Consumers knowingly accept transparent deceptions to avoid intolerable lives.

Evidence

People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 141

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that deception’s exact transparency is a condition of its function inverts the usual gullibility model of ideology — the ideology holds precisely because users know it is swindle.
• XREF: Echoes Marx’s commodity fetishism and Zizek’s ‘they know it, but they do it anyway’ — a useful modern mapping to test on post-internet media consumption.