Unsolicited

The financial success (and even survival) of so-called “social media” depends utterly on one thing. No, it is not ‘eyeballs’. It is advertising dollars, spent by corporate ‘managers’ gullible enough to believe that ads on social media platforms are anything more than an annoyance and a complete waste of money.

Advertising, PR, marketing and similar forms of capitalist propaganda are, I am convinced, a total con game. The people in these ‘businesses’ are, after all, by the very nature of their work, con artists. Their patsies are ‘consumers’ — that is the term they use to reduce human beings to what Jerry Michalski famously defined as “a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash”.

Their con is to convince ‘consumers’ that the garbage they are hawking is worth buying at the usually absurdly excessive prices (thanks in part to the costs of overhead, largely advertising, PR and marketing costs, and inflated executive salaries) they are hawking them for. And to convince ‘producers’ (their real customers) that spending huge sums of money on advertising, PR, marketing, branding, promotion etc is not only a good use of their money, but an essential one.

They will of course roll out vast dumps of carefully-selected data to ‘prove’ this is the case. They will show a correlation between more ad spending and increasing revenues, except when they can’t, in which case they’ll make up some excuse that is not their fault and exclude the data that shows their con for what it is.

In the pseudo-sciences of management and economics, these kinds of self-reinforcing con games are commonplace. Executives get obscene salaries and bonuses when they have the good fortune to hold their positions when profits are rising, even though any kind of rigorous study would quickly demonstrate that this is almost entirely coincidence, and that in most cases executives actually contribute less to corporate profits than the people on the front lines who actually do all the important work. (In fact, when they get into complex deals like mergers and acquisitions, they consistently destroy far more ‘value’ than they create.)

Likewise, economics is based on popular theories that come and go, and has absolutely no rigour underlying it at all. Here’s Biden’s whack-job economist Janet Yellen talking about her economic ‘theories’, justifying her cabal’s decision to endlessly jack up interest rates on those already buried in unmanageable debt, in order to deflate the economy and cause a spike in unemployment:

Unemployment serves as a worker-discipline device because the prospect of a costly unemployment spell produces sufficient fear of job loss.

I am sure that this depraved indifference to human suffering is not based on any personal experience of the agony of crushing debts, unemployment, and economic precarity. It’s just a theory, an opinion, and in the pseudo-sciences, you can always find ‘data’ that supports your group’s theory or opinion.

And so it is with the whole racket of advertising, PR, marketing etc. When your job is to con people, you get very good at it, or you don’t last long in the business. You even get good at conning yourself, especially if you surround yourself with other con artists and let groupthink do the rest.

The citizenry of our countries are not, despite what many pundits would have you believe, mindless idiots. Of course, under the horrific stresses of our modern world, we will sometimes buy things for therapeutic rather than ‘rational’ reasons. But those reasons have substantially nothing to do with advertising, PR, and marketing.

Of course you cannot buy something if you do not know it exists, but that’s a minuscule part of the hawkers’ con game. Most of it is packaging, window-dressing, and, most importantly, barefaced lying about the product’s ‘benefits’. And we can all get conned, once, by a carefully-contrived set of lies. But then we will never buy that product or service again, and will warn others not to buy it either. (This is why advertisers are so terrified of online ratings by purchasers, and why they work so hard to discredit, sabotage and manipulate them.)

So after the con has worked, and there’s an initial jump in revenues before the public catches on to the con, and revenues slump. But by then the hucksters have folded up their whiteboards and flipcharts and moved on to the next campaign. And they’re ready to tell gullible corporate ‘management’ that perhaps a new expensive campaign is needed to restore the volume and lustre of their overhyped and now-discredited product.

This keeps going on for a reason, and that is that it serves everyone’s purposes. The advertisers keep their jobs. The executives justify hiring them and spending money on the con, which justifies their own existence. If profits aren’t high enough, the executives use their oligopoly power to jack up prices. If that causes revenues to plummet because ‘consumers’ have no money to spend, banks will open up their purses to lend them more. And if they’ve reached their credit limit, well, “it’s the economy stupid”. Not our fault. Maybe need a new advertising campaign to get sales back up?

This is not an evil process, and the people who keep it going are not evil, just mildly sociopathic, as anyone who gets into the con game really has to be to stay in it. They’ve been conditioned by each other to be that way; it’s not a character flaw. We can all be sucked into it. You can find similar vicious cycles of absurd, useless and even destructive behaviours and rationales in just about any sphere of human activity (in politics especially). It’s the same self-reinforcing process that produces mobs, gangs, rogue cops, corrupt governments, oligarchies, prison camps, military atrocities, and genocides. All just doing what we’ve been conditioned to do, with the best of intentions. Vicious cycles of unsustainable systems in various stages of accelerating collapse.

Even if enough of us were to shake off our stupor to realize that the hawkers have no clothes — that all this money spent on the con accomplishes nothing sustainably except to increase costs — then nothing much would change. There’d be growing unemployment in the cons’ ‘industries’, and most of the cons would probably gravitate to a different con (likely ‘management consulting’). Costs of products and services would briefly drop, as the cons struggle to get reintegrated into the ‘cost of business’ in some new role. (Imagine everything re-priced to what are now called ‘no-name’ prices in the grocery and some other industries.) But those cost savings would be quickly appropriated by the oligopolies to jack up profits, since they need to perpetuate annual double-digit profit growth to keep the Ponzi scheme called the ‘stock market’ going a bit longer.

But what about the ‘businesses’ and ‘industries’ that have nothing of any value to sell except the con of advertising? Like the new oligopoly of ‘social media’?

Well, they would of course try to institute transaction fees, subscription fees and other ‘user fees’ to replace the trillions in lost revenue. But MuskX has shown the futility of that brainless strategy. We don’t need some oligarch intermediating our online conversations at an obscene cost. We can easily and quickly set up and network non-profit platforms that will give us all of the benefits of ‘social media’ with none of the crap advertising and other interference in our conversations, with an annual user fee so low that it is substantially free.

Will that happen? I doubt it. There is too much inertia in the system. Too many rich and powerful people’s jobs and reputations depend on continuing the con.

Until the system collapses. MuskX is at death’s door. Farcebook and Goourgle have become sufficiently annoying and rapacious that people are abandoning them in droves. But these companies have already done immense damage to the essential structure and modus operandi of the internet, so it’s anyone’s guess whether what will follow will be a return to the bold innovation of the internet’s early days, or additional disasters sponsored by dimwitted rich and powerful narcissists, or years of chaos.

Kind of like what the future is looking like for a lot of the other collapsing systems these days. Hang on to your seats.