Hacks

HACKS

 To hack something is to intentionally enter something. 

Human use hacks – substances, actions, experiences – that give pleasure, lower distress.

Hack Origins

The basic hacks we share with other animals:

• Eating food when hungry.

• Escaping when scared.

• Having sex when horny.

People now have advanced hacks -that can be harmful:

• Eating comfort food when not hungry.

• Drinking alcohol when nervous at a party.

• Hours watching porn on-line.

A hack can be good, bad or both.  Many hacks are beneficial in small amounts and damaging in larger quantities. 

Our hunter-gatherer minds and bodies were designed for a time of limited everything. 

• Food was limited. Light was limited, from the sun and campfires.  News was limited to word of mouth. 

• Drugs, alcohol, caffeine, porn, and added sugar didn’t exist for most of our ancestors. 

Civilizations increased known and available damaging hacks.  When people discovered a mind-altering substance, the supply and usage was limited, it would be used on special occasions.  Only the rulers of a civilization would have unlimited access to a few hacks – perhaps, food, sex, and alcohol.  

 Now, every American has access to an unending buffet of hacks.  With technology people

• discovered hacks,

• amplified the hacks, and

• created vast supplies of hacks. 

Hacks – food, caffeine, nicotine, opiates, alcohol, sugar, news, light, sex, shame, envy, etc. – damage us as consumption increases.  In our modern maze the supply of many hacks is unlimited to you: 

You can have coffee 24-7.  Smoke one pack after another.  Eat cookies all day long. 

Hacking Your System

Computer systems are vulnerable to design hacks.  A computer hacker uses openings to enter a system and change things.  White-hat hackers do-good things, like improving system security.  Black-hat malicious hackers do bad things - they make news when they steal millions of dollars, or millions of records.  Malicious computer hackers care more about money than ethical behavior. 

Human systems have been designed by millions of years of evolution.  Our systems are open to a wide variety of hacks – physical, psychological, and a combination of both.  Malketeers are malicious marketeers who put their financial interests ahead of concern for customers.  Snake-oil salesmen with MBAs, marketing plans and billions in advertising dollars.  Malketeers exploit human hacks through delivery systems - levers – and use deception, promotion, and psychological tricks – lies.

Hack-based industries destroy their best customers.  Casinos want you to gamble all your money.  Cigarette companies want you to smoke two packs-a-day.  Soda companies want you to drink only soda. 

Hack Examples

Hack: Sweetness

Reason for vulnerability: Mother’s milk and fruit are healthy, natural, and sweet. 

Discovery: People discovered that sugar cane was very sweet to chew on. 

Amplification: People developed ways to extract sugar from sugar cane, then sugar beets, then corn.  Sugar cane came from South and Southeast Asia.  As it became a profitable crop to grow, often with slave labor, it’s cultivation spread. It’s now farmed worldwide in warm wet climates.   

Supply increase: 500+ years of technology improvements have made sugar from cane and beets, and recently HFCS from corn, widely available and inexpensive.  In only 500 years - sugar sweetened food and drinks have gone from non-existent - to expensive and rare – to cheap and everywhere. 

Dangers: People like sweet things.  People develop a psychological and physical dependence on sweet.  Many people have come to expect sweetness in everything that they eat and drink. 

Sweetness dependence leads to obesity, metabolic disease, diabetes, liver disease, heart disease, dementia, sleep apnea, erectile dysfunction, cancers, and death. 

Hack: Light

Reason for vulnerability: Light allows us to do more when it’s dark out. People aren’t nocturnal – our eyes perform poorly in the dark.  Being able to see at night makes us comfortable because we can scan our surroundings for danger. 

Discoveries: Wood fire - animal fat fire – animal fat oil lantern - candles – gas lights - electric lights. 

Amplification: In colonial times, the primary home illumination was the fireplace.  Candles and lanterns were expensive.  Rapid technology advances in the last 140 years have allowed us to make more light at less cost.  Light now comes from lightbulbs and screens. 

Supply increase: Increased energy production and electrical lighting have eliminated darkness inside, and outside in our towns and cities.    

