ARTIFICE

Artifice seeks to impart information, be it a message, an opinion, a judgment, or a physiological stimulus. It is therefore naturally implicated in the creation of Consensus, a term I am using to describe the cloud of received opinions and ideas in which we all live. Consensus is the statistical world of useful knowledge, generalization, habit, custom, and ideology.

There is no room for genuine conception in Consensus but only preconception, pre-thought, all things having been packaged prior to delivery. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote, “When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself” The last thing artificers want, however, is to divide their audience,” he wrote. “Anomalies must be ironed out of the work, which for its part must exhibit seamless continuity and smoothness” “Perfect artifice would evoke exactly the same emotional state in everyone regardless of who they were,” he said. Artifice appeals to our physiological urges by replacing individuality with an abstraction. The more a pornographic work objectifies people, the more the viewer is objectified in turn, he writes. Artifice can lead us to acts of self-betrayal. The marketer’s goal is to have us act in certain ways whether or not we personally approve of the prescribed behavior. Marketing exemplifies the basic principle of consumer culture, that William S. Burroughs dissects in Naked Lunch. You’re selling customers to the product. The product itself is secondary, all products are junk from the salesman’s cynical viewpoint that goes straight to the “reptilian brain,” the most primitive part of the nervous system. “The reptilian brain always wins” .

“The Customer Is Always Right” is technically a predecessor to “Do What The Algorithm Wants” Markets are an information technology. A technology is useless if it can’t be tweaked. Left and right identitarians want something that I don’t want: a committee to make sure everyone gets what’s best for them.
How much activity on the market is based on the fact that you could not buy the goods available on a fair market, but only on a market that had been rigged in your favor?

How much of the market is psychological deception to get into people’s heads the notion for situational specialty? How much of the business is committed to simulating that the company is forced breaks its own rules because, well you’re on your way up?

The question is whether the entertainment markets are by nature enough to create middle classes. Technologies are never perfect. They always need tweaks. And what does The Market want? Share your thoughts in the comments below.