If you arent paying for it, your not the customer - you are the product being sold.

Anyhow I think you might be right, though for somewhat different reasons. After all, directly replaceable products like Kodak/film only account for a very very small overall percentage of the economy.

A better way to put it, is that humans are creatures that evolved in small communities, and human societies then proceeded to evolve to enable humans to function in larger communities. Now with the social underpinnings that enabled stability in large groups largely undermined, what we are left with is creatures that evolved in small groups living in a super-community/global community and thus completely out of their depth.

So especially people in groups without a particularly strong social structure , unless they are particularly lucky or abnormally able are left rudderless and overwhelmed.

I recall a article recently (perhaps was even you that linked it actually) regarding poorer people, intelligence and how some studies are finding the correlation exists in large part because they are literally too mentally/emotionally overwhelmed to make good decisions.

Having come to a similar conclusion myself some years ago, (though my observations dealt with political choice and awareness as opposed to finances and standard of living) I found the (very liberal leaning) study findings as highly plausible. In fact I would hypothesize that it should be taken a step further, and the effects are felt well beyond the lowest socioeconomic tiers and well into the "Middle Class" to various degrees.

Its a dangerous negative feedback loop.

For who could be free when every other man's humour might domineer over him? - John Locke (2nd Treatise, sect 57)