Work in the Internet marketing industry can be eye opening. Seeing how the attention economy is being crafted from the ground up reveals strange things. From internet content production, to click campaigns to consumer semantic metrics. Most of this is tide to neuromarketing: “the scientific method to target the sweet spot of underlying emotions and influence subconscious decision making to buy more. Even if we don’t need it, even if it is actually bad for us. Getting to know these inhumane metrics of the online realm [J. Williams] gives us no surprise that the advertising money is incrementally moving to the digital world where things can be capture, retained and measured much clearly than with any other media channels.
Internet based attention-economy has nourished the online traffic by taking advantage of the innate pleasure seeking mind deeply ingrained in human species, and magnify the selfish need to want more things from moment to moment. The result is a newly called ‘addiction economy’ cultivating techniques to hack the lizard brain and keep us growing the consumerist culture.
Pleasure Seeking Mind
If You pay close attention to your cravings in your mind, you notice that most of our daily needs are not derived from biological needs but rather from habits, addictions and false values – a common denominator of going after another “pleasure”.
The pleasure seeking mind has addictive characteristics – it forms our justifications for having a particular pleasure, molding our decisions and reasoning for it. The extreme case happens when addictions are ruthlessly and selfishly reasoned in the very moment, despite our rational mind being aware of the bad consequences. The addicted mind almost always wins. But that’s another story on another topic. What we focus here on, is the power of the desire itself – a driving force of the modern economic model (perpetual production – perpetual consumption).
What is Addiction Economy?
It may come to you as no surprise that the whole global economic model is based on debt-fuelled infinite growth model. The whole growth is backed by advertising strategies that induce the pleasure seeking mind – the addiction triggers in the brain reward system, in turn fueling the infinite consumption.
In today’s digitalized attention economy, a vast market evolves online along with the different monetization models – one of the most lucrative ones being advertising. Advertisers are now incentivized to gamify consumers mind using neuromarketing techniques. It is a fierce competition for ‘clicks’, ‘views’, ‘retention rate’, ‘click through rate’ etc.
A gamification mimics life natural accomplishments — success in school, career, or in a relationship make us feel satisfied if we meet our goals. Gamification online, on the other hand, works differently – it reacts to the same part of the brain by hitting the dopamine receptors instantly. Particularly vulnerable ‘target group’ are children that grow up in the world of ‘instant gratification’ and are being alienated from the joy of gradual progression. Gamifying the life of social constructs like’ status’ and ‘success’ are incentive the consumers (target groups) to consume more because it ought to make them happy.
But is it so?
And “what” is a target group?
Ads work on needs and desires – in most cases we buy what we don’t need. Without the pleasure seeking mind there is hardly any advertisement that could manipulate the mind so effectively.
Imagine an ad that refers to our basic needs of quality life: shelter, food, companionship, and self-actualization. Instead what we encounter on a daily basis is this:
‘Just enjoy, buy to yourself, buy to your friend, find a present, experience and rejoice a special moment here or there, eat ice cream before bedding, swim with a sugary cocktail, open taps all night, feel your beauty in these jeans, never feel tired again with this energy drink, bump up your mornings with caffeine, and we can go on and on. Tons of products are shockingly highly addictive and rather unhealthy to our bodies and brains. Many of us know it, but we still want them.
Our socio-economic environment is addiction inducing, backwards and unnatural to our physical being. I’m bewildered by how could this be alleviated if entire economies are relying on people being addicted to products, media, bad habits and misguided by materialistic dogmas. This is the addiction economy – you are born here to buy stuff, to spend, and are expected by the society, to endlessly want more day in day out.
