Risky Business

In today’s world, it’s nearly impossible to escape advertising. Whether scrolling through social media, watching TV, walking down the street, or even checking your email, ads are everywhere, urging you to buy something. But behind this constant barrage of marketing is a clear goal: corporations want to make a profit—and they’ll do almost anything to get us to open our wallets, even if it means downplaying or ignoring the dangers their products may cause to consumers and the people they employ. Consumers ingest products like cigarettes to help them with anxiety and then get addicted, the long-term effect of smoking tobacco/cigarettes leads to cancer and other serious problems all at the cost of making someone else rich off the suffering of others. Corporate greed impacts the ones employed by the corporations putting them in unsafe work conditions that don’t afford the workers to live comfortably.
Additionally, kids being employed is detrimental because it brings the human development index down. After all, the kids are working instead of receiving an adequate education that can help them be better in life instead of having to work in these industries that always result in a zero-sum game, in which no one benefits. Therefore, I do think corporations are headed in the direction of the cyberpunk approach. Due to corporations not caring about the welfare of the people they create value in their products and help them earn profit. The patterns of corporate greed and disregard for human value resemble the dystopian realities of cyberpunk fiction more and more. I think the movies/ creative expression of cyberpunk which model the future of our society and display corporate greed is a realistic prediction of how we should expect our society to operate. Change is inevitable so it is likely that ads will progress and corporations will only get greedier to manipulate individuals into throwing their morals away and purchasing products just to do it because they have been manipulated.