I'm reposting this comment because I would like to open the discussion up beyond facebook and social media and into the reality that technology has provided marketing with some pretty ridiculous tools. : I feel like you used to be able to avoid getting swindled by ignoring the swindler, ex. close the door to the saleman, or ignore the gypsy pear salesmen at the market. Today, marketing is engineered at such a level t…
I have doubts that this happened regularly in the past, usually wealthy/powerful were allowed to be toppled by their enemies. I don't know the details of how Weinstein got toppled after so many years of being protected, but my gut says that the people who were protecting him no longer felt like it was worth it to continue. In revolutions, it's not the people that overthrow the dictator, it's the court/army which allow the people to overthrow the dictator, in order for them to install a new dictator[0].
> How do you overcome marketing that is engineered to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities you are not even aware of?
Become more aware of your vulnerabilities so as to be aware of when you're being exploited. I recommend mindfulness and then making note of when you're being triggered in either a positive or negative way. If you know the enemy and yourself, you need not fear the result of a thousand battles[1].
> How do we patch our society and governing systems from being pwned?
As these systems become more complex it requires more energy and complexity to maintain the systems, this additional complexity creates a larger attack surface and more internal fragility. Solving these problems requires more energy and complexity, exacerbating the problem and delivering diminishing returns on additional complexity. Systems should to be designed to collapse in a way that minimizes losses of knowledge (especially of why they collapsed) and with mechanisms to recover quickly using the accumulated knowledge to build more robustness into the new system, this would be an anti-fragile system. Centralized, too big to fail, institutions (Facebook, et al) are a major component of fragility in our current systems[2][3][4].
I think you can avoid the marketers and advertisers by learning how they operate, nobody gives away shit for free, so anybody that claims that is either a marketer/advertiser trying to lure you into a bait/switch or is using you as the product (TANSTAAFL). Be flexible and avoid lock-in to any single service/company, always be ready to drop a service when they start acting against your interests or the interests of society as a whole.
[0] CGP Grey, Rules for Rulers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
[1] Sun Tzu, Art of War - https://sites.ualberta.ca/~enoch/Readings/The_Art_Of_War.pdf
[2] Joseph Tainter, Collapse of Complex Societies - http://wtf.tw/ref/tainter.pdf
[3] Nassim Taleb, Antifragile - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile
[4] JP Crutchfield, The Hidden Fragility of Complex Systems - http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/FOCS.pdf