Generally speaking, I am against aggressive/manipulative advertising that is directed at children, no matter how good the intention behind it. You might be encouraging them to save the planet, but you’re also teaching them to respond positively to manipulative advertising - in other words, to be a mindless consumer who will buy anything they’re told to buy. I have to think that in the long run this is not a good thing for society.

Retail stores are like those highly complex, optimized tropical orchids that entice them by scent, then force bugs to navigate a complex internal labyrinth that brings them first past the female parts, then the male ones, and finally some nectar before letting them escape again. The orchids ensure pollination, and ensure against self-pollination, and do it by methods that might be described as “sneaky”.

Humans now inhabit the world’s most complex environments: huge cities full of noise and color; and everywhere are attempts at demanding our attention, from commercial advertisers to random people to street performers and suchlike.

Going to the store is an everyday occurrence but throws someone into a pressure-cooker environment that does its darndest by hook and by crook (not to mention subtle manipulation) to stick its hand in their pocket and parasitize them, while they try to get the best deal they can and avoid overspending. Successful stores get at your pocketbook. Successful individuals avoid spending beyond their means despite such temptations as colorful product labels, subliminal scents, or “platinum” credit cards.

The larger system repeats these forces at larger scales, between chains of stores competing and using methods like sales, coupons, and rebates, and consumers trying to comparison-shop or find alternatives or just do without some things.

This situation is a recipe for the continued evolution of human intelligence, and even the particular trait of being more “cerebral” in the colloquial sense, more capable of rational and self-interested judgment despite subtle things like scent cues or other attempts at emotional manipulation.

Once, the main driving force for human intelligence evolving was an outside environment of climate change and variability and food insecurity following the arising of the Central American land bridge two million years ago. Now, it is the very environment we’ve created to shelter us from that climate and efficiently provide food — which means we now pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, locked into an evolutionary arms race with ourselves.

One that, thanks to technological advance, is accelerating and about to hit the knee of the curve…

There is an old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times” … it seems one of those Chinamen must have cursed an entire generation. Between human-induced climate change and the rapidly complexifying human-created parts of our environment, the world seems about to change drastically, perhaps to the point of unrecognizability, in the space of a mere few decades now.

Around and around and around it goes; where it stops, no-one knows.

When you visit a fruit stall at a market, you may well enjoy the aroma of fresh melons. But then your senses are perceiving reality (their veracity being critically vital after aeons of natural selection).

Using chemicals to create an illusion, specifically a subliminal one, is deceitful.

On the other hand if an electronics shop deliberately situates itself next to a fruiterers, then any aroma is honest and truthful. They could even create a small stall within the electronics store by way of saying “Perhaps you’d like a real melon while you’re here?”

Aromatic deception may succeed in manipulation, but it won’t endear customers once they find out about it.

There are enough nasty chemicals and aromas evaporating from within electronic devices without making things doubly nasty with a chemically aromatic mask. I’d rather the truth of industrial solvent than the falsehood of MelonomaTM.

If anything I’d be likely to start associating melons with deceitful electronics companies whenever I smelt the fruit at a market.