Via Andrew Curry, some sort-of-good news: if you’ve ever suspected, as I certainly have, that the marketing industry is locked into a perpetual arms race with our ability to realise when we’re being marketed at, then the news that “behavioural scientists” (also known as shills) are starting to worry that “nudges” (also known as dark patterns) baked into commercial website design strategies are actually becoming counterproductive. Turns out that cynically treating people as manipulable money-dispensers and/or metricised attention machines makes people cynical about your motives. Who could have foreseen etc etc? *eyeroll*

Bonus points for this closing paragraph, with its disharmonic mixture of aggrieved intellectual nobility and incipient panic:

We should also consider our responsibilities as we use behavioral interventions. Marketers should design nudges with more than the transaction in mind, not only because it is ethical or because they will be more effective over time but also because they bear responsibility toward the practitioner community as a whole. We owe an allegiance to the public, but also to each other.

Translation: guys, tone it the fuck down, you’re blowing our collective cover!