[johnc1]

> Politics and consumer capitalism are motivated to identify and target stupid people...

My bet is on a variation of this. To some extent, we all target people to advance our goals, be it to get them hooked on our product, to get people to rally behind an idea or a policy we want, or perhaps to get ourselves elected to a public office.

Entities with more resources naturally invest more in this and have more advanced tools to get people do what they want. Most likely emotions work much better when targeting large groups of people than smartness and objective truth, so that's what we get.

I think it's nothing new, but the recent research advances and the ease of reaching out to people personally these day made it so that using people to accomplish your goals become probably the most powerful tool on the planet. Why build weapons or wage wars if you could just make people do what you want on their own will and also sing you praises along the way?