So how did we hand over our republic to a technocratic elite capable of manipulating any election?
Have you ever heard of Edward Bernays?
Bernays set in motion what we have all come to know as an essential part of our capitalist ecosystem: the use of mass media to promote roles, desires and status symbols that rake in profits for corporations. The chilling words of Wayne Chilicki, chief executive of General Mills, show how faithfully Bernays’ vision has been followed: “When it comes to targeting kid consumers, we at General Mills follow the Procter & Gamble model of ‘cradle to grave.’ We believe in getting them early and having them for life.”
What’s changed is that a new generation of mind controllers are using the burgeoning technologies of data mining and social media to inject their power even deeper into our minds than their forebears could have dreamed possible. A modern-day Bernays named B.J. Fogg has founded a field called “captology,” derived from the acronym CAPT or “Computers As Persuasive Technology.” At the ominously named Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab, he teaches freshly minted graduate students how to use technology to “change people’s attitudes or behaviors.”
His teachings have spawned the interfaces of our new daily routines: the chimes from our smartphones diverting our attention, the thumbs-up icon on our news feeds, and the Like statistics telling us how popular we are today. These are known as “hot triggers” which kick off behavioral loops in our subconscious. Successful apps, they teach, are those that trigger a momentary need, and then provide us with an instant solution. The solution sparks a micro dose of endorphins in our brains. That feels good. So, like rats on a wheel, we find ourselves getting addicted, going back for more.
Like a rat on a wheel, we are trained to need more… and more.
Facebook has built its global empire of 1.6 billion active users on this addictive routine. According to one of Fogg’s students, Nir Eyal, Facebook’s key trigger is FOMO: fear of missing out. Humans evolved in hunter-gatherer bands, where survival meant being part of the community. The social anxiety of missing what our friends are doing arises from deep within our hormonal system. Meanwhile, as psychologist Sherry Turkle has pointed out in her book Alone Together, we sacrifice our daily physical intimacy with those around us by focusing our attention on the screen in our hands. This has been brilliantly captured by artist Eric Pickerskill in his photography series, “Removed,” which documents the feeling of everyday social situations – after removing people’s smartphones from the picture.
Facebook has been researching the extent of its power over our behavior, manipulating its own users as guinea pigs. On election day in 2020, it sent “Go out and vote” reminders to more than 60 million users, causing an estimated 340,000 to vote who otherwise wouldn’t have. If it chose to send these reminders to supporters of a particular party or candidate, it could easily flip an election without anyone knowing about it. Under current law, it wouldn’t have to tell anyone what it was doing. In another experiment, which caused a public outcry, Facebook successfully manipulated the emotional state of 689,000 users by sending them either an excess of positive or negative terms in their news feeds.
The mind control doesn’t stop at social media. Do you believe in your autonomy when you’re carefully conducting research on a topic and use Google to search for something? Think again. Psychologist Robert Epstein has unearthed the massive subliminal power of what he’s called the Search Engine Manipulation Effect, or SEME.
This effect is based on the fact that when we search, we click half the time on one of the first two results, and more than 90% of our clicks are on the top ten links listed on the first page. There might be thousands of other web pages containing our key words, but Google decides which ones we’re going to read.
Is your mind being controlled?
Yes.
Epstein and his associate Ronald Robertson wanted to test whether SEME could impact how people decided to vote in an election. They asked a sample of Americans to research candidates for an Australian election (to minimize preconceived notions about the candidates) using their own mock search engine, “Kadoodle.” They randomly divided the sample “voters” into three groups, and served up the same results to each group. The only difference was the ordering of the results: one group’s results favored one candidate; another group’s results favored the opposing candidate, and the third group saw results that favored neither candidate.
The results were staggering. The proportion of people favoring Kadoodle’s “favored” candidate increased by 48%. Disturbingly, three quarters of the people in the manipulated groups were completely unaware of any bias in their search results. In the “neutral” control group, there was no significant shift of opinion.
These findings have been replicated in larger tests conducted across the U.S. They’ve discovered that using simple techniques, they can mask the manipulation so that virtually no-one is aware they’re seeing biased rankings. In 2014, they took their testing to India during the election for prime minister, where people were already very familiar with the candidates. Even so, they were able to shift the proportion of people favoring a chosen candidate by 20%, with 99.5% of people showing no awareness they were being manipulated.
In many countries of the world, including the U.S., Google has a near monopoly over internet searches. The search-ranking business is entirely unregulated, and courts have ruled that Google’s right to rank search results however it pleases is protected as a form of free speech. If Google chose to swing the U.S. election, they could do so without anyone knowing about it.
And they did.
Would they do something like that? They have been for a while. Go way back to 2000. It turns out that Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, Inc. (Also the parent co. of GV, formerly Google Ventures), funded a semi-secret company, The Groundwork, to provide Hillary Clinton the engineering talent she needed to win the election, prompting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to call Google “Hillary’s secret weapon.” Hillary had also hired a longtime Google executive as her chief technology officer. If Google were prioritizing pro-Hillary search results over those favoring Bernie Sanders, we would have never known, because, well, to be frank, they have complete control of the public mind of the majority of America and so a great job at keeping us distracted.
Thank heavens some powerful people in Russia 1) prevented Google from acquiring Yandex in Russia 2) had a score to settle with Hillary, and 3)Know how to use social media instead of being used by it, a skill I pray we all master.
In hindsight, we can now make sense of Alphabet's rigorous attempts to force the Russian Internet to capitulate during the years leading up to 2000 and continuing into the War in Ukraine, when the internet giant set all bureaucracy aside and became the anti-russian cyber arm of the war. To Google, the outcome of the war has monumental ramifications - absolute global Dominion of multiple industries and resources, primarily the internet.
