Living In The Age Of Manipulation

How many of you think Facebook is listening to you? Scottish writer Johann Hari asked an audience he was speaking to about the devastating impacts of social media on our minds.
It wasn’t a far-fetched question to ask, he said, “because there’s some ad that’s been served (to you) that’s just too accurate.” It’s not something anyone had searched for online. They had only talked about it with a friend. Of course, their phones or computers were nearby. Many in the room raised their hands.
“The truth is creepier. It’s not that they are listening and then can do targeted ad serving,” Hari writes in his book Stolen Focus. “It’s that their model of you is so accurate that it’s making predictions about you that you think are magic.”
Google Maps isn’t free because Google is benevolent; it uses the data from your searches and locations to build a more detailed model of your behavior.
Facebook could but doesn’t, have a program that allows you to travel to San Francisco and check who among your friends happens to be nearby so you can spend an afternoon together having a glass of wine or coffee. It doesn’t want you spending time with your friends; it wants to keep you fixated on your phone so it can generate ad revenue.
Voice-activated devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Nest, and the Siri assistant on our iPhones are all technology that is underpriced on the market considering what they could bring for one reason – surveillance. They capture information about your interests. And, some wonder, are they always listening?
Every technology service, tool, or social media provided on the internet is engineered to benefit the tech providers. While seeming to make your life easier, it is, in fact, designed to consume and waste it as it delivers revenue-generating ads.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs are supercharging surveillance capitalism with their ability to sweep the world wide web in seconds, gathering data on you from a thousand different sources. It can read your mood from the tone of your writing or the sound of your voice. It can assess your feelings from facial expressions. Are you happy or sad, mad or joyful, or have you had a few drinks or some cannabis gummies? It compiles all the data and uses the best-engineered addiction psychology to feed you suggestions for purchases at your most vulnerable moments keyed to your mood and state of mind.
There is a program called “style transfer” that can mimic anything from a famous painter to a poet. Feed it enough examples, and it will start producing art in the style of Van Goh or poetry in the fashion of Robert Frost. But it has the potential to be used in more invasive ways.
“They could look at all of your Gmail, look at all of the emails you responded to quickly and positively, and learn that style,” Aza Raskin, the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, told Hari. You would then start getting emails appealing to you in a style you like – because it is your own.
This technology also works for manipulating your political fears and anger. All this data collected about you acts as a voodoo doll of you, Hari says. It is collected and sold to those willing to pay the high price.
Political parties have access. Special interests have access. Foreign countries with the goal of undermining American democracy have a voodoo doll of you. They all know where to stick the pins to get their desired reactions.
But unlike a “real” voodoo doll, there is no pain felt with each pinprick. You’ve provided the pins.
“Facebook is a lie-disseminating instrument of civilizational collapse,” Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic magazine executive editor writes. “It is designed to engage us emotionally then lead us to sources that heighten those emotions, cementing them.”
We don’t see ourselves becoming more prejudiced, more unforgiving, and our society becoming more polarized. No one stops to ask, “Is this really who I am? Is my neighbor whose politics are different from mine really a bad person? Do I believe in the American dream of the founders of E Pluribus Unum – out of many one?”
With where AI is going in the next few years, there won’t be just detailed, manipulative commercial ends served, but political control as well. It will be done in seconds on every one of us. AI will enhance surveillance capitalism’s power and deepen political division by further refinement of your voodoo doll.
In our long years of being a newspaper reporter, editor, and publisher, these are the worst days we’ve experienced. No longer do people agree to disagree. Their reactions to even the slightest comment they disagree with is anger often accompanied by retribution, whether with heated words, canceled subscriptions, pulled advertising, or all three.
One of our more enjoyable conversations used to be with someone whose political views were often different from our own. He was well-informed on political and social issues. He could be sarcastic and biting in his comments at times if he thought you didn’t have a solid foundation for your thoughts. These discussions always made us think more deeply about the way we viewed things. There was growth in the process.
At the same time, he was accepting of others whose beliefs were different from his own. He recognized their inherent goodness.
For his friends, he built a small wooden box he called a “man box.” He put considerable work into making them simple but attractive. You would put objects into it, and after a year or so, if you hadn’t touched them, you should give them away or throw them.
Before he died, he gave us one. We keep things we value in it.
No political foundation that serves the needs of all citizens is built on intolerance.