Competitive pressure. Gary Taubes in his books "The Case Against Sugar" and "Good Calories, Bad Calories" mentioned the competition between Kellogg's, Post and other cereal brands.
While it's hard to believe today, Kellogg's was founded by a health nut who was eager on bringing healthy grains to Americans. Once his descendants took over, they noticed how enriching their product with sugar increased sales. Kids specifically don't have necessary mental controls to recognize addictive behavior (which is why we have restrictions on sales of cigarettes and alcohol).
So bit by bit American breakfast table and grocery store cereal isle turned into varieties of concentrated sugar instead of the muesli, oats, granola and nuts mixes it was way back in the days.
As a (currently) flagged comment absolutely accurately notes, a major concern of the Kelloggs was matters of mental and spiritual hygiene, including concerted efforts (including surgery) to avert masturbation.
Medical historian Howard Markel addresses this in his recent book The Kelloggs, with some relevant aspects mentioned in this book-tour interview at KALW, Santa Monica:
[Dr. John Haarvey Kellogg] also was very chaste and reminded both his readers and his followers that sex outside of the marriage, of course, was not a good idea, but [that] sex for anything other than procreation really sapped the soul and sapped the spirit. And of course, he was very much opposed to masturbation of any kind, something he wrote about extensively and called "the solitary vice."
Ideologically driven reasearch in which conclusions are assumed or asserted rather than proven empirically has a poor track record for truth discovery.
The Kelloggs' theories of nutition are fairly hit or miss. Corporatising the institution they created has not helped.
Another reply summarized my view: there doesn't need to be a goal other than optimizing for profit for this type of "hacking" to arise.
I guess the word "hacking" conveys intentionality, or an explicit goal, but I'm using it in the sense that it's "exploiting bugs" in human brains.
Human brains/bodies didn't evolve in a situation with unlimited supplies of fat, sugar, and salt. Likewise, human brains didn't evolve in a situation where you can have an instant audience of 1,000, 100K, or even 100M people.
If you consider facts of about human biology (we like fat, sugar, salt, and to belong to a social group, etc.), and if you understand what a powerful mechanism capitalism is, then it's not surprising that corporations could remake the entire food industry or remake our social lives / belief systems in the span of a single generation.
Whether it's intentional or not is perhaps a secondary issue. I'm saying that in the absence of any opposing force, it would be surprising if this phenomenon did NOT occur.
So I guess my takeaway is that it doesn't hurt to treat current social networks and tech products like smartphones as adversaries. Just like it is reasonable to treat McDonald's and cigarette companies as adversaries. They were designed to deliver concentrated pleasure to your brain without regard to long term consequences.
My impression is that tobacco was a traditional, social, harmless pleasure until "capitalist optimization" morphed it into something deadly and addictive.
(BTW there is evidence that the human brain grew bigger to keep track of our peer group, i.e. it didn't grow big in order to solve math problems. The social part of the brain is large and critical for survival.)
Thanks for clarifying. Hacking has strong connotations with having a smart individual doing the exploiting on purpose. Also, hacking has strong connotations with that purpose being cool, not evil.
But since you mean companies just following the market gradient - that is precisely what happens.
> So I guess my takeaway is that it doesn't hurt to treat current social networks and tech products like smartphones as adversaries. Just like it is reasonable to treat McDonald's and cigarette companies as adversaries. They were designed to deliver concentrated pleasure to your brain without regard to long term consequences.
This is the key. The goal of companies is to make money off you, not to do good to you. If doing good to you helps them make money, they will do it. If screwing you over lets them make more money off you, they will screw you over. This is obvious both in observational evidence and in theory (if you look at the incentive structures of the market economy), and yet some people still persist in the belief that companies do only what consumers want, and that consumers have any agency in this process.
Overweight people eat more. Creating obese people needn't have been a corporate goal; a blind optimization process could have produced the same outcome. Just tweak the product until it sells more.
this is exactly what's happening with digital media. Optimize for human attention. Direct real time feedback on how people react to your media. Tweak for more attention. Repeat. No intentional malice needed.
I believe one of their goals was to lower testosterone in general population, to make for a meeker and more easily controlled population. This probably wasn't a 'fully evil' goal, since the horrors of WW2 were recent, and some of them thought that they could prevent that from happening again by engineering a less aggressive population.
From the onset of 20th century at least, it was known that testosterone is responsible for 'manly' characteristics (aggressiveness etc); in 1935 it was synthesized from cholesterol by Lavoslav Ruzicka. So, by the end of WW2 it was already well known that a) testosterone is what makes people aggressive and b) body needs cholesterol to synthezise testosterone. With this information in hand, it's easy to conclude that to get a less aggressive population, one should make them eat less saturated fat/cholesterol.
Enter Ancel Keys, a military-related dietologist (he created the ww2 K-rations, for example). Before mid 1950s, he was making rational scientific research into good/bad foods, and even published some material about the negative health effects of 'grain' ie carbs. But by the mid 1950s he made a full 180 and started attacking saturated fats and cholesterol as the cause of (especially heart-related) health problems. He started using bad science (selectively choosing countries for study to confirm his claim that it's high fat and not high carb diet that causes health issues), and using his pull to silence everyone claiming otherwise.
In 1960s/1970s he was joined by the Big Agro/Food who poured a lot of money into continued shifting of the blame from carbs onto fat, including silencing and ostracizing scientists and studies who dared to claim otherwise; this is the 'conspiracy' that we are familiar with, but I believe it started even earlier, with Ancel Keys, military, and 'powers that be'.
It is sad that you are downvoted (however you may have told it without hints to conspiracies), because there are parallels to what you say about that time's mentality in for example the "Morgenthau Plan" that was fortunately dumped in 1947 and replaced with its opposite the "Marshall plan".
During implementation of the Morgenthau Plan, Germans had to live with 1200 calories per day:
