Consent doesn’t have to be coerced if the range of thinkable options was already narrowed before you arrived.
The propaganda model, developed to explain how mass media systems shape public belief without overt censorship, argues that consent for a given social order is “manufactured” through structural filters operating upstream of any individual message: what gets funded, what gets amplified, what counts as a credible source, what gets treated as too fringe to cover. No single actor needs to lie for the effect to hold — the filtering happens through incentives distributed across an entire system, which is what makes it harder to see than a single act of censorship would be.
The essay’s broader claim — that sensory marketing, algorithmic feeds, and institutional narrative all function as one continuous engineering of perception — is this same theory generalised past its original media-specific case. The mechanism doesn’t require a media company specifically; any institution that controls what people repeatedly see, and what feels credible enough to repeat back, is running the same structural process at whatever scale it operates.
Source: Herman, E.S. & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books.