Dangers: People don’t get enough rest because light and distractions are unlimited.  The blue light from screens – tv, computer, smart phones – interferes with sleep patterns.  People don’t make their sleep environment dark enough to allow the body to get deep sleep and restore itself.   Sleep deprivation leads to obesity, poor health and low energy.    

Levers

LEVERS

Levers are designed to entice you to make bad decisions.

The Lever Lab

Levers are how you get a hack. Levers are used by researchers in animal studies to watch and record animal reactions to hacks such as food, drugs, and physical stimulation.  Levers don’t describe the entire distribution system - only how the consumer gets the item.  The rat doesn’t know or care how the pellet was made, shipped and loaded up behind the lever, it only knows that hitting the lever makes the tasty pellet appear. 

I was observing a lever filled lab when the importance of levers became clear:

• There were 160 levers. 

• The levers were on 5 units, each having 4 rows of 8 levers, facing out in quadrants.

• Each lever provided a liquid with a combinations of flavors.

• The liquid hacks had been designed to match subject’s psychological and physical preferences.

• The subjects entered the space, learned to use the levers, and drank the liquids trying to find the liquids designed for them.

During my observation, subject flow into the space was high and the space became crowded.  New animals entered looking for open levers.  Young subjects dodged between older ones to get to levers.  The older, often obese, subjects took possession of a row of levers by clustering in front of them.  The floor was sticky from spilled soda.   

It was May of 2018.  I was in the World of Coca-Cola’s Taste-It! room – as a person who no longer drank soda, I observed how people were interacting with the beverage dispensers and each other.  The room was chaotic due to students on middle school field trips.  That’s when I noticed the levers – people hitting levers to get a treat, over and over.  I’d been reading about animal experiments in which rodents hit levers to get food, or a drink.  This room was a giant lever lab.

School Field Trip to Coke’s shrine

During my visit to the World of Coca-Cola I was surprised to see school field trips. When they don’t let kids buy soda at schools, it’s odd to have a field trip to a soda shrine with unlimited soda.

It would be better to have a field trip to a field.

The Taste-It! Room was interesting to observe with many subjects and hacks.  There were tactics such as scurrying and fighting for territory.  The “Buffet Effect” kicked in, people tried to maximize their experience by drinking as many and as much soda as they could before leaving.  I saw people that felt ill from drinking too much soda and I heard that occasionally a person vomits.  I’m glad that I didn’t witness TasteIt! room vomiting, I would’ve been tempted to take pictures.

Lever Gauntlets

In our culture we encounter thousands of levers each day. 

Levers are the end point in delivery systems - they are how – effort, knowledge, cost – a person obtains a hack. 

The number of levers expand based upon profitability.  Malketeer’s levers are often part of a hack-stack that combines physical, mental and emotional hacks.  Business and marketing have made parts of the modern maze into lever gauntlets - grocery stores, fast food clusters, smart phone apps – that will damage us if we don’t think our way through the situation. 

Hack: Sweetness

• Lever Delivery System: Sweet Beverages

• Lever Multipliers: High profit in sweet beverages.  Intense sweetness.  Emotion marketing.         

• Example: The typical Walmart Superstore has soda in over 20 places besides the soda aisle. Bulk warm soda in end caps and in-aisle displays.  There’s individual, ready to drink cold sodas in small fridges at each check-out aisle and soda machines at the entrance.  Soda is profitable for retailers, so they’ve designed and installed, a gauntlet. 

You want a hammer with that?

This is a hardware store.

 Hack: Social Status

• Lever Delivery System: Social Media

• Lever Multipliers: Free-to-use, variety-buffet affect, crowd affect, alerts, notifications, and algorithms.

• Example: Social media companies sell access to you to other companies. There is FOMO if you aren’t on it, because people you know are on it.  Social media companies create urgency -

•   ***RED ALERT*** – NOTIFICATION! – GET BACK ONLINE! - SOMEONE YOU MAY KNOW MIGHT HAVE SAID SOMETHING ABOUT YOU!

