"God Only Knows What It's Doing To Our Children's Brains"
— Sean Parker, Napster founder and original Facebook president.
Our story today dates back to January of 2012 when a Data Collecting agency moonlighting as a social media platform launched a secret mission into the minds of their users, without their consent.
The experiment consisted into filtering the contents on the users’ feeds without their knowledge, basically stopping them from seeing certain posts that were shared by their friends.
The experiment subjects were then successfully locked into an echo-chamber where only certain types of content are allowed to be seen.
The echo-chamber is one of the most powerful manipulation techniques known to man. Its main principle consists on removing the entire surroundings of the victim so that the manipulator can control everything they can hear and see.
The goal of the perpetrators is that the victims are completely unable to receive any other pieces of information from the outside world to compare with the information inside the echo-chamber.
“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.” — J. R. R. Tolkien.
Cults are notorious for employing this tactic, the minute a new victim is recruited, no effort is spared in order to separate them from their family, friends and any connection to the outside world.
Just like a serpent slowly circling your rib cage, wrapping themselves around your body while slowly debilitating you... Until they know that they successfully immobilize you, it’s then and only then that they begin to inject the venom.
The Venomous Taste of the Single Narrative
Dangers of the single story isn’t exactly what you call a short commodity, history is filled with conflicts that were instigated, wars that were ignited and societies that were brought to their knees by such an inhuman monstrosity.
Our free will and critical senses are what makes us human after all.
“It neither kills outright nor inflicts apparent physical harm, yet the extent of its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record - and its potential damage to the quality of human life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation.
For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the 'Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.' Its more conventional name, of course, is dehumanization.” ― Ashley Montagu, The Dehumanization Of Man.
Stephen Colbert joked the other day about Facebook’s threat on our free will, and to be honest, I didn’t quite understand what he meant back then.
Until I started to take a deep look at Facebook’s echo-chambers and I asked myself: Who does these things?
It’s funny to observe how it’s always the most despicable of all dictators that try to isolate the public from any other piece of information that defies the single narrative.
In Nazi Germany, the Gestapo convinced the population that they had records and surveillance of every single citizen, while in fact they only had the personal data of about 10% of the population.
I guess they didn’t have Facebook back then.
The reason why they did that of course is to scare the public from subscribing to any ideology that deviates from the single story that they push in newspaper and television which they controlled with an iron fist.
After all, you don't need me to tell you about all the extensive censorship and propaganda in the Third Reich, we've all heard the stories. But let me give you another example.
In the former Soviet Union there were two only newspapers allowed: Pravda (the Truth) and Izvestiya (the News).
And people apparently used to joke that there was no truth in the News, and no news in the Truth.
They kind of knew what was going on but at the end of the day, they had no other options, as they were locked inside an airtight echo-chamber where they are constantly fed the same antagonistic narrative until such point when they become effectively divided and polarized.
Closing Thoughts
If you would've told me a few years ago that there was someone collecting data about every single aspect of people’s lives. That they were tracking each activity that the public engages in.
That they were trying to listen to everyone in the privacy of their homes, and spy on people every hour of the day… And oh, that they were busy trying to lock people inside ideological echo-chambers and trap them in feedback loops.
And then if you would’ve given me the choice between:
A) Joseph Goebbels
B) Ivan Pavlov
C) Jim Jones
D) Mark Zuckerberg
If you would’ve asked me that a few years ago, there’s no way in hell I would’ve answered Zucks.
I guess there is only one thing left to say: