Every epoch has its advertising campaigns for the declared advancements in civilizational progress, usually crafted around technologies that proclaim to liberate humans from their own deficiencies and inadequate dispositions. New offerings promise to nurse increasingly obscure imperfections, amplified and exaggerated beyond reason for successful advertising campaigns. Each one is often a new ball and chain convincingly sold under the label of “saving time” through efficiency and expedience or as a source of safety and security from imagined threats, too often manufactured by those in power who have prepared in advance the recommended solution.
There is no public custom, social performance, digital application, novel technology, or mass surveillance gadget today with a utility that can’t be fabricated around an equally fabricated public campaign, usually manufactured chaos to stir manias that move the psychology of the passive post-modern consumer to justify the absolute necessity of the unnecessary, while believing they arrived at this position through their own cleverness. The measurement of privacy violation tolerance, the “creepy line”, is itself a manufactured public custom invented to move the masses toward surrendering any remaining notions of the concept (privacy) as one unit, having learned that individuals are more apt to accept the sacrifice within the warm confines of a mindless herd.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Good Citizen to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.