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.