I had a friend that tried to take advantage of me that way. Last time I heard he worked as a software tester at a clothing company, but he had made attempts at managing people. To a certain degree, I used to be like that, except I never explicitly tried managing people, only posted ideas on forums. These days I'm a determined programmer. If you're one of those people who love posting on "Ideas" subforums, I have sympathy for you, but programmers, animators, sound designers etc also have ideas, and can make more things happen.
In the old days, people devoted their careers to a company and companies looked out for people. Continuous layoff cycles were rare and long-timers earned pensions. These days there are layoffs in good times and bad. Sometimes layoffs hit entire divisions and even top rated people are let go.
Why the heck would i trust some traditional system and not try to find shortcuts?
Really? I've been hearing that lament regularly for the last 35 years.
He tells this explicitly at the beginning of the book. He tried several names using dummy adverts to gauge click through rates and chose what generated most.
I think the book is honest and comes clean on it's intended goal. It's written in the classic marketing buff style of TV shops worldwide. If one takes it seriously in all of it's claims then that's not really the authors problem.
I agree the followers and not the source is the problem.
It was intentional as you note. Calling it the 25 hour work week, wouldn't have sold very well, and would have attracted less of the shortcut crowd. He deserves appropriate criticism for the pandering, intentionally seeking to sell to that audience, with a fraudulent setup premise; the shortcut followers are his created monster.
As an engineer who gets approached to build other people's ideas regularly, I find this trait to be true.