The core of Philip Dick's "The three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" is addiction to psychotropic drugs caused by alienation and hopelessness in a high-tech, climatically doomed, capitalistic world. Those who get the population addicted to said drugs are of course the very tycoons who need people (and by people I mean workers) to be subjugated and unquestioning of the status quo. They lure more and more consumers into drugs and make unspeakable money in the process. This is predictable (pre-cogs do see it) but unpreventable (they cannot stop it and are ultimately entangled in a deeper and deeper hallucination). And this is why EM, an Eldritch-like entrepreneur, bought birdsite.