Coercion

Why We Listen to What "They" Say

Winner of the Marshall McLuhan Award, Coercion is Rushkoff's landmark investigation into the techniques used to manipulate human behavior — in advertising, sales, politics, therapy, and beyond.

Rushkoff goes undercover into the world of professional persuaders: car salesmen, televangelists, political consultants, cult recruiters, and advertising executives. What he finds is a sophisticated arsenal of psychological techniques — borrowed from hypnosis, behaviorism, and neuroscience — designed to bypass our rational decision-making and compel compliance.

But Coercion is more than a catalog of manipulation tactics. It's an exploration of why we are so susceptible to these techniques — and what it would mean to develop genuine immunity. Rushkoff argues that true resistance requires not just awareness but a willingness to tolerate discomfort, ambiguity, and the absence of easy answers.

Ahead of its time in identifying the mechanisms of digital-age persuasion, Coercion remains essential reading in an era of algorithmic manipulation and viral misinformation.