This is a book about choices. Not the kind you make when you decide who to marry, whether to quit your job, or when to go for a hike. It’s about the kind that hardly existed a hundred years ago but now govern our lives. The kind that have architects.

Choose Your Captivity exposes the hidden forms of designed choice that, by determining the options made available to us, are deployed to steer our attention, behaviour and desires, influencing everything from what we eat to where we live and how we vote. It introduces the architects who first devised and applied these insidious tools, from the maze-building eugenicist who invented the multiple-choice test to the marketing gurus who in less than a generation helped transform a handful of online platforms into the richest corporations in history. By constraining our actions, shaping our choices and even our identities, they have made the world we know today.

Open your eyes to the immense power wielded by the choice architects – and how to escape it.