Paying for more customers means customers are the product.

This is a quote

It is about the subtle brainwashing that was discovered to be very profitable for companies selling food, beverages, cars, clothes … in fact, just about anything that is sold. I was born around the time this started so I remember most of it.

More history:

Before TV, and before my time, we were trained on the glory days of radio. The Lone Ranger, spaghetti westerns, and the original podcast: FDR’s Fireside Chats. It was good, wholesome news and entertainment. It offered value to the community. NPR has maintained the “community value” approach to support. Everyone else started selling out as quick as the ink was dry on the contracts, the ad money started rolling in, and things have never been the same.

It has been extended to radio, print, and internet advertising with very little adjustment. In fact, they have gotten much better at it. I remember a time when you could watch 4 channels of “regular” broadcast TV, with an antenna only, no monthly bill of any kind. Free. That is how they got us to all buy TV’s.

You can’t sell ads if there aren’t TVs in everyone’s house! And people aren’t buying TVs if they have to pay $20/month for content, too! People had priorities back then, but they fell for the same tricks as we still do today.

We paid for cable to get rid of the ads

The way it was paid for was by advertisers showing ads, something everyone understands now. After most people had bought a TV, some genius came up with a new idea. They would come run some wire (a cable) to your house so you could get 20 or 30 channels, but you would have to pay $20 / month. The great part was since you were now paying yourself, there were no ads. NO ADS! It was great. HBO and a bunch of other great stuff. Almost like having Netflix today - monthly fee, no ads.

Not long after that, they figured out enough people had cable installed that they could move on up to the next level. They had us addicted to TVs, and cable, and very crucially, for the first time, had us paying a monthly amount purely for entertainment. Not like an electric bill or heat bill that you really did need to run your home, but a monthly bill to light up a screen with entertainment and ads. Remember, the news and all that was still free with the antenna. So the next trick was to put the adds back in … and a LOT of them. Remember, this is the ultimate goal anyway, to advertise to us. That is where the brainwashing comes in.

We created an installed base of connected consumers

So a bit later, they were selling us TVs, monthly cable bills, and in exchange we are volunteering to pay them money to have them tell us what stuff they want us to buy. It was a dream come true for salespeople. They used to have to actually go out and sell, or wait for people who actually needed something to show up at the store.

But now, they can tell us we need something. Even though we really don’t need most of it, we will pay them to tell us, use our own gas money to drive to the store, and pay them again to actually buy the stuff we really don’t need.

And it was all FREE! Amazing. Next, of course, they started in seriously selling us anything they wanted to. Food that makes us sick or kills us, medicines we would only need if we ate bad food, cleaning products we now think we need because our immune systems are compromised by eating bad food and taking medicines instead, health insurance because most people actually need doctors now since they are much sicker than before, and any number of gadgets, toys, machines, tools, video games, clothes, and shamwows that for some mysterious reason we think we need. Those ads work good.

It is good to remember that nothing is free. Someone is paying the salaries, buying the equipment, paying the rent for the office, etc. for any business that is in existence. McDonald’s has been in business for decades, P&G owns so many products you may not need another company’s products to live a full life, Hollywood and the entertainment industry are full of rich people, energy companies get us thinking we need to use more energy, Apple convinced us we need iPhones (I love mine), sports has become another great way to catch us when there is no screen around, and social media has made ads devastatingly more personal and targeted. Someone is paying the salaries of all of the people at these huge companies. These are the most successful companies in the history of the world.

It is always the same people who take turns collecting our money.

Who pays for all of it? Who is their customer … the ones they have a relationship with … the ones whose opinions they value … the ones who get a real person on the phone when they call? The advertisers. It’s not a hockey team. Who are the advertisers … funny enough, it is the same people. The people who own most of the country, the 1% everyone complains about (which is probably more like 20%), they take turns collecting our money and passing it around amongst themselves.

They don’t keep it too long, in many cases, because they might have to pay taxes on it if they did that. So they pass it around, pay salaries, pay expenses, pay bills, buy properties (and this is an important part), buy assets for the business, pay down some liabilities … basically they move all of the money around under the tutelage of a master at avoiding taxes, an accountant.

They designed a system that only they can use - lobbying.

They hire this person, whose services most people cannot afford, to tell them the way through the maze. They design a plan to pass it around in just the right way so that they have the lowest tax liability possible, often zero. This may even involve charities. You might think that, well, at least they are generous and money going to charity is better than the federal government getting it.

That is another mirage they have sold us. The federal government is fairly inefficient at managing money by comparison, but at least the money is going back into the communities, the schools, the roads, something useful. Not all of it. Goodness no. A ton of it is wasted on a huge bureaucracy that nobody understands anymore. The remainder is divided up among the causes that the rich people have decided to lobby for. Often to the benefit of their business, but also to the public, almost by accident.

It is the same people … still.

Why isn’t charity better? The charities that the rich people donate to are the ones run by their families and friends. So they are earning favors by donating large sums to charities, colleges, churches, or tech. clubs for geeks. They will then have friends to call on when their children need a favor, or something else handy.

Really, you can’t beat their system. Everywhere you turn, you will find they have an angle worked out. And you will find that it is all legal. Any rich person who gets arrested for any crime at all must be mentally ill or just stupid. There are so many completely legal ways to fleece the system bare that it just isn’t rational to do anything illegal.

The ‘public’ is the crop that they are tending … and it always has been.

