{"id":105713,"date":"2026-11-05T04:00:01","date_gmt":"2026-11-05T09:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=105713"},"modified":"2026-11-04T12:24:43","modified_gmt":"2026-11-04T17:24:43","slug":"machine-tooled-emotional-manipulation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/machine-tooled-emotional-manipulation\/","title":{"rendered":"“Machine-tooled emotional manipulation: how a department-store Christmas ad should be”"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Lewis, the British department store with a history of heart-warming (if saccharine) Christmas ads released there 2026 Christmas ad and … it’s getting a lot of attention<\/a>, but not the kind of attention the company may have anticipated:<\/p>\n

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[Previous John Lewis Christmas ads have] often been rather sweet with an agreeable, universal sentiment. Missing friends, shyness, loneliness, not wanting to leave people out, etc. Hibernating bears<\/a>. Machine-tooled emotional manipulation. Which is how a department-store Christmas ad should be.<\/p>\n

This year, however, they’ve assumed we’ll be enchanted by rude, selfish, misbehaving children whose affection has to be bought with great effort and at great expense, in desperation. And the decision to make those children brown<\/em> \u2013 because apparently you can’t have an advert without the statistically unlikely interracial couple \u2013 adds a dynamic that I somehow doubt was intended.<\/p>\n

Commenter [+] quips,<\/p>\n