I take issue with the word "stupid" being used this way to refer to the masses in design discourse.
People don't have to be stupid to be manipulated in the way the author suspected; it just takes being busy, having a specific goal that one wants to realize (buy software) and focusing on it, and not being particularly interested in the internal implementation details of the mechanism of manipulation.
Well, point taken - I think most people today, aren't naive enough to take these messages at face value.
As marketeers become more sophisticated, and choose to employ more devious methods of swaying opinion - the ability of the general population to successfully decode these messages improves.
Take a look at some advertising messages from the 50s, or some propaganda posters from the first or second world war - their messages wouldn't hit home today (unless they're served together with a liberal dose of irony).
Do you know how many people get taken in by phishing scams every day? Do you know how many people blindly click the top result for the search "facebook login" and assume it is Facebook's login page even when it's on a different domain? Do you know how many people even know what a Web browser is?
The answers to the above questions are, respectively: "A lot," "A huge number" and "Less than 8%, according to a Google survey."
Right; and the people in the "What is a browser?" video [1] are not stupid; they're busy, have adapted very well to the extreme compartmentalization of 21st century Westernized life and knowledge, and are largely uninterested in what we know as computing. To invoke a central theme of "Paradox of the Active User" [2]: they're all experts in one field or another, and would make many a hacker here look like someone who doesn't know what something as supposedly generic as a "browser" is in their respective fields. That's far from "stupid".
You could replace a good 80% of the instances of "stupid" with "busy" in design discussions, and you'd end up with better discussions.
People don't have to be stupid to be manipulated in the way the author suspected; it just takes being busy, having a specific goal that one wants to realize (buy software) and focusing on it, and not being particularly interested in the internal implementation details of the mechanism of manipulation.