The Century of the Self - Part 1: "Happiness Machines"

Thanks for your part in getting this story published! If you have not seen it, the BBC series "The Century of the Self" details the pre-history of these tendencies in the creation of the public relations industry by Freud's nephew Edward Bernays [0]. It is truly fascinating and horrific -- all 4 or 5 hours of it! Social media/big data has also made the consumer a (not fully willing or conscious) _producer_ of mass addiction, through the exploitation of their social graph data. There is a fictive "work contract": give me your data and we'll give you your buzz. This relationship is based on unwaged work. What if this work, the value of it to BigTech, were recognized? It leaves open the possibility of mass refusal. And in some sense how people use social media now is already composed of many types of refusal, some more and some less effective. To state one obvious way -- Facebook is used around the world as a tool for political organizing. The fact that this makes it an even more valuable commodity for repressive governments, starting with the US government, does not stop us from using it and finding it effective, does not stop us from getting together "in real life". More needs to be said about the social basis of addiction. It's not only ad scientists pushing well-studied biological buttons. It's the trauma of living a society that locks up an insane number of people, puts its children on psychotropic drugs, poisons them with toxic environments and toxic fast food, separates p

There's a great four-part documentary by Adam Curtis about Edward Bernays, his career and the rise of marketing in the 20th century called "The Century Of The Self". It's available on YT: [VIDEO]

I highly recommend the documentary, Century of the Self, which details how Bernays' theories about advertising were put to use by Nazis. [VIDEO] [LINK]

The Century of the Self documentary by Adam Curtis does an incredible job of covering that and is well-worth the watch. [VIDEO] [LINK]

I would recommend the documentary [The Century of the Self]( [VIDEO] ) about advertising as propoganda, in which Edwards Bernays plays a central role.

Of course, man. I grew up with the Apple ][ and C64 and we all saw a future where small businesses and creative people would make zany, informative, cute newsletters to advertise their wares. Our parents and teachers prepared us for a world mostly like the one that existed in 1980, but some of the icky parts like bookkeeping were ameliorated by the 6502. We went online a little bit, but mostly to goof around, trade some software and maybe sometimes discuss and flame, but it was always a tiny part of life, about the footprint on our time as the card game UNO. An interesting diversion, but certainly not a daily activity, much less a dependency . Of course, older now, we realize there was much more brewing behind the scenes: Corporations had been leveraging Freud's psychological principles to make us rabid consumers. Cold War paranoia created an arms race. American military hegemony had been cruising to a head. We plugged on, amused we had internet in college, but still found time to play music, party, ride bikes, etc. Suddenly around 2000, networking fused the military and commercial nature of American life into the portable mega-mall of cookies. But with all this communications technology, why only use it when sitting at our Pentium II's? Let's get everyone carrying cell phones -> surveillance capitalism. It's starting to all come together for me as I re-watch The Century of Self: [VIDEO] What to do? Opinions vary. Many people will argue whether we can legislate our way out of

Folks in this thread may find this interesting, a 4 part documentary on Edward Bernays and the history of advertising and PR as we know it today. [VIDEO] From the video description - "The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar. His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile. It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world."

Adam Curtis has a good documentary about Bernays influence in the PR industry.It's a really good watch [VIDEO]