There's probably a kernel of human nature supporting this kind of behavior stretching into prehistory, but in the modern take on it, it's exactly what Big Data-based marketing is designed to support. If you've got a big enough database of consumer behavior to catch every trend that's too small or isolated ever to catch the eyes of the people in charge otherwise, you can have a computer do the search for you. Oh, look, RX7 exhausts and C-mags are hot right now. Maybe we can drop gaming blogs and move the company in that direction.

I feel the same way actually, and can corroborate it with some guy in the front row for the premiere of the X-Files movie that yelled "I LOVE YOU SCULLY" during the titles. Still had to post the article because it was an interpretation I hadn't thought about before.

I had to wonder if there was some tell going into this that it wasn't going to work out. Was it their materialism? If you had met these people and done an in-depth interview with them beforehand, could you have said that they might not be ready for marriage, or that if it did go bad they'd have it in them to drag it out like this? It's a subtle horror that the article leaves this totally unanswered.

Right, and especially with the veneer of serendipity that you get from stumbling across (or upon ) a news article, it's easy to miss that there's a common set of beliefs behind most of it. They're not all that nefarious as hidden beliefs go, but you could still easily get the impression if all you read was these sites that you were doing everything a good democratic citizen should just by reading 8th grade reading level coverage that's designed not to scare off any advertisers. There's a huge unrealized potential for a more educated populace if we could collectively move past that.