Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr. is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Netflix. He has a net worth of roughly $6 billion.
Spoiler alert: His great-uncle is Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud.
Edward Bernays was a public relations pioneer, one of America’s most innovative social engineers, and the author of a 1928 book brazenly entitled Propaganda. In 1929, Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to persuade women to take up cigarette smoking. His slogan, “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet,” exploited women's fear of gaining weight (a concern purposefully manufactured through previous advertising and/or public relations work by Bernays and others).
While Lucky Strike sales increased by 300 percent in the first year of Bernays’ campaign, there was still one more barrier he needed to break down: smoking remained mostly taboo for “respectable” women. This is where some watered-down Freud came in handy. As Bernays biographer Larry Tye said, he basically wanted to take his uncle’s works and “popularize them into little ditties that housewives and others could relate to.” With input from psychoanalyst A.A. Brill, Bernays conjured up the now legendary scheme to re-frame cigarettes as a symbol of freedom.
"During the 1929 Easter Parade," explains New York Times reporter Ron Chernow, "he had a troupe of fashionable ladies flounce down Fifth Avenue, conspicuously puffing their 'Torches of Freedom,' as he had called cigarettes.” As Chernow reports, Bernays augmented this successful stunt by lining up "neutral experts" to "applaud the benefits of smoking, all the while concealing the tobacco company's sponsorship of his activity.” (I strongly suggest you re-read that last sentence a few more times to comprehend its relevance within today’s Big Pharma context.)
It’s no wonder so many of today’s Americans — all across the ideological spectrum — are so easily and willingly duped by fake news and clickbait. In the era of social media and a 24-hour news cycle, we are now exposed to more propaganda than ever before. Bernays’ PR progeny continues refining and honing their skills. They keep us passive, distracted, and divided — but still inherently trusting those in power. Most Americans are thusly trapped inside algorithms that serve as echo chambers to create and reinforce flawed opinions.
All this talk of Bernays’ progeny and manipulative algorithms brings us back to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. Under his watch, Netflix has dramatically changed how we view movies and TV shows. Their algorithm virtually controls us. In addition, they use what music mogul, David Beer calls “classificatory imagination.” The term is meant to describe “how viewing the world through genres, labels and categories helps shape our own identities and sense of place in the world.”
“On Netflix,” he writes, “the thousands of categories range from familiar film genres like horror, documentary, and romance, to the hyper-specific ‘campy foreign movies from the 1970s’.” Such metadata controls our consumption without us realizing it. “Our social connections are also profoundly shaped by the culture we consume, so these labels can ultimately affect who we interact with,” Beer concludes.
Meanwhile, Hastings and Netflix are pumping stuff like this into our heavily programmed minds:
We are the intended result of a century-long social experiment — only now they have artificial intelligence to more efficiently condition us. We’ve willingly surrendered our ability to discern fact from fiction. Even worse, we’ve surrendered our desire to discern fact from fiction.
Pro tip: Nothing will change until we truly open our minds, recognize that we are being lied to, and consciously reject the programming.
Edward Bernays was also an integral part of the "flouride-in-water-is-good-for-you" psy-op. :(
Excellent observation: "We’ve willingly surrendered our ability to discern fact from fiction. Even worse, we’ve surrendered our desire to discern fact from fiction."