to me, dark patterns were not the means, but the goals: the cognitive patterns that are established and reinforced after all the methods have been successfully applied.
[hop]
when all those little spikes compound while you ingest global and national news and those backpacking friends from Russia, Ukraine and Cambodia come home ^^, for example ...
[hop]
and we thought Machiavelli et al wrote so we could understand, when they really just established patterns that could be matched with little effort