Coincidentally, Facebook also had its dirty hands in Yandex around the same time period, and even purchased Face(.com) the Russian-based company it acquired in order to obtain its facial recognition chip.
The British economist Kenneth Boulding once warned: “A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government.” So you decide, is your mind being manipulated?
You decide. Did you know Google, or, rather, Alphabet, now owns the most advanced process in the world for the enrichment of Uranium? Did you know the U.S. Military uses Google's AI to target strikes and is responsible for all the innocent deaths we heard about every day of the late 1990s but somehow Google was never mentioned? Oh, and did you hear about Alphabet's investments in various biogenetic engineering and vaccine tracking technology which began 3 years before the pandemic?
Surely we would not be using any Google Products if we knew these things, right? Perhaps we could have prevented our money from going to lobbying powers waged against our President. Perhaps, if we had refused to allow Google to monetize our attention, we would not have ignorantly paid for Trump's demise?
I will save Amazon for another post, because my intent is to build up, not discourage. But we must face this.
Fact is, we love Trump, but we have failed to keep our republic; and to this day we are unable to sacrifice convenience. Thus, the most dangerous partnership of global dictatorships the world has ever known will continue to grow fat on our apathy, unless we decide to emancipate ourselves from anti-trump and anti-american tech.
Until these unseen influencers are better regulated, there are still some things we can do to protect ourselves from their mind control, that we may, at least, begin to think clearly. One idea, suggested by technology thought leader Jaron Lanier, is to investigate your relationship with social media and take back your power to choose by conducting your own experiments.
Consciously go through periods of complete disengagement from social media – a day, a week, or a month – and notice how it feels. How strong and how frequent were those urges to reconnect? Did you miss anything? Did anything positive arise in their place?
Another idea is to become aware of the sources of our media and news and do more than mentally disagreeing with them. Do not turn them on. Do not watch them and they cannot count you in their audience or ad-value. Many people will say, I don't watch CNN, yet they continue to watch Youtube. Realize YouTube is far worse than CNN, for it generates vast wealth for the anti-trump machine.
Notice the extent to which you live in an information silo. Make a regular habit of checking the websites of news sources outside your ideological comfort zone. Do not visit Google, or open or use any Google App. If you must, skip the content you know they depend on you seeing and see what’s listed two or three pages down, and occasionally try an alternative search engine for a reality check.
We can use the realization that our minds are being manipulated to delve deeper into the patterns of thought instilled in us from early infancy by our culture. What ideas do we take for granted that are really constructions of the global corporate profit machine? What implicit beliefs do we hold about the world that are merely the result of deep cultural indoctrination? Asking these questions, while consciously searching for patterns of meaning that could lead to a more equitable and sustainable world, offers a pathway of liberation from the mind control those distant strangers are attempting to impose on us.
Finally, there are now apps specifically designed by communities who have dedicated their lives to helping people remain free of the mind control of Big Tech. You may never hear about them unless you look for them (or happen to be reading this article). This is mostly due to the fact they do not advertise or seek to profit financially from their humanitarian efforts, coupled with the awareness that society's current craze for "success" and "audience" is, in itself, an intentional result of the efforts of those pulling the strings of the public mind - the companies who exploit society's efforts to "grow" by the daily use of their "platforms," efforts which, in reality, only benefit the platforms and serve to perpetuate and extend the depths of their ability to control the minds of their users and prevent them from ever founding their own apps or from realizing just how easy it is for anybody to replace them with a free and non-manipulative, open-source, and community-owned model, which would not only damage their enormous profits and break the iron curtain around the flow of information, but also transfer vast wealth to the very people who need it the most.
Facebook (now Meta), Google, Twitter, Amazon, and Microsoft will stop at nothing in their efforts to prevent the use of any apps which may threaten their empires, and they make no attempt to disguise their suppressive practices.
As these companies move from social apps to global payment systems and top-tier holding companies, venture capitalists with military weapons contracts, advanced nuclear fusion and fission patents, bio-engineering and generically-engineered drug factories (on one hand) while also holding the very pliable minds of our children, via games and apps and short-form-videos (in the other), with their elbows deep into the private health records of all people while holding a shroud over their secret nuclear AI drone programs, it is very important for them that the vast majority of the human population be prevented from ever connecting the neural synopsis attached to their more sinister activities by a constant triggering of social pleasure centers and peer influence, followed by negative references designed to steer their victims away from any news article or content which may mention it.
In closing, I sincerely encourage anybody interested in this subject to try some of my suggestions and do everything you can to take control of the data you share as well as the information you consume.
Use Private Apps
Endorse the User-Owned Business Model for digital and social media. It is not communist. It simply means all users are partners and earn a share of the profits equal to their contribution, and it may be the only concept capable of fighting what is coming and maintaining a private means of digital communication.
Read new books by authors not publicly promoted or endorsed.
Read banned books!
Read free and unregistered books.
And, the most powerful and effective of all detergents (stain-lifters)----- > become the creator and not the consumer --- write articles, stories, and novels on issues which interest you deep inside your heart. Create outlines and map your original thoughts into a strategic weapon of love tempered by wisdom, knowledge, and diligence. Publish your words on the small apps that they may help the small groups of people who have the courage to challenge the big ones working against us.
When you become the writer and not the consumer, you will have regained your full human power.
With love,
Writing under the pen name "W.O. Wikacy"
Daniel Perley