• We want to know what people are saying about us.  The hack works because we are naturally tribal – concerned about our social status in the tribe and what the alpha apes are doing.  Once you get on social media, it’s designed to keep you there, hours of checking on other primates.

 Hack: Opiates

• Lever Delivery Systems: Legal and Illegal Opiates Distribution

• Lever Multipliers: Addictive, pain reduction, legal gateway, affect decline, and large profits

• Example: Oxycodone – Opiates receptors are a natural part of the human body and opiates reduce pain.  Widespread legal distribution of painkillers - Percocet and Oxycontin - results in higher rates of addiction and drugs moving from legal to illegal distribution systems. 

  • Many people are naturally inclined to become addicted to opiates.  It’s not that they’re weak, it’s not a character flaw – they’re wired for opiate addiction.    

  • Overtime the same dosage becomes less effective, so people increase desired dosage. 

  • It’s sale and distribution is very profitable.  Large margins have increased supply. 

• Legal Profit - To manufacture a legal 10-mg OxyContin pill probably costs a few cents. A pill sells for more than a dollar.  Millions of people taking multiple pills each day leads to billions in revenues.

• Illegal Profit - At a pharmacy a “10-mg tablet of OxyContin will cost $1.25 and an 80-mg tablet will cost $6. When illegally sold, a 10-mg tablet of OxyContin can cost between $5.00 and $10.00. An 80-mg tablet can cost between $65.00 and $80.50.”  https://www.ctclearinghouse.org/topics/oxycontin-oxycodone/

There are ways to defeat lever gauntlets - you use some already. You pass thousands of levers everyday. To improve you’ll learn to recognize the the hacks and levers that are harming you.

Not all levers are bad - here’s a Great one.

Lies

THE LIES

Good people lie to themselves

People lie when it’s in their best interest, when it’s for money, their career. The Malketeers promoting junk food don’t think of themselves as bad people selling obesity and malnutrition.  They think of themselves as selling “fun” foods that people like eating.

People lie to themselves to justify their bad acts and maintain a positive view of themselves.

Hack companies have lies ingrained in their culture and their own corporate versions of Orwellian doublespeak.  This allows nice, hard-working people to slowly poison millions of other people while never having to think of themselves as being bad people.  It’s a neat trick.

Honest people lie to us

They don’t want thinking past the taste – Ads promote fun and flavor. They don’t care about nutrition and health. Malketeers care about their goals – financial projections, marketing plans, and product developments.  They want people to consume the unhealthy crap that they sell instead of the unhealthy crap that someone else sells.  Their focus is on increasing sales and beating the competition. It takes the combined efforts of many honest, smart, and hard-working people to promote hacks, create levers and spread lies.    

Lies are okay in a war

In a 1932 essay by Kurt Tucholsky, a fictional diplomat speaks about the horrors of war.

"The war?" says Tucholsky's diplomat, "I cannot find it to be so bad! The death of one man: this is a catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of deaths: that is a statistic!" 

Marketeers have adopted the language or war – they make plans, create alliances, launch campaigns, have targets, and seek to defeat the competition. They ‘frame the facts’ in attempts to deceive people.  Bending the truth is okay in a war.  Propaganda is required for victory.  Malketeers focus on their results, not on collateral damage – like your health, the health of a nation.   

Pepsi’s “Fun for you” brands

Fun-maybe. Terrible for you-certainly. BTW Pepsi classifies it’s other brands as “better for you” and “good for you” though almost all the brands are bad for you. If they were honest marketeers instead of fun, better and good they’d use terrible for you, better than terrible for you, and bad for you.

Corporate Catchphrase Lies

“Calories in, calories out.” Coca-Cola and other companies shift the blame from their role in the Sick-Awful Diet (SAD) to you - by claiming that you aren’t exercising enough.  Obesity is your fault. Everyone knows that to “calorie balance” a soda you should go for a 2-mile walk.

“A calorie is a calorie.” This ignores that some calories, like those from added sugar, have no nutrients, make you tired, feel hungry, and damage the bodies weight control hormones.  Other calories, like veggies, have nutrients and make you feel full. 

