I'm not conspiracy minded. I see the hullabaloo right now is about Fake News , PizzaGate and all the other trending topics in the media. I see a pattern and I want to warn you about it because it's dangerous to your freedoms.
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Every one of these freedoms is under attack right now.
We have radical Islam (a very tiny subset of a very large faith group) being touted out and blamed for every attack by some crazed jack ass with a kitchen knife. And the government is now talking about restricting peoples movements based on religion and maybe setting up a registry.
We have the so called "Fake News" story circulating with a very serious undertone of "anything that isn't coming from the mainsteam media is fake". In the meantime you have this pizzagate thing everyone is talking about, which truth or not, is bordering on slander and libel based on what the intelligence community would call "an amplified but unreliable signal".
This is setting up for a dangerous show down, because the very next step is a law that will weaken freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Eventually it will require a "press credential" in order to be able to report the news.
The question here is why?
And as ridiculous as this sounds, it's probably your webbrowser, your phone and the echo chamber effect of automated curation by "deep learning" systems. It's effecting you and it's effecting the people who run the 6'oclock news.
As you search and move across the internet, you are tracked by a myriad of various little bots, scripts and web bugs. These things are constantly comparing your movements to the movements of others and suddenly you're seeing what they're seeing. Google is curating your search, facebook is curating your newsfeed and twitter is curating your list.
Everyone keeps using these services despite the low quality that results from these services sourcing data from the 50% of people who are well below the median average IQ.
But it's more than that. No matter how tiny you think you are, you have a very loud voice with a very far reach. The more you follow a topic, the more you research it, the more it raises the profile of the items you spend page time on with others. Not only others in your direct social group, but others who are socially similar to yourself. This social similarity indexing is going on every time you look at at site on the web and allow it track you.
You're going to find that roughly 20% of the people in the world share common interests with you, that's a crapton of people you share at least something socially with.
This also means that you're not special, none of us are. We're not that different from anyone else and by this, I mean ANYONE else, Trump, Clinton, Bernie Sanders, hell even Colonel Sanders. We exist within a shared matrix of information and the machines filtering and prioritizing this information for us are causing a feedback loop and compartmentalizing us ever tighter into a tiny handful of "slots". We're building bubbles we can't break out of.
So now you only see what others see, they only see what you see. A whisper in crowded hall is nothing, but that's how the screeching feedback in a dance hall starts. A tiny little bit of input gets amplified over and over and eventually it's an overwhelming screech! Until someone is able to think clearly and unplug the damned mic.
So that's what I'm advising you to do. Stop feeding the damned bots please, you're allowing yourself to be manipulated for advertising dollars.
Put the clickbait down and walk away.
It's a pain, but delete the cookies and cache in your browser. Install adblock plus and ghostery and noscript (or just disable javascript by default if using chrome) then make sure to make those settings stick in incognito mode.
Log out of all your social media and stay out for a few weeks, switch to signal for communications encourage your friends to do the same.
Stop using facebook, twitter, google, yahoo, bing, even duck, duck go. Set startpage.com to your home page.
Now surf the internet as per normal, but do so in "incognito mode".
Watch as this huge faceback loop you're caught in, dies down and the world returns to the pre-ai era when we had to search out the stuff we were interested in rather than having it rammed down our throats.
Why? Because there is no grand conspiracy, but someone IS going to do something soon, if we don't take steps to shut off the feedback loop right now!
When they do this it will be your freedoms that will be abridged. It will probably be barely noticeable. It will be a simple change to the law that leaves website owners liable for the postings of their users and lowers the standard for cases of slander and libel. The only exceptions will be credentialed media. Eventually you'll only be able to get news from mainstream media.
Break the cycle now, stop the feedback loop by unplugging the mic and walking away.
