Informed consumers are more easily exploited by the market

Evidence

The satisfaction of curiosity by no means serves only the psychological economy of the subject, but directly serves material interests as well. Those who have been thoroughly informed lend themselves to thorough utilization. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 126

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that information-obsession aids labor exploitation — not just consumer manipulation — is a dense, paradigm-shifting inversion of the common-sense view that information empowers.
• XREF: connects to: Advertising budgets, not product merit, determine what consumers buy — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 175; Revealing corporate evils fails because Walmart embodies consumers’ securitized subjectivity — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 310; Advertising could sell solutions to problems consumers did not know they had — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 189