Until the not too distant future when more of us will be wielding our power and freedom to live in societies without marketers and profiteers (in other words as long as our daily lives continue to be beset by marketing), people who believe in true democracy should actively resist being subject to any 'techniques' designed to 'sell' or 'position' or construct your reality without your fully-informed consent and co-equal participation. Here's one little but effective thing I do. I would like to get rid of the tv, but my wife watches a few things so we keep it and I inevitably watch some (Colbert Report, etc.). The big problem with tv is you can't talk back to it in any effective way -- it gets to talk and you get to sit there and take it. So when I am watching tv, whenever a commercial catches my eye, makes me notice it with style or originality or whatever, I CHANGE THE CHANNEL and then stay away long enough so that I don't know what the ad that was enchanting me was for. Even though my attention was momentarily captured, I was able to slip away before it was commodified, which is to say made into something that makes someone a profit. If I don't know who the commercial is for, then it doesn't work for them -- they get nothing out of my momentary enchantment by the commercial imagery they paid for -- haha! And sure, they will come up with counter-techniques, new psychotechnologies of mind control for profit. But, as always, we have the ultimate freedom and power to remain vigilant and resist commodification of our lives and selves, and finally, as more of us are jarred awake by the wreckage of capitalist modernity raining down all around us, construct our new societies based on values that disable the kind of non-transparent manipulation of others that serves the needs of the plutocrats and undermines the radical (at the roots) potential for democracy.
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