By Emily Rice
We are living in a marketing crisis. There are ads on a large percentage of apps, programs, and websites. Many of them unskippable, unavoidable, forced upon you. Even if you think you block it out or are playing it in the background, your subconscious mind will be taking it in any way. Ubiquitous assimilation, you are always consuming everything around you.
They get inside your head; they know how to use your psyche against you. They use your senses; specific colours, sounds, images invoke certain things in your mind. They know how to sell you their products without you wanting to purchase them. Marketing psychology is a post-secondary course; they teach students how to manipulate people’s psyches to buy materials, ideas and concepts. They are so okay with using people that it has become integrated into our lives.
At this point, we have even reached the level where we have become the product. Corporations sell our information to other corporations. Those corporations then use our data to sell more of their products.
We have been warned about this for years through dystopian novels and other people who could see what society was doing and what it would become. I’m living in my dystopia already—a seemingly democratic society. Yet, the groups in power are working to turn us into mindless automatons for their profit.
We already know about the dangers of technology, the effects of marketing and have been warned multiple times by different reliable individuals and groups against it. But we have not done anything to stop it or have not taken significant action. We are not willing to give up what we have to stop the continuation of the adverse effects. It’s not easy to spot this. It has become natural to us, so we do not question it. Our society may seem democratic, but it’s become quite the opposite right under our noses.