Let Me Count The Ways

Apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning for stealing the lyrical beauty of Sonnet 43 about her husband, poet Robert Browning. But this isn’t about that. This is about the accelerating skill of the vulture capitalist culture in taking your money. They are getting really good at it.

A little history is in order to put things in perspective.

People have used money to grease the wheels of production from almost the beginning of civilization. The very first efficiency we invented was bartering. Some people were really good at curing hides and others made excellent bows and arrows. So, it was just obvious to move up to bartering. ”I’ll trade this buffalo hide for that bow and arrow.” It didn’t take long for money to take over. It was just too difficult to keep track of how many chickens it took to buy a basket of grain. In fact, this might be one reason Homo sapiens is such a violent species. People figured out that it was a lot easier and faster to bash the farmer over the head until he’s senseless and take the basket of grain. You got to keep the chickens too.

Through the centuries, a new form of head bashing has been perfected: Advertising and Marketing. It’s the art, and more recently the science, of bashing people senseless … without using actual violence.

The “Columbus” of this new science was a man who should be right up there with Adolph and Vlad the Impaler:  Eduard Bernays. (I can say that now because he’s dead and can’t sue me. See my blog The Meme.) This cold-hearted killer figured out how to addict millions of soldiers to tobacco during WW II. His ideas converted non-smoking women into cancer victims. It’s worth noting that Bernays had a medical background and refused to allow tobacco use in his own home.

The point is that head bashing through scientific social engineering is a confirmed and reliable way to control people. … Most people. It’s made a lot of people filthy, stinking, rich. I like a slightly altered version of a quote attributed to Lincoln: “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. And that’s enough to win an election.” But this essay isn’t about proving that people are manipulated continually. I think that’s obvious and doesn’t need to be proven.

A recent trend in squeezing money out of people is “subscription based marketing”. It’s taking over and it’s morphing into different forms. It used to be that people only associated subscriptions with magazines and newspapers as a practical way to ensure that you could read the morning news with your bacon and eggs. (Making “bacon and eggs” the traditional American breakfast was another Bernays accomplishment. Remember him fondly as your arteries clog up.) More recently, social engineers (Doesn’t that sound much better than “propagandist”?) have noticed that this technique converts occasional buyers into automations who hand over control of their wallets to companies. Once someone signs up for a subscription, that someone forks over money like an assembly line.

I first noticed this trend in my own career in software development when it started to become difficult to “buy” software that you could use for as long as you needed it. Companies invented the much friendlier sounding acronym “SaaS” – Software as a Service – to camouflage what they were doing. I would normally buy a new version of something I used a lot anyway, but SaaS made it a drumbeat that I had to “buy” the software every year.

These days, this Kudzu Weed of commerce is taking over everything. In researching this article, I discovered that a search for “subscription marketing” turned up hundreds of sites of consultants who wanted to help companies convert to this “forced buying” method. Browsing through some of them, there was nothing … literally nothing … that ever mentioned a benefit to customers. It was all about how companies could make more money.

There is a small movement, however, that is starting to recognize that it’s just a predatory technique that needs to be controlled. Like monopolies or loan sharking. (Well … Like they used to be controlled.) Last year, for example, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) hauled Amazon into court because “Amazon duped millions of consumers into enrolling in Prime”. (Reuters headline) Amazon is trying to turn their whole business into a subscription. Amazon used to be a really good deal for consumers, but recently, a lot of financial advice columns point out that you can often get a better deal at your local store. But if you have already paid Amazon $139.00 for the privilege of buying stuff from them, it kinda doesn’t make sense to save $1.98 when you go shopping at your local store.

Eduard Bernays “described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and he outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desired ways.” (Wikipedia). Bernays was a brilliant pioneer in the science of social engineering and besides that, it seems to me that the methods he discovered are still working great.