Social Media, Civil War and the End of Liberty (Part 1)

 So much has changed over the last six months, the life we once knew appears to be gone as we are encouraged to embrace the “new normal.” Social distancing, masks, temperature checks, restricted entrances at Walmart are part of life for the foreseeable future. We have no idea when we can see a play or concert again, go to church, a county fair or see a parade. We have missed life events; births, funerals, proms, anniversary parties, visiting the sick in a hospital. We hope some things come back, others were missed and are gone forever.

These are more than inconveniences, these communal events are crucial in shaping our common identity as a people. Coming together to share in celebration or remembrance, no matter how weighty or trivial the reason, these are events that satisfy the longing within all of us for human contact, for a sense of belonging, the need to see a smile and feel the touch of our fellow human beings. With it is a shared experience that unites us. All of that is gone.

What has taken it's place? Social media. Look at the path we have taken. We once talked face to face and we learned how to read facial expressions, to acquire clues about a person by listening and observing. Masks now hide many of those cues and if they do become part of the “new normal” how are children going to learn these skills? Then we started communicating over the phone where the visual cues disappeared but tone, inflection, cadence and volume made the nuances of communication reasonably clear and it happened in real time. Now we send a text or a post which eliminates all the visual and audio cues. There is no warmth or personal touch in a text, the accuracy of communication reaches its lowest level. The cold, impersonal text leaves so much real communication out. If we believe this is satisfying our need for intimacy and social interaction, we are lying to ourselves.

But we have immersed ourselves in the world of social media as governments at various levels have prohibited proper forms of social interaction. What this has done is forced us to become even more immersed in an artificial world, a world that is manipulated for the sole purpose of keeping us within it for profit. It is designed to make us addicts, addicts to notifications and likes and ads and pointless information. What do social media platforms call us? Not customers-users. Just like drug addicts. This growing addiction is drawing us all into the artificial world of the Matrix.

In this world we no longer interact with our neighbors or even our families. In it we connect with people we have never met, seeking their approval through likes and shares, measuring our worth through these artificial numbers. It is no coincidence that since social media became widespread over ten years ago, suicides among young women especially, have increased dramatically. As if that is not bad enough, we confuse likes, shares and views with the truth as if the number of views has any relation to the accuracy of the information.

The information we receive on our phones, all the pictures and the ads and the news feeds, is manipulated by algorithms to keep us engaged by feeding us what they think we want to see. Every click, every like, every share teaches the algorithm something about us that it can use to further addict us to that particular media platform. If these algorithms were neutral, impersonal programs that were simply trying to please us by learning our habits and inclinations, well, that would be scary enough. But algorithms are not neutral, objective, impersonal programs. Algorithms are opinions embedded in code and they have goals, they have a definition of success. That success may be increased profits for the platform or it may be something else.

Whether the coronavirus pandemic was planned or the reaction to it was merely opportunistic I will leave to the reader to decide. There is no doubt, however, that the reaction to it was unprecedented. Never before have governments essentially locked well people in their homes for months, shut down business and prohibited physical interaction on a national, and really, world-wide scale. If you remember before the pandemic, globalism was in decline; Trump, Brexit, the rise of nationalism and individualism over globalism, economic prosperity which always lessens the need for government intervention. Now all of a sudden a virus that has a mortality rate similar to the seasonal flu and kills less than ten percent of those who die of cancer or heart disease every year and it all goes away with this unprecedented draconian response. Now people locked in their homes have no other option for communication than the internet and more time than ever to do it. Has this all been part of a scam to get us all ensnared in a world so easily manipulated by the powerful for their own ends?

Before you dismiss the idea, consider what the algorithms in social media are doing to us by tailoring our individual feeds based on our individual habits. It is creating a different and individual reality for each one of us, our own personal “Truman Show”. Our news feeds, our searches and recommendations are manipulated based on algorithms and NOT truth or accuracy so no two people see exactly the same thing, therefore there is no longer a common objective reality we share. This is subtly separating us. We each have our own reality with our own set of facts. How can we communicate meaningfully and accurately anymore? Our assumptions and realities are not just tribal anymore, but unique to us as individuals. And we think everyone agrees with us because that's what our news feed tells us. Once we believe that, we are ripe for manipulation.

