By 1980, in the United States alone, video games were consuming 11.2 billion quarters annually, yielding $2.8 billion in revenue; by the early 1980s, the estimate was $5 billion, exceeding, for a while, the income of the film industry. Video games also consumed something else, human attention, in a way that was both old and … Read more
Timothy Leary and his followers wanted the public to block out the messages of the mainstream media and other institutions, which they saw as little more than tools of mass manipulation. Instead the Federation was setting forth on an inward voyage, with a bit of help: to reconfigure the public mind and its priorities, Leary … Read more
Launched in 1955, the Marlboro Man campaign was Burnett’s most successful and among the most astonishing campaigns in the history of demand engineering. But upon the cowboy’s appearance, Marlboro went from a mere 1 percent of sales to become the fourth bestselling brand in the United States within a year; its sales increased by an … Read more
Hitler’s entire approach to propaganda might be understood as a reaction to the rationalism for which German thinkers were known. Instead, he had an alarmingly intuitive understanding of how to appeal to a mass audience and to the reptilian core. In Mein Kampf, he asks, “To whom has propaganda to appeal? To the scientific intelligentsia, … Read more
The average woman was outraged, Business Week reported, to find that “the soap which made her so popular at the dance was made with a little creosol… recommended by the Government for disinfecting cars, barns and chicken yards.” Some of the most intense new critics of advertising were internal. In 1928, Theodore MacManus, who had … Read more
The cigarette company Lucky Strike was trying to figure out how to acquire more customers. To round out the team, Hill also hired Edward Bernays, who had just released his most acclaimed work, Propaganda, espousing his ideas of how the techniques government had developed during the war could now be applied to the purposes of … Read more
A commonly held narrative is that Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernayes, transformed American advertising. But it’s not that simple. While Freud’s ideas did circulate, it is hard to prove that advertisers made use of them. But the data does suggest that Freud’s competition, the behavioral school of psychology, inspired many advertising projects. For Watson, unlike Freud, … Read more
In Living in the End Times, Zizek writes about the four horsemen of the imminent apocalypse. These are the ecological crisis, social divisions, the biogenetic revolution. and economic inequality. The book is structures according to the Kubler-Ross model (the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). The death of capitalism is being grieved … Read more
The Divided Self by R. D Laing is a landmark book in psychology that managed to point out the moral failings that underpinned the emerging field of psychiatry. Schizophrenia Laing begins by saying that “schizophrenic” should be used to describe people who are internally divided, or who experience a rift between their self and their … Read more
In The Apocalypse of the Reluctant Gnostics: Carl G. Jung and Philip K. Dick, Stuart Douglas traces the similarities between two geniuses in the last century. One is the legendary science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick. The other is one of the founders of psychoanalysis, Carl. G. Jung. . Douglas shows how both these thinkers … Read more