So now, in 2019, most people have bought into the idea so deeply, it is difficult for them to see it. We are not customers, we are the product. We are delivered, using our own gas money or credit card straight to the doors of the businesses. We buy tons of stuff we don’t need and a lot of it we don’t even want. We eat what they tell us, drive what they tell us, buy our kids what they tell us … live our lives like they tell us.

We stay connected to them 24 hours a day now. If the screens at home aren’t available, we have a radio in the car. If not that, we have a phone with a nice screen on it that we carry with us. We never forget it. We make sure we are connected to the ad revenue at all times. They don’t have to worry about that anymore. We have been trained for generations now.

If we could get an implant in our heads that would give us a direct mental link to the internet in exchange for free WiFi anywhere, I have absolutely no doubt at all that there would be a line down the street longer than the Apple store in September. OMG it’s FREE!! Free WiFi - anywhere in the US … all the time! Then, of course, the pattern would repeat. Once an installed user base is present, we would start getting mental ads beamed to us, personalized by Facebook, of course. Not long after that, there would be a monthly charge for the “service.”

So after all of this … after generations of volunteering to be “fertilizer” for big business to grow … after volunteering to watch the commercials, to drive ourselves to the Walmart and buy the stuff, and pay a monthly fee to watch more ads, and buy 5 devices to do it anywhere we are at any time …

We volunteer to fund them with every penny we have.

After all this, the very most ironic, hilarious, and morosely scary part, we have the nerve to complain about the 1% and the “big businesses” who are making all of the money while poor middle class workers can barely make it on their paycheck. This is the biggest pile of ignorance that has ever been sold. We volunteer to buy anything they tell us to buy, spend all of our extra money, take out loans to buy more, keep buying even when the stuff is unhealthy, and buy the extended warranty because the crap might break in two weeks! We volunteer to follow directions, to pay them for all this stuff and then have the nerve to complain when they have all the money!

Find any middle class person who is complaining and see if they have a TV, a cell phone, a bunch of clothes they don’t need, toys they don’t need, two cars - make them new ones since they break so easily now, cable, internet, expensive junk food, and all sorts of additional things we have been “programmed” to need.

We volunteer for this!

Calculate how much money you would have if you only paid rent, bought food to cook, and had an electric bill 1/4th what it is now, the electric bill that is too high because of all the devices we use. The phone bill would be about $9 / month if you had a plain phone for actual phone calls, the kind without a screen. We have high phone bills so we can carry the screen with us (we volunteer to carry it with us!! So they can track us and our habits! So we can stay in touch with the people who are taking all of our money!!!) No electronics, no car with insurance, no habits they talked you into.

You would have what people had in the 1950s … and a bit extra. You would have that American dream everyone keeps complaining is gone. It’s not gone, we just give it away little by little every month. It isn’t gone … it is just in the hands of the people who have learned to do business efficiently while making rational decisions. We give away all of our money, time, and thinking ability every day to the “big businesses” that we complain about. And we do it completely voluntarily!!!

Ever notice that if you have any ‘extra’ money, something comes up?

Here is a bit of truth: The companies know exactly how much people make. They take turns raising prices and selling things to us to make sure they take every bit of extra money that we might earn. If you have money left over, they haven’t done their job, and they always do their job well. In fact, if you catch people who aren’t very good at managing money, they are even in debt for thousands of dollars worth of stuff they never needed.

So banks invented credit cards that allow us to buy stuff we can’t even pay for yet. Don’t overlook the banks, they are certainly owned by rich people and have done their fair share of taking all of the money we volunteer. The reason they often look different is because they have tons of accountants so they are masters at this stuff. They just take all of the money at once. Why wait until you are 60 to retire if you can do it at 30?

There have been times when you hear about a bank crisis. It isn’t a crisis, it is just the rich people passing around the money, but huge amounts at a time. The last time they did it, they made sure your house went down in value by 50 to 75% while they were at it. That’s a pretty neat trick. Now you will have to be paying for the mortgage for over 15 years before you even have ANY equity in it. You don’t even own the house that you bought … and you will be paying for it for 15 to 30 years!

So we have another monthly payment, now (new and improved!) with high rates of interest! This guarantees it will never go away.

So they keep pushing this to the limit, taking more and more. What do they find? To their delight, they find hard working people, even people who have children they could be spending time with, are willing to forgo their free time and instead work second and third jobs to pay for more stuff!

When we all had too much stuff, they sold us the dream of more stuff.

“What if we sell them a chance to make more money? That can’t lose!! We sell them the opportunity, then when they make more money, we sell them even more stuff!” Thus, student loans were born. It has grown and grown until it is an unbelievable national burden.

If the average consumer gets a raise, their rent goes up, their mortgage blows up, or the IRS shows up. If there is extra money around, someone has their eyes on it! And they will get it if you let them. They will get it even if you don’t let them.

People have to start making decisions about money if they want things to change. You can’t complain that the businesses are doing it. We volunteer for all of this. It is some kind of delusional nerve people have complaining about these companies making money. That’s what businesses do. Their job is to make money. In fact, it would be illegal to purposely lose money. They have a responsibility to make money, to pay people’s salaries, to pay rent, to pay vendors, etc.

But we volunteer for all this!

Society in the US has made these companies very proud. They were right … 40 years after 1970, the US has become a dumping ground for anything that anyone wants to sell. Cheap plastic junk, cars that have been purposely designed to cheat our smog laws, dog food that is poisoned, and plenty of screens to keep us connected to this Borg Hive Mind of consumerism.

Footnotes