#MIND CONTROL PROFESSIONAL#

Adverts offered imaginative contact with unknown persons, things, activities, logics, and lives that exceeded readers’ own sensual surroundings, invited renewed engagements with hidden potentialities of familiar environments, and enlivened daily realties. Consumers, in turn, found themselves in new enchanted worlds. Newspapers and magazines multiplied and spread, containing thousands of adverts outdoor posters mushroomed in and beyond urban centers and handbills and leaflets were distributed on streets, in shops, and to homes. The nineteenth century was immersed in an advertising extravaganza a variety of print forms were carried by novel distribution channels. This history reveals the role of enchantment in advertising, the fears that it fuelled, and the efforts of advertisers – which seem so counterintuitive today – to alleviate rather than rouse those fears by claiming to direct the nonrational mind. I have been examining it as part of a study of the first era of mass advertising in Britain, roughly from the 1840s to 1914.

#MIND CONTROL PROFESSIONAL#

A major and influential version of this story was developed in the late nineteenth century by professional advertisers. The capitalist story was simply less enchanted than the alternative of incalculable forces, and made sense of perspectives that seemed incompatible with a disenchanted world. By confining mysteries to the mind and showing the mind to be controllable, the story of capitalist mind control was pacifying for those who subscribed to the view – or hope – that the world was becoming progressively disenchanted. In addition, in the capitalist story we find the assumption that the nonrational mind is directed by rational commercial calculation, where alternatively it might spin totally out of control. Max Weber famously called these powers ‘incalculable forces,’ and associated their disappearance from popular beliefs with the process of disenchantment.

One could believe, alternatively and more alarmingly, that inexplicable powers and magical efficacy actually operated outside the mind, in the natural and social environment, including, in particular, the economy. That is because in the story of capitalist mind control, the nonrational was placed in the mind but not outside it – in the world. However, historically this understanding of capitalist methods was intended by promoters of business as a pacifying cultural story, rather than the alarming one as it so often appears today. The consequence is widespread anxieties about these technologies. Many of us understand technologies of enchantment as attempts to play with our minds, to shape and control our desires. They focus on capitalist technologies of enchantment, that it, structured ways of using technology, from lithographic print through media to algorithms, in order affect people beyond reason and below consciousness. Such waves of anxiety have been appearing since the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

The film in fact partook in the most recent wave of anxiety about mind control by hidden persuaders, in which the attention economy and surveillance capitalism are a source of concern. Partly, it was about the disappearance of privacy, but its more alarming element concerned what Netflix described as the hidden reprogramming of civilisation. But the film’s popularity indicated that it tapped into something deeper. On one level, the film was a comparative advert that implicitly recommended its own brand (streaming) over alternative brands (social media) at a moment when everyone perforce lived in technology’s universe more than they wanted. Of course, Netflix too has an algorithm working to keep viewers hooked. While the world was deep in pandemic mode, Netflix released the social dilemma, a docudrama about the algorithmic control of social media over their users. | by Naomi Richman | Categories: Commentary, ResearchĬultural historian Anat Rosenberg on the history of mind control in advertising and its links to current discussions of social media. Blog The Market Enchanters: Mind Control in the History of Advertising

Mind control