, but here where I am at, if the music is before about 2000 it simply is not played, and is pretty much all canned stuff that one of the five or six major radio station companies wants people to hear.
Youtube music is pretty much the same, amazon music the same, i-heart radio the same, stuff that other people want me to hear made by people that the companies made.
I have heard a lot of different music on Hive, some of it I find very damn good, especially the Original content. Some of the cover songs are good, but I am really enjoying finding some real artist when it comes to music. The block chain can really shine in this department, giving people the power to choose music of their choice, not of the same lyrics the same artist, the same company, but from people that are artist on hive stretching the boundaries of music.
I think the block chain also goes a little way in this direction with stories, but has more room for growth in that direction.
The block chain can break all the constraints imposed on people from the real people with power, thus we can have a little bit of our own un-corrupted power to choose how we want to use that power.
Once the platforms start popping up to support independent artists and have the funding and user base behind to support, it is going to be quite amazing. Spotify on steroids, where all the new music in the world is first released on the blockchain and then the studios vie for a piece of it, while the ownership remains squarely with the creators.
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And we begin to have real choice, not some artificial company telling us what we should like, but finding that which we enjoy. I think it will ahppen with books one day also, instead of amazon kindle or good reads, maybe one day it will be Hive-Reads.
It would be interesting to see what it would look like to have a decentralized marketplace owned and operated by content creators and consumers with a lot of support and usage behind it. The argument on Hive is always "not enough users" but what would it look like if it had enough?
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Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Distributed power corrupts everyone a little, but not too much :D
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That is an interesting perspective. I think if I had to pick one thing that goes in had with power it would be validation. That is the big thing that most everyone seems to be looking for these days. Write a rant on Facebook and get a million likes validating the opinion that you just expressed, whether it is wrong or not, you just got support for your way of thinking. It can be a dangerous thing.
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Validation is definitely part of the feedback loop. I got a million followers, I must be important and that means I can speak with authority.
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It doesn't even take that many followers. It is just one person with a crazy opinion and a handful of others that support it!
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I'm hearing you right now x_x
I'm glad I read first and comment later (which is why I always take so long to comment as that means sometimes reading multiple times x_x), I was going to mention this but it would have taken me a paragraph.
I wonder if for at least some things, you learn better because of this. There is thing called cognitive dissonance (or something) where for example, reading a hard to read font makes people slow down and learn better, so they end up with higher retention.
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I thought cognitive dissonance was something along the lines of holding conflicting beliefs or saying one thing but doing another? Or was that an example of cognitive dissonance?
I feel cognitively dissonant now XD
I never remember the term... I googled it now to find out for sure:
"disfluency interventions"
Here is an abstract of one of the studies:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-06-hard-fonts-retention.html#:~:text=Study%20suggests%20'hard%20to%20read'%20fonts%20may%20increase%20reading%20retention,-by%20Bob%20Yirka&text=(Medical%20Xpress)%20%2D%2D%20Researchers%20from,harder%20to%20read%20are%20used.
Seems kind of like trying to use writing to make adhd kids slow their brains down and develop their memory skills (need to keep the thought in the head long enough to come out the pen).
Probably works just about as well too (will be amazing for some and annoying as all hell for others XD).
I agree with the fact you said power sells, but I still won't agree in a way, coz the sex you are condemning is more like the most rampant thing that happen now a days, don't get me wrong "Power sells", but our modern day people still believes that once they offer there body for marketing/sales it get accepted more than the Power aspect. This post is actually educating though,and thanks for this post.
Please do well to up vote and reblog my posts
There is a line from House of Cards I like:
Everything is about sex, except sex, that is about power.
People "buy the sex" because of power, usually because it portrays people they can't have or be in real life.
I dont condemn it by the way, but it is good to be aware of how we can be manipulated.
A few years ago after a US school shooting, the gun debate was everywhere, and I saw a 3 hour old anti-gun post from an acquaintance, on Facebook. It had 2 likes, and zero comments, the likes weren't from mutual friends. I clicked on her profile and saw a dozen posts of hers from the previous 12 months or so, many commented on multiple times, by mutual friends.
I hadn't seen any of them.
Just recently, same thing with an old friend from High School. She took a Covax selfie and posted it. No interaction from anyone, but there it is on my timeline.
Click her profile, and its full of random posts I've never been shown, with lots of engagement, from mutual friends.
We even have Facebook whistleblowers leaking internal policies.
If the service is free, the product is me.
This is certainly food for thought.
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An amazing way to look at it, but it explains so much about why influencers and celebrities hold sway over us. I think many believe that following these people on social media and purchasing things they shill brings us closer to them and their Power. I think there’s a subconscious belief that Power and by extension that success will rub off on us. It doesn’t but the masses try anyway. We need to learn to Dustin guide between copying what made them successful; drive, dedication and focus, not the fancy trappings of success they sell.
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