Ideally, children would be educated and trained better to think critically; making people harder to manipulate through emotion. But, pragmatically, yeah, marketing/propaganda strategies are useful and even necessary for progress.

Your article made me wonder if there were any theories about ethically appealing to emotion, and I found this (psychological/political) theory interesting: https://semihcakir.com/blog/the-affective-intelligence-theory/. As I understand it, it posits that when people have low anxiety, their thinking is just habitual, but when they experience anxiety, they open themselves up to new information.

I think this is a good article and I agree with it.

A big part of how I got turned on to open source was emotional and still is tbh. I felt like I was being taken for a fool by Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook and was angry.

The big money and power is in information technology now and it’s the new instrument of imperialism, which is why ‘enshittification’ has happened. The great news though is that information is so easily shareable and reproducible, so the more of it we make free the harder it is for them to keep fucking us over with it.

I don’t know when the next big civilizational ‘reshuffle’ will happen (probably on it’s way now), but the more that we make common and free the less leverage the greedheads will have over us when it’s time to work out a new settlement.