Objective truth has been under assault for a long time, relativism and utilitarianism have replaced absolute truth and universal principles of value. Not only can we not agree on what is true, we can't even acknowledge that there is such a thing as truth. Facts are no longer statements of objective truth but strongly held opinions. Now we are all operating on a different set of 'facts' and once we do that, we cannot be objective anymore, we cannot even consider the possibility of other contradictory 'facts'. When everyone has their own set of facts, there is no longer a shared reality and the possibility of communication and compromise vanishes. We wonder how the other side can be so stupid, we see the facts every day, don't they? The answer is no, they don't. They see their own facts and they are different from yours because all the 'facts' are being manipulated.

There is no doubt the system is biased toward false information. On Twitter, fake news travels six times faster than real news. Often Algorithms steer you down rabbit holes whose content may be completely false but it comes up in your feed and presents itself as true. Why? Because the truth is boring; false information makes more money. We are beginning to see what the world is going to look like when lies have that kind of advantage.

It is destroying any sense of community, locally and nationally. We have been denied our common experiences in the real world because of Covid restrictions and there are no such things in cyberspace because they are all filtered and manipulated. Every objective event, a police shooting for example, is no longer a news story based on fact but an event manipulated for the purpose of creating division and discord. Why? Polarization keeps people online which means more money. We want to see what the other side is doing and we want to be consoled and affirmed by our own side. Dissonance is also better for those who want control. They can pander to aggrieved groups, they can create boogeymen, they can promise protection. Are you beginning to see what is happening?

Imagine a world where no one believes anything that is true, where everything is a government conspiracy or a lie fostered by the group that is not you. No one trusts anyone, you are taught to hate the other side. We are seeing it in the streets. Look at what BLM has done to race relations by creating a false narrative. Antifa is doing the same with class warfare. People don't even want to interact anymore. Instead of continuing the process of integration, Black people are buying property to create havens for black people or demanding the state of Texas as a Black only state. Social media would have you think this is the norm but it is not. The vast majority of my interactions with Black people have been positive and friendly but social media distorts reality and makes us believe that every Black person is ready for a race war and every white person is part of the Klan. This creates suspicion and distrust where there wasn't any before, dividing us based on false perceptions.

Bad actors and governments can spread these manipulative narratives with ease for their own nefarious ends. We are being molded and exploited by people seeking power, commercially and politically. Social media now has the ability to destabilize all countries at once. Democracy is for sale to whomever wants to target a lie to a specific population to create chaos and foment a culture or civil war. Facebook calls this “coordinated inauthentic behavior”, the use of multiple fake accounts to boost engagement or spread content. With Covid and the forced isolation and steady diet of social media, we are seeing it happen before our eyes. Large state actors are seeking control, globalists are tearing down all marginally democratic systems for their own malicious goals. It's already happened in countries like Honduras, the Philippines, Ukraine, Spain and of course, the United States among others.

So what is the solution? Who should police these platforms to root out all the lies, expose the bad actors and stop the manipulation? Should Facebook and Twitter be the arbiters of the truth, flagging or eliminating any posts or content they find wanting? They wouldn't know the truth if it hit them in the face. The government? Do you really want the government deciding what you see on the internet? If you give government control of all media and allow them to spread manipulative narratives with ease, you will have the situation current in China, North Korea and a number of Muslim countries. No, neither of them is a solution. It is OUR responsibility to be informed and to think critically, a capability that has been bred out of too many of us through the government school system.

The problem is US. We are allowing it, we are participating in it. We are willingly living in an illusion, the Matrix, and either don't understand or don't care how we are being manipulated because we lack the mental tools to comprehend our enslavement. We have lost the ability to think critically, we don't understand philosophy, political or otherwise. Look at us. We are a nation of spoiled children desiring to have our way and get our stuff without having to work or sacrifice. Few of us think about the consequences, implications or the true ignorance of such a worldview. For us to receive without work, the products of someone elses labor needs to be stolen. For us to have our delicate egos protected, someone elses liberty must be limited. A world based on entitlement is a world based on theft, not only of those in the present who have more but from future generations who will live in a world defined by limitations they will not even see because they will have grown up in the Matrix, the “new normal.”

A people who accept such a world as normal and, God forbid, virtuous, are easily duped. When we think we are owed, when we think money if free, when we seek to be offended and believe being offended is just cause for personal retaliation and government action, we are ripe for manipulation. How easy it is to divide a people who believe it is their right to live in a bubble of security where only their life and viewpoint has value. Yet in truth, our individual lives have no value in the Matrix. We are simply little computer nodes in a giant artificial brain, interchangeable and valueless. We are solely means to an end. Yet who's end? What is the goal of all this control and manipulation? That is for the next installment.