“I just want to see horses!”
The outcry when a news feed is being swiftly tailored to establishment opinions
I was standing by the fence yesterday and right across our neighbour’s son and daughter walked past. They were complaining about what they were seeing on SecondPost, a social media app that has become wildly popular among teenagers these days. Scott, the neighbour’s son, is on the high school hockey team and he is very much into all of the major sports leagues. On the contrary, his sister Kelly loves us. Yes, you read that right: she loves caring for horses and she avidly shares her passion both on SecondPost and on NetFreaks, another app owned by the same parent company.
As they walked past, they were sharing frustrations about their online experiences. “You know, the Big Game is up tomorrow,” Scott snared angrily, “and all I’m seeing is Taylor Swift. If they showed me game strategies, plays to expect, rumours about the players, just anything, you know I’m saying… but just not Taylor Swift. She’s never even held a football in her hands.” Then Kelly joined in: “You know that’s happening to me too? I used to see stables, horse breeds, some horse races and now everything is Taylor Swift”. As they walked away, she screamed: “I just want to see horses!”
I am just a horse, so I don’t use SecondPost. or NetFreaks for that matter. Life is too good out here to lose it in some sort of device. But I did want to know what is going on, and here is what I found.
Back in the early 2000s, intelligence agencies, such as CSIS, NSA, CIA, GCHQ and the likes were all desperate to be able to model social interactions. At first, they wanted to know who is connected to whom. But their eventual plan was much bigger. After modeling social networks, they wanted to learn each and every person’s interests into minute detail and eventually, their intent was to influence these preferences. In their ideal world, not a single person would ever harbour a negative thought about the establishment or the intelligence community, once their technology was rolled out.
I don’t like the intelligence community, but one thing we have to admit that they are good at, is to develop tools. So to learn social networks, they developed SpookNet, a tool in which they could monitor interactions between their own colleagues. Yet what they really wanted was to monitor interactions in the broader public. The average citizen being skeptical about the intelligence community’s intentions, it would have been a bad idea to just launch SpookNet as a government-run website. This is where Mike Suckercreek comes in. The intelligence community decided to follow a well proven path: find a docile, not-all-that-intelligent seventeen-year-old from a trusted and vetted family, make him sign a State Secret Contract and then claim that he developed SpookNet in his garage between ages eleven and twelve. But of course, it needed a different name. Suckercreek wasn’t all that creative either, but fortunately the CIA had a great marketing organization with connections all across the venture capital community and soon SecondPost was born, the free speech site where “you can post your opinion on anything in just a second”.
SecondPost got all the government support one can dream of: huge government research grants, along with floods of capital infused from intelligence-connected venture capital firms made sure that SecondPost developed into a billion-dollar company. While SecondPost grew, the intelligence community played the same trick to learn about what people like rather than what they opine about. Fifteen-year-old Jake DeMolay was set up with the SpooksPix architecture to share vast amount of pictures and comment on them, which was then launched as NetFreaks and eventually acquired by SecondPost.
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Given the State Secret Contracts and lasting financial ties to the government and to the intelligence community, it should not come as a surprise that SecondPost has no opinion of its own, but just takes marching orders. Yet SecondPost soon discovered that it could do more than to merely have people post on its platform and to analyze the result. Actually, as SecondPost had grown so fast, it was processing billions of posts a day. No user would ever see all of these posts, even if they’d actively looked for them. So SecondPost found itself actually at liberty to show whatever they chose to show to their users. If they had wanted to have Saddam Hussain reinstated, all they’d had to do is to selectively present positive posts about Saddam in users’ news feeds. Most users would then start to think favorably of Saddam.
In so doing, SecondPost actively abuses innate psychological reassurances of perceived peer pressure and the feeling of belonging. If it looks like everybody else loves Saddam, most users will start to question themselves rather then to ask themselves why they are not seeing opposite opinions. This technology is known as nudge technology, since it is actually very successful at nudging people into changing their opinions. Nudge technology is not limited to social media, but it can also be deployed in the shape of computer games, legacy media, movies or even commercials. A prominent alcoholic beverage producer’s recent decision to engage with trans activist Dylan Mulvaney is a good example of nudging in commercials: the drastically negative impact on their financial results illustrates that sales were not the driver to associate with a celebrity who represents values alien to their own customer base. The nudge strategy behind it intended to influence the values their customers hold dear, which in this case clearly failed.
When Scott and Kelly only started seeing Taylor Swift, they were being nudged. Nudged away from “aggressive, toxic masculine sports” and “ecologically unfriendly hobbies involving animals that have the same carbon footprint as a small person”, while being nudged toward the empty-headedness of celebrity culture and Taylor Swift’s music devoid of any content.
This brings me to the point. Meanwhile, I trust that the intelligence community has all the tools it needs to nudge. But what I trust far less is that they have the intelligence to know which direction to nudge in. In fact, all I am seeing from these nudge efforts is that they absolutely have no sense of right or wrong and are acting totally opposite to common sense and to the interest of the people. No gender is born with inherent toxicity nor is any gender exempt from toxic behaviours. Attempting to change one’s own gender does not make one less or more toxic. There is no need to reduce carbon emissions up to the level of the individual animal. So let’s return to reason and try to care for a sustainable future without nudging individuals to make or support radical changes that are diametrically opposed to common sense.
Hitherto, I have not yet mentioned nudging in the most basic interaction with information: search. As it turns out, 97% of the world’s internet search is delivered by LookingGlass, an app owned by Abacus Inc., which can bias the results whichever way they like. Users will simply not realize that different information even exists. Scott and Kelly soon started to be aware of that too: when Kelly typed ‘horse’ into LookingGlass’s search bar, the top twenty search results described “why a gender transition might be the right path for you.”
Since the intelligence community controls the likes of LookingGlass and SecondPost, I also trust that they know how they are influencing opinions. And again I have no trust that they have earned the moral superiority to be in the driver seat. Still, there are slight differences between these companies. While Suckercreek is merely a bottle of hot air, LookingGlass’s then eighteen-year-old founder Stanley Brine is an absolute zealot who once stated to intend to “reshape global societies in accordance to LookingGlass morals”. Well, judging by everything I see, their moral compass is entirely upside down. Yet their effort is exactly what caused Scott and Kelly to be nudged away from their hobbies.
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Based on what I observe, we are dealing with a stupidity community rather than an intelligence community. That notion is even more frightening when combined with the knowledge that they have very advanced tools and control very powerful corporations. But there is hope.
Both Scott and Kelly saw that something was off. The more radical the nudging, the less Scott and Kelly or any of their peers will trust what they are seeing. Eventually that will mean the demise of the stupidity community. Virtually nobody in the Soviet Union trusted the word of the Pravda. We are not far away from that happening to social media. Likewise, it has already been established that Clydesdales make for better beer commercials than trans activists. Of course, isn’t it a no-brainer that horses are the better pick for a commercial?
As a caring horse, I advise the stupidity community to stop nudging. If nudging their own population into nonsense is the best they can come up with to “protect our national security”, than they have lost all relevance. Where do they even get the arrogance from to think that they know what is best for everyone? Truly, my best advice is to stop nudging. Because as it stands now, we horses will be roaming this continent long after the nudge efforts will have been disbanded. When the time comes, their tools will signal that change is imminent. But both LookingGlass and their overlords will be too conceited to act upon it.
Yet we don’t have to wait for things to change around us, and nor do Scott and Kelly. They can start spending more time in nature and be focused on what happens right here and right now. I have a good time without any of these digital services and so will they. Life without digital garbage is much more rewarding.
(no need to say, this work is fiction and any similarity to real persons or companies is purely coincidental)