architecture of choice or now for a word from our sponsors

Although we would probably like to fancy ourselves as ever freer agents than we were just a few years with seemingly boundless opportunities and marketplaces with such selections as to pose to many feelings of anxiety and paralysis, there’s still quite a bit of coaxing and nudging that forms the substrate of how we react and participate as consumers of all types of commodities.
No one wants to believe that their decisions, from the trivial and impulsive to the very consequential ones of family and career, are not necessarily our own and subject to design, marketing and context and will produce an impromptu narrative defending and justifying their choice, even if a moment before there was no deliberation and the outcome was guided—manipulated. As various the platforms and customer-engagements come to know us better, the allure will become more irresistible and less transparent (the commercial pitches will be indistinguishable from content), just like the increasingly addictive and obsessive nature of social networking—which can seem like the most fundamentally self-determined, stoical acts of preening.