“Part of a healthy breakfast.”  Most cereals aren’t healthy.  If you eat a lot of healthy stuff, your breakfast might still be healthy despite the cereal. 

Flavors lie to us - they are designed hacks.

Natural flavors give us information on how edible and nutritious something is.  

-          Ripe fruits taste sweet, good. 

-          Vegetables taste good – they taste better with a fat. 

-          Meats taste good – they taste better when cooked.

For animal’s in their native habitat, when something tastes good, it’s good for them. An honest system that keeps the animals alive and reproducing.

Processed “foods” are designed for flavor (and low costs). Flavor hacks include tastes, colors, and textures. Micro-nutrients are not a priority and are destroyed in the creation of processed food. Thus the “food” created by Malketeers is flavor and calories, without the nutrients that will keep you thriving and reproducing.

Doritos – the color, texture, and tastes are designed so people will eat them without feeling full. Pepsi food designers and malketeers have done the thinking. Bubba, the consumer who buys a bag and mindlessly eats the bag, is only reacting.

When we love these flavors, we love an illusion. They are delicious, yet empty and harmful.  These foods are part of a Sick Awful Diet (SAD) and not a Nutrition Energy Diet (NED). 

Labels are lies

The color of the label is a lie – bright colors grab our attention. Ripe fruit has bright colors.  Branded products make grocery aisles colorful.

The words on the label lies:

• A cookie might be fat-free, sugar-free, or organic and still lousy for you. 

• Diet sodas are bad for people on a diet and their long-term affects are not yet known.

• Unnatural things are called natural. 

While the words are regulated, the regulations are more influenced by manufacturers, than consumer advocates.

• “Healthy” only refers to having a small amount of fat and sodium in the product – not the amount of added sugar.

• “Sugar free” normally means something has artificial sweeteners.

• “Fat free” is often a product full or sugar and fillers.    

• “Vitamins added.”  Manufactured added vitamins aren’t absorbed as well as those found naturally in real foods.   

• “Natural” is a term not regulated by the FDA. 

Example: I was doing a long drive and wanted some water.  I didn’t need a full case and looked for a six pack of water.  I saw Nestle Splash Lemon water bottles that promoted:

“0 Sugars and Calories” “Natural Lemon Flavored Water Beverage with other Natural Flavors”

“water beverage” WTH?

Besides grain alcohol, everything we drink is a “water beverage.”

Always read the fine print. I wanted water and ended up with a 6-pack of sweet slime.

I expected an ‘essence’ water with a slight lemon taste. I ignored my own “rules” and did not read the fine print before buying it. I got Bubba’d.

After getting on the road, I sipped it and was surprised by how sweet it was. Then I looked at the ingredients – Sucralose, an artificial sweetener was listed.  The phrasing on the label was deceptive – It contains some natural flavors and strong artificial flavors.  This wasn’t water, more like a flat diet soda.

Fat-free, sugar-free, low sodium, natural, vitamins, etc., are on labels because malketeers want you to think that they’re healthy products.  It allows you to feel good that you’re making healthy choices. Ignore the big fonts on the front label. Look at the small print on the back. If you don’t know what something is - should you eat it? 

A/B Tested Lies

A/B testing is simply trying two things and seeing which one works better.  Pick the one that works best and then A/B test again, and again.  Marketeers are quickening the pace of A/B testing in marketplaces.  Online A/B testing is becoming more automated. 

With A/B testing results are everything, the means are unimportant. 

Example: Click-bait gets relentlessly A/B tested.  The headlines hack your attention and make you want to read more.  To read more you click the link, the lever.  Sometimes you’ll find that the article has little, or nothing to do with, the clickbait headline.  With clickbait – you’re not fishing, you’re the fish. 

 A/B testing makes a hack-lever-lie offer harder to resist – with each A/B repetition, performance increases – more people react, less can resist. 

Your Busness

Should you buy from companies and consume “foods” that try to deceive you?

Best not to become collateral damage in a marketing war between massive companies.