Boomer Bait And The Business Of Predictable Minds
What It Reveals About All of Us
A few weeks ago, I was sitting at a café in Sofia, half-listening to the hum of conversation around me, when I noticed a man at the next table scrolling through his phone. He stopped abruptly, leaned closer to the screen, and let out a quiet, disapproving laugh.
“Unbelievable,” he said to no one in particular.
He turned his phone slightly toward his companion. “Look at this. They don’t want you to know this. It’s not on the news. Who do they think we are?”
His friend leaned in. A pause. Then a slow nod followed by the Bulgarian version of “WTF,” but a lot more explicit.
No skepticism. No question. Just an immediate emotional reaction and total agreement.
I didn’t see what they were looking at. I didn’t need to. My own mother does this multiple times a day. She scrolls on her phone and periodically runs over to show me something with, “Look what they are saying here.” At least, I’ve trained her now to also say, “I don’t know if this is true,” which she inevitably follows up with, “But if it is…” So, I am not convinced that I’ve out-influenced Facebook’s algorithms.
You’ve seen these reactions too, and may have had them yourself. The details change—the cure, the villain, the urgency, the scandal, the outrage—but the structure stays the same. The content always resonates and masterfully hits a pre-existing mental trigger.
It reminds me of when the doctor tests my neurological reactions by hitting me at just the right spot below the kneecaps. My legs jump, and I can’t stop them. The visceral reaction is so automatic and fast that my brain has no way of preempting it.
In a world where more of our reality is mediated through screens, this isn’t a side issue. It’s the environment we’re operating in, and we absolutely must talk about it.
I am certain that no one thinks of themselves as “captured” and “exploited” and much less as the product of engineered behavior. But research shows that our ancient brains are no match for today’s technology-enabled business practices.
The quality of your daily life, relationships, and communities depends greatly on your ability to preempt targeted mental strikes and exploitations. You must remain yourself, now more than ever, and learn to recognize the Trojan horses before you let them in.
Long before algorithms and smartphones, before content could be produced by anyone and at scale, newspapers and magazines understood something simple: people don’t respond to information, they respond to emotion. Yellow journalism led the way successfully, not because of accuracy, but because it harnessed this truth. It was effective because it made people feel something quickly and intensely. Fear, outrage, and curiosity spread as news, and made people like William Randolph Hearst very wealthy.
A century later, the tools have changed. The wealthiest people’s roster holding our emotional triggers at their fingertips has too. But the psychology that makes that possible has not.
What’s different now is precision enabled by machine learning and artificial intelligence, faster at detecting patterns than any human mind ever could.
Today, emotional triggers are not just understood—they are mapped, measured, and optimized. Entire systems exist to identify which inputs reliably produce which reactions, in which groups, at which times.
Nostalgia works. Fear works. Moral outrage works. A sense of lost control works especially well.
And it all works really well on the Baby Boomer generation. There’s even a term for it: “Boomer bait.” Usually said with a smirk and a kind of casual superiority as if the problem is obvious: older people, less tech-savvy, are easier to fool.
But what’s actually happening has very little to do with Boomers.
