Both you and GP are assuming people to be perfectly spherical rational actors in a philosophical vacuum. Under this assumption, people are indeed responsible for what they get, as the market only serves the demand. But that's not the world we live in - in our world, "revealed preferences" are bunk, because the suppliers have a lot of tools to control the demand.
The "hoi polloi" aren't born with fully fleshed out idea of "what they really want". Nor do they have much ability to communicate their wants to the market directly. Rather, their wants are in large part created by marketers, and the only signal they can send to the market (via "voting with your wallet") is their relative preferences for options available on the market. That is, they only get to choose from what's available. And what's available is under control of the vendors.
The way this relates to your "lower/higher order wants" is that my actions can actually communicate either of them. Where I spend my attention, or my money, can be driven directly by a high-order want - but I'm still limited to expressing that need only by choosing from a very limited set of actions or products that are available, and then my choice is also heavily biased by sales tricks and manipulative advertising strategies.
In short: I claim that the market is currently robbing all consumers of agency - "hoi polloi" and ${whatever the complement to that is called} alike. This is especially pronounced in tech industry, as commercial software resist commoditization - most apps and services are sticky and not interchangeable, so the UX decisions aren't being strongly influenced by competitive pressure. The vendors have an actual choice of how useful or how abusive they want to be. And they should get the blame when they choose the latter.
I see a three stage change, from the pre-Bernays world of informational
advertising and functional markets, to the post-Bernays world of contrived
demand driven by psychological advertising, to what we have now.
Now we have policy driven economics in which technological goods are
foisted upon the population and a post-hoc rationale of why they are
necessary is relentlessly pushed as an explanatory narrative.
We're approaching the point where the "very limited set of actions or
products " is so dominant that the only choice looks like abstinence;
the "Luddite's" choice to not be abused.
The "hoi polloi" aren't born with fully fleshed out idea of "what they really want". Nor do they have much ability to communicate their wants to the market directly. Rather, their wants are in large part created by marketers, and the only signal they can send to the market (via "voting with your wallet") is their relative preferences for options available on the market. That is, they only get to choose from what's available. And what's available is under control of the vendors.
The way this relates to your "lower/higher order wants" is that my actions can actually communicate either of them. Where I spend my attention, or my money, can be driven directly by a high-order want - but I'm still limited to expressing that need only by choosing from a very limited set of actions or products that are available, and then my choice is also heavily biased by sales tricks and manipulative advertising strategies.
In short: I claim that the market is currently robbing all consumers of agency - "hoi polloi" and ${whatever the complement to that is called} alike. This is especially pronounced in tech industry, as commercial software resist commoditization - most apps and services are sticky and not interchangeable, so the UX decisions aren't being strongly influenced by competitive pressure. The vendors have an actual choice of how useful or how abusive they want to be. And they should get the blame when they choose the latter.