Everything is a Lobby

I was chatting with a good friend of mine the other night, when she made an offhand mention of the Sugar Lobby. I’ve heard of this group before. One of the less famous of the lobby organizations, but it comes up every so often when you’re reading health blogs. She brought it up to point out one of their most influential accomplishments: they successfully lobbied to have sugar content hidden on the nutritional labels of packaging.

Same as it ever was. The inmates are running the asylum. The very organizations from whom safety legislation is meant to protect us are the ones with the input on how the safety system works. Instead of sugar content, we just have carbs. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Corporations are interesting things; they have the legal rights of a person, they shield their employees from culpability, and they exist without soul or conscience. They are best understood as a form of Artificial Intelligence, one which runs on a substrate of humans instead of electrical processors. Every employee of the corporations is given a set of per-defined decision making algorithms; the accountant calculates, the salesman sells, the lawyer patents everything that isn’t tied down. All the way up to the CEO, the humans which make up the corporation’s mind have their decision making abilities curtailed to serve the corporation’s raison d’etre. Which is: increase market share, and sell product.

Let’s say you’re hired to build the marketing campaign for a breakfast cereal. Lying’s off the table – there are laws punishing that, as well as the risk of a public reaction if you’re caught – but mendacity isn’t. “Part of a complete breakfast” is true enough – so long as the rest of the breakfast is healthy eggs and fruit, and the breakfast cereal is just your desert at the end – but it nonetheless leaves the impression that your unhealthy Human Feed is somehow nutritious. You don’t like that? You feel like you’re making the world a worse place? Then hit the door, Jack, there are plenty of people willing to do your job.

The Corporation embraces the limited morality of the psychopath, manipulative and callous, but also prone to adopting the camouflage of popular shibboleths. Gay pride is the cause du jour? Then repaint your logo for July.

Note that I’m not claiming that corporations – or the people within them – are explicitly evil. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that many of them are, but even if we posit nothing but mostly-decent human beings at every level, the sort of people who might steal your beer but won’t steal your car, we’re left with an incentive structure that values nothing but short-term profit and liability. We’re left with the travelling salesman, who will say anything to sell you a vacuum cleaner and sleep with your daughter, because he’s never going to see you again. He got his; caveat emptor. Never ask your barber if you need a haircut

This is how things work. Everywhere.

Ever wondered what’s up with all of the anti-depressants that people are taking these days? It turns out that something as simple as a magnesium deficit could be the culprit.

One 2008 randomized clinical trial showed that Mg was as effective as the tricyclic antidepressant imipramine in treating MD. Intravenous and oral Mg protocols have been reported to rapidly terminate MD safely and without side effects. Brain Mg deficiency reduces serotonin levels, and antidepressant drugs have been shown to have the action of raising brain Mg. Excessive calcium, glutamate and aspartate intake can greatly worsen MD. We believe that, when taken together, there is more than sufficient evidence to implicate inadequate dietary Mg as contributing to the cause of MD, and we suggest that physicians prescribe Mg for its prevention and treatment.

Magnesium and major depression
George A. Eby, Karen L. Eby, and Harald Murk.

But if you work for the drug companies, you’re not paid to think about that. You’re paid to sell Zoloft.

Forget the high minded ideals of the saints. Let’s just aspire to the enlightened self-interest that most people are capable of. Selling a product which harms your society winds up harming you in the long run. Whether you’re selling a food substance that results in ill health, a lifestyle that results in infertility, or a drug which decimates the mental health of your neighbours, it’s simply not in your best interests to do so. Humans come pre-programmed with a complex set of moral instructions which do a fairly decent job of calculating all of this, with various degrees of hyperbolic discounting based upon uncertain futures; what imperfections there are allow virtue philosophers such as myself to make a buck.

But it’s no longer humans running the bulk of our civilization. It’s AIs and corporations.

One interesting suspicion I’ve heard is that the political polarization we’re currently seeing is largely being driven by marketing AIs. Politics has shifted from a debate about ideas into a polarized sense of identity, with consumption directly tied to it. Radicalize a youth into left wing politics, and they’ll be a loyal customer of Apple. Radicalize a youth into right wing politics… I’ll leave this one as an exercise for the reader. If you’re a sane person, this radicalization should be extremely worrying – you’re ripping apart the very social trust which allows a company like Amazon to leave their packages on your front porch, unattended – but nobody at the corporation is paid to worry about social trust levels in society. If package theft gets too bad, Amazon will simply ‘pivot’ – to use the pretentious language spoken by Project Management professionals.

Your diet? Controlled by lobbyists. Your entertainment? Lobbyists. Your medicine? Lobbyists. Your beliefs about science and history? Lobbyists. That horrible news story that has everybody up in arms? Lobbyists! We’ve been practising how to manufacture consent for over a century – ever since Bernays and Freud – and we’ve become so good at it, that even the manipulators are being manipulated. Just about everybody is having their firmware flashed by people who are constantly being updated themselves.

The late AfOR wrote about this years ago:

OK, there is an 88% chance that you as an adult single male in the western world have shaved pubes, she said… OK got me there.

When you were a young man in the 70’s, did you shave your pubes? she asked… fuck no.

So you starting to shave your pubes coincided with the advent of the VHS cassette and easy access to porn, and pornstars with shaved pubes… umm, I guess, yeah….

Well guess who started that campaign by getting to the porn companies and financially supporting them if their models were hairless, minimal pubes, ideally all over…

A campaign that has now been running for 30 years.

“You know what SHOULD frighten you? Not that we have had a hundred years of practice at manipulating consent, but the fact that the manipulators themselves are at least as susceptible to their own products as joe public, there is a 92% chance that I as an adult single female in the western world have shaved pubes…..”

“Nobody is in control any more” I said

“Oh no, there are shifts of people taking turns at the wheel, the problem is we are driving in the dark in unknown territory with the lights out and tinted windows, we only care about what is going on inside the bus.”

Finally, ask yourself this. If you and I can figure this out, down here on the bottom floor – do you really think those at the top aren’t aware of all of this? And in knowing that society is being wildly steered into an ocean of chaos – are they able to build sails, and float upon top? What if the whole thing is so chaotic that it’s statistically predictable? What do you think somebody like that might be up to?