The honey-trap of tribal love
Human species might actually dissapear just because the altered information space
When the Russians and Saudis put billions into the development processes in Silicon Valley, Americans barely noticed: “Some stinky rich guys on the West Coast. They are buying social media, so what?”
Some will remember: Oligarch Yuri Milner has purchased shares in Facebook, Zynga, Stripe, Twitter , Flipkart , Practo, Spotify, Zocdoc, Groupon, JD.com, Xiaomi, OlaCabs, Alibaba, Airbnb, WhatsApp, Nubank, Wish, Robin Hood, and many others. Social media represent the upper level of the distribution of knowledge in our civilization. These platforms decide, who knows, what is going to be known and who is allowed to become the new information authority.
Sheryl Sandberg, daughter of Russian immigrants from Florida and a Harvard alumna, was hired as the Facebook leading business person. She invented the entire surveillance business model, based on the unethical mining of our intimate psychological data and behavioral predictions by artificial intelligence. These products (Facebook has gradually swallowed every strong competition as early as possible) are used daily by half of the people on the planet. Tens of millions of behavioral predictions take place every second on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and others, determining which psychological class we belong to in the database and how we are likely to behave in the next few minutes of our lives. These predictions are supposedly used to better map and predict our purchasing behavior as well as election behaviour-
This knowledge primarily gives few oligarchs the greatest power in history of mankind. No, it´s not a hyperbole.
Social media has become a demiurg of the behavior of the human swarm. We are entrapped. The algorithms can predict not only our behavioral triggers, but also influence them. The dystopia we experience today “ trumped biggly” the scariest parts of the Book of Revelation. We became prisoners of the honey-trap of our social value inside our Facebook tribe. We desire to belong to tese new tribes more than we are able to understand our beloved ones. This knowledge helped to slowly enslave millions of humans without their attention and close them into bubbles, opinion tribes, religions and even dangerous cults. The human swarm is not healthy anymore, the omnipresent undue influence shapes its suicidal behavior.
Company Cambridge Analytica was the first to convince us that Facebook and people who have access to the databases (psychometric data is the 21st century enriched uranium) can manipulate human tribal emotions and hidden fears to cause short-circuited behavior in towards elections, insurgencies and even genocides (Myanmar). “We can find your hidden demons”, bragged CA Director Alexander Nix at a presentation in Washington D.C., 2016. He forgot to tell a substantial part of their business story: They sold themselves to the Russian state company Lukoil and other adversaries od democracy.
Social Media is not the single perpetrator of the most serious epistemic crisis in history, but it is the most influential one. If we don’t understand that the distortion of our information space has caused the loss of our collective ability to agree on an interpretation of reality, we will perish like that bee swarm poisoned by neurotoxins. Our addictive need of tribal dopamine, attention and positive confirmation will kill us in the same way. The oligarchs, our adversaries and insurrection supporters, they already know how this game works. Now is time that the people get this too.
***