Product Description
We like to believe our tastes are our own. This book is about why they might not be.Over the last hundred years, companies didn't just learn to sell products — they learned to manufacture the desire for them. Not through crude tricks, but through a slow, technical, astonishingly effective science built from psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and behavioral economics.ENGINEERED is the story of how that science was assembled, piece by piece — and how it became invisible.From Edward Bernays turning cigarettes into "torches of freedom," to the diamond engagement ring invented by a single advertising campaign, to the toothpaste that sold a sensation instead of clean teeth, to social-media feeds engineered as live psychological laboratories — this book traces the hidden architecture behind what we buy, what we celebrate, and what we believe we always wanted.Across fifteen chapters, you'll discover:How habits are installed in the brain — and why willpower rarely beats themWhy so many "timeless traditions" were actually born in marketing departmentsHow the food industry engineers flavor to override your judgmentHow brands became identity systems people defend like religionsHow personalization quietly turned convenience into controlAnd, above all, how to see manipulation that's designed to be invisibleDrawing on the research behind landmark works like The Century of the Self, The Power of Habit, and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, ENGINEERED synthesizes a century of history and science into a single, readable narrative — written by someone who knows the marketing playbook from the inside, but refuses to treat it as inevitable.This isn't a book about escaping the modern world. It's a book about something harder: learning to recognize when a choice began in you — and when it began in someone else.How many of your desires are actually yours? Read more
