This is not a particularly new hypothesis, moreso a conspiracy; all encompassing viral marketing, publicity, business models of "free" services, and the acceleration of government control. Despite this the conspiring of recent events had me inspired, or rather pushed into a breaking point (as in: "just how much more of this can I even take?") which allowed me to step back and think about this for just over a week's time. When you see things in such a lens, the controversies and events that control discourse for weeks morph into thin cardboard cutouts that can be picked apart, ripped to shreds, or run through without effort. As textbook of a scheme to control as there can be. But this is not solely exclusive to obfuscating government activity (although the word implies some conscious effort). Consumer behavior is the premier target, as money is second to eyes, although both are most definitely not mutually exclusive. To begin this discussion, we're going to talk about the centripetal factors behind the psychological operation which swore in Labubus, old network television, and sheiks shitting on salaried strippers as the defacto aesthetic for the new global fascist dictatorship headed by the most insufferable public figures ever.
Prefacing: all of this is nothing new. Powerful groups, executives, and the likes have always schemed to find ways to popularize media, goods, and people in some way to get more money rolling in. Advertisement is too conventional of an example when speaking of this. We've all but accepted it as a normal part of everyday life. Except me, because trying to be pandered to is legitimately worse than rape. The industry plant is the next best thing when speaking of such an act. The act of someone leveraging internal connections in order to manufacture a following, or for executives manufacturing it themselves, is an art that has been named and shamed for what seems like time immemorial now. Looking to find the answer to this, I researched the origin of the term, only to find that one of the earliest known instances of it was on KanyeToThe in the early 2010s. To say that my day was ruined is an understatement, but we all have former Disney channel stars to blame for both effectively being networked into guaranteed success and the prevalence of the term by proxy.
If the details behind child stardom were not harrowing enough for you, consider the heel turns they make in their respective careers (usually music and/or acting) they make what feels like immediately after becoming of legal age-- carefully concocted by board rooms-- coming across as a vomit of sexual trauma manufactured for box office successes and number one spots. Hannah Montana was swinging on that wrecking ball with her booty out when I was an embryo, Olivia Rodrigo, and Sabrina "BBC I Wish I Had It In Me" Carpenter is currently making that RCTA Doja Cat music for really annoying white women and also gay men, although they're usually at the scene of the crime for all of this, if not female rap. For me, personally, it's Super Bass.
It is only harrowing because it works. You either didn't know of these people or forgot all about them up until they randomly crept forward and leaped upwards all of a sudden. This is the nature of all effective marketing now, and the aforementioned "recent developments" have really allowed the beans to spill to pretty much everyone else who was not already in the know. It hinges itself on virality. Virality produced by a new caste of people with fake jobs, influencers, who capitalize on mass appeal in order to cultivate views, to then cultivate an audience, to then cultivate a massive revenue stream. Their "capitalization" is either pre-influenced by existence of virality, or they are thrown a massive cheque (I'm from the UK). This provides some context to the sudden success of things like "Dubai chocolate"; given the methods we know these oil states use to market themselves to global audiences, it wouldn't be wrong to assume that there is now some foreign interference involved in the manufacturing of consumer trends.
So how about these countries' methodology? Well, I said it before. It's just money. They throw money to plaster their names on anything major that may have an extra amount of eyeballs attached to it. It's a simple but effective model, and their greatest sphere of influence as a result is in sporting. UFC in Riyadh, the Qatari Sports Investment group owning Paris Saint-Germain, the Saudi Arabian government's ownership of Newcastle United, "Fly Emirates" and "Qatar Airways" plastered at the front of the shirt of every football team worth a damn, and the fucking World Cup and the other fucking World Cup in like 10 years. This a method which has been coined as "sportswashing", and it has one goal: to repair the perpetually broken image of these oil countries, that of them being substantially more gaudy nouveau-riche Las Vegases built on a mountain of the corpses of illegal migrant workers. Could you say it's working? For many, yes. I think the existence of an awesome delicious pistachio chocolate bar may contribute to the Emiratis' positive public image. So would the subconscious programming in sports, in social media shorts, in small factoids about "most expensive [blank]" etc. etc. In earnest, if I could go anywhere without a budget, it would be the "ultra-rich futuristic" utopia that charges you out the ass for shit like gold plated steak or paintings of a Gorilla smoking a cigar. I think the knowledge that all of this is maintained by a brutal theocratic dictatorship and religious customs outdated by a century makes me less likely to do so. Hence the sudden emphasis on this sort of guerilla marketing. If you were looking for the answer to the question "12 Labubus or property in Dubai", it would be property in Dubai, as it isn't just a trend, unlike Labubus.