We’re All Being Manipulated the Same Way ~ Conservative or liberal, American or Filipino, everyone is a victim of tech platforms’ attack on the truth.
Surveillance capitalism, which Shoshana Zuboff has described in great detail, is what powers this entire thing (a kind of global pyramid scheme -efg). And we only debate content moderation. That’s like if you had a polluted river and were only looking at a test tube of water instead of where the pollutant is coming from. I call it a virus of lies.Today, we live in a behavior-modification system.
The tech platforms that now distribute the news are actually biased against facts, and they’re biased against journalists. E. O. Wilson, who passed away in December, studied emergent behavior in ants. So think about emergent behavior in humans. He said the greatest crisis we face is our Paleolithic emotions, our medieval institutions, and our godlike technology.
What travels faster and further? Hate. Anger. Conspiracy theories. Do you wonder why we have no shared space? I say this over and over. Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without these, we have no shared space and democracy is a dream.
Surveillance capitalism pulls together four things. We look at them as separate problems, but they’re identical. The first is antitrust: There’s three antitrust bills that are pending at the U.S. Senate. Then data privacy: Who owns your data? Do you? Or does the company that collates them and creates a model of you. Third is user safety: Do we have a Better Business Bureau for our brains? And the fourth: content moderation. As long as you’re thinking about content, you’re not looking at everything else.
What happens in the virtual world happens in the real world. That thing where people think they’re different, disabuse your mind of that. There is only one world because we live in both worlds.
There are four layers in this 'pyramid' scheme. What are the four layers? Each of the newsgroups have links to each other—that’s good for search. And they also then share each other. Use your power. And then beyond that, it moves to the second layer. I call it “the mesh,” like in that movie Don’t Look Up, where the Planetary Defense system came together like a mesh.
That’s kind of the way we have to live right now on social media, because meaning has been commoditized and each of us has to take our area of influence and clean it up. Then we connect it to each other, like a mesh. So all our human-rights organizations, our business groups, the church, environmental groups, civil societies, and NGOs are taking what the newsgroups are doing and sharing it with emotion.
The last layer is the most important one, and they’ve been quiet for too long: legal groups. If you don’t have facts, you cannot have rule of law. These legal groups now are working hand in hand with the pyramid. They get the data pipeline and they then file both strategic and tactical litigation. The one that I think is important is from the solicitor general, who really started the weaponization of the law, and he called fact-checking prior restraint.
Indeed, we are all being manipulated. The sad irony is that everyone especially journalists like her think that they have the 'right' sources or 'right' truth in view or in context of their 'weaponized' geo-political directed manipulated pyramid scheme.
Indeed, we are in the time of when good is called evil and evil good. And, yes, in a global world order, we have surveillance capitalism. I discussed this at university 20 years ago but we all agreed then that surveillance fascist communism would not be the better option.
In fact, surveillance fascist communism is top-down engineering at its worst (look at Shanghai today) talk about being manipulated. In such a scheme, you won't be able to take the ‘vaca’ you want when you want let alone go out when you want to i.e. ... Surveillance society means you do what you are allowed and only that! ~ Dr. EFG
*Online Source ~ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/maria-ressa-disinformation-manipulation/629483/?fbclid=IwAR0Ur5yJYQQSxIP4PNz0TssYwtKqd9d9FUMBhJmjko3bFNSidVzSqKBFgFs
Maria Ressa is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, the CEO of Rappler, and a recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.
