In the Deadly Embrace of a Ruthless Marketing Mafia

 

I just registered again my two phone line numbers (home + office) with the Do Not Call Registry. I remember that I did it already about 10 years ago, and it seemed to work for a while. To my relief, most of the incessant, annoying, idiotic marketing calls stopped. I could not believe my good luck.

But alas, it was not to last. It was only a matter of time before the telephone marketing mafia would find new ways to get around whatever puny laws might be interfering with their sacred business goals that make all of us their living and breathing targets. Since they are now calling from cell phones and from virtual phone numbers through Internet, there may be no way to enforce the ban by going after them since all they have to do is get another anonymous number.

The new technique that they are using is extremely ruthless. They make automated calls to call telephone numbers at different times, sometime even at night, simply to determine when are people most likely to answer the phone. If you pick up the phone, there will be nobody on the line, just a deathly silence. There may be millions of bewildered senior citizens who still dutifully answer their phone, who don’t understand what is going on and who are really, really scared.

It is much more efficient this way and that is the only thing that matters to marketing companies. Or so seem the marketing geniuses think. They don’t seem to realize that after a while, everybody will start monitoring phone calls and answer only if the call ID of the phone number appears to indicate a legitimate number. They don’t seem to realize that their complete disregard for even the simplest form of human decency will in the end kill off their own business as well, along with what is left of human decency in the profit-at-al-cost mentality.

It is not just the ruthless phone marketing that is killing off one technology after another. Junk e-mail is killing off the way Internet has been used for the last two decades. When 95% of what is in the e-mail is deceptive and malicious spam and “phishing”, often in languages that we don’t even understand, many people simply don’t use e-mail much anymore.

My children who are in their mid twenties hardly ever check their e-mail. I text them when I want to tell them something because texting still seems to work. They don’t have a fixed phone line either and they may never even bother to get one. I also wonder what will happen if the marketing mafia is given unencumbered access to databases of cell phone numbers. Will they eventually do to texting and cell phone lines what they did to wired lines, by which I mean killing off a lot of former cell phone users and making sure that people no longer answer their phones unless they know who’s calling?

Aggressive marketing techniques of search engines have also done a lot of damage to Internet. I no longer use Google for most of my searches because I don’t want them to know everything about me, especially since I have no idea who they will share this information with. My guess would be, with anybody who pays them for it. That is why I switched to a couple of non-tracking search engines about a year ago and I use Google only very sporadically now.

Celebrities are being pursued by the paparazzi, everybody else is being chased by the marketing mafia, in addition to the NSA, crazed hackers who want to turn our computers into zombie PCs unwittingly transmitting more of the malicious spam and deceptive marketing propaganda to more victims, thieves who want to steal our identity, and who knows what kind of other predators are hiding out there.

The way people are turning on each other, our modern world now looks like a watering hole in African Serengeti where hungry lions and hyenas are chasing weaker and sick animals to sink their claws and teeth into the tasty meat.

The deadly embrace of what must be most of the world by an extremely ruthless marketing mafia is just another symptom of a gradual, persistent decline of our culture. A culture that has lost respect for common human decency is in transition, on its way out.

And it is more than likely that it is going to be replaced by something that will be even more repulsive and menacing than what we have to live with now.