[Brian_K_White]

Corporations get everyone to do things they don't have to against their own interests all the time.

All day every day every industry every level.

"How?" is infinite different ways not any particular one.

Usually it's down to something being 0.001% prettier or more convenient or even a totally fabricated impression that everyone else does it (which then becomes true but is only true after the idea was used).

They sucessfully harness the desire for conformity in some people and also the desire for non-conformity in other people, at the same time for the same products.

They completely effectively harness countless well studied aspects of human nature.

If you're like me, sitting here writing about how cynical and manipulative they all are, they have angles that work on that too.

[dventimi]

> Corporations get everyone to do things they don't have to against their own interests all the time.

Not without government intervention, they don't. In fact, they wouldn't even exist without government intervention.

[Brian_K_White]

Harnessing knowledge of human nature does not require government support. Governments don't create human nature.

They use the government where possible, but as just one of countless tools. They don't always get what they want from the governemnent, yet they still make money. As often as not, corporations end up making more money as a result of losing some fight with a government.

All they need to make money is activity. Any activity, even "the government just took away something we were using and dinged us for $200M" 6 months later they are worth twice what they were before, because that was big activity.

If the government takes away a toy they were making money from, they just figure out some other new toy, and in the end the shake-up and (forced) opportunity for change was worth more than what they were making from the status quo.

[dventimi]

> Harnessing knowledge of human nature does not require government support

Yeah but fencing it off from others does require government support. If it's human nature to create, it's also human nature to copy. If you create some new worthwhile invention, I'll just copy your invention without even asking you, and without the government there's nothing you can do to stop me.

[Brian_K_White]

No, it does not. It's just one of countless levers.

There are countless things anyone can copy or do for free already right now, that countless people pay a company for, for no reason at all. No government enforcement of anything involved.

[dventimi]

> There are countless things anyone can copy or do for free already right now, that countless people pay a company for, for no reason at all.

Name one.

[Brian_K_White]

3% tax on every transaction in your entire life going to Visa by using a debit card instead of cash.

There are people (not huge corps in this case) selling CDRs of PDFs from archive.org on eBay. But more to the point, people buying them.

The completely intangible nothing that differentiates a Burberry bag from any other medium quality bag.

Now that last one almost sounds like the opposite point since the intangible nothing is exactly what the government is protecting there, but the government does not enforce that you need to pay Burberry to get a bag exactly like it in both quality and aesthetic, but people voluntarily do anyway.