me stumbling through life following the sounds of jingling keys and shiny objects

Huh? What were we talking about?

I wish astroturfing was illegal, but it's not since it'd be impossible to enforce. It's why I never used r*ddit. Half the site is a government psyop and the other half is corporate astroturfing.

This is fairly obvious on a couple levels right? I mean obviously online rhetoric is driven by marketing, you'll never know if they created the phrase or just latched onto it but social media is very much like that. And yeah, it disappeared when the movie left theaters that's how culture works.

May 4th the first year after Disney bought star wars was the first time I noticed this.

Everything is marketing

tbh I sorta feel like most pop culture memes are just marketing at this point. If a "meme" is trying to get you to consume something, then it's likely just astroturfing.

All of them, probably

A lot of modern marketing is dialectical, of course it originates as marketing and bots and paid influencers, but that's just to build to a critical mass where millions of people willingly and enthusiastically participate in it, which can lead to new commodities being created to tap into the cultural moment that has nothing to do with the original product being advertised, which fuels the cultural saturation of the trend, etc. Of course, the infrastructure supporting the cultural moment is still grounded in the original advertising campaign, so they rarely last long after that campaign is over.

You can go back to the idea of American cowboys and it works in the same way, the meat companies wanted to make it look cool so young men would go out and herd cattle. The cultural shadow of that campaign remains very strong, because the secondhand media products remained as a massive industry even after the demand for the cattle ranchers themselves dropped off. Everything is advertising in the country, always has been

I think the proliferation of the belief of "I'm the main character, I make rational informed decisions in a vacuum of pure volition, marketing and propaganda and the subtle messages in my treats all have no effect on me" makes people even more susceptible to all of the above.

When Vance was the pick, I swear i saw a whole bunch of inorganic "between this and the VP pick, this week is going great!". Like, a TON of them across all social media platforms and they all gave off the same vibe.

Bit of a ramble, but I guess my point is yeah, if something feels weird and is in support of a product, there's probably marketing influence at play.

Performative 80s nostalgia seemed to crest when that awful "Ready Player One" was about to be in theaters, and seemed to almost instantly fade right afterward, too.

I'm not saying all the "remember your childhood?" stuff from 40somethings was artificial, but the surge of interest seemed to be.

Yeah, I really liked seeing the girl pop femininism thing. I am sad it has left. I didn't think of it in terms of being an astroturf. It looks like it was. However, that does mean that energy does exist in society and just needs to push to come out which is cool.

Consumerism teaches the population that fads where you buy and display things is a form of socialization. With limited time, you can actually build a passable personality out of consumption habits and the constellation of activities around them. I know people that more or less do this.

Companies are all trying to be the next and longest-lasting fad because it means high profits. A fad is just sudden large demand, which translates into a large volume of profit if they can make enough supply. For Barbie stuff? Just make more pink items and maybe brand some of them. Easy way to ride the fad and these folks wrapped up in the spectacle will do most of the work to sustain it.

Scene queen? Is this what Chapelle Raon is doing? I have three brain cells right now.