Dark Psychic Forces of Social Media

Give me the strength to resist the pull of dark psychic forces attempting to suck me under using the deadly whirlpool of Facebook. I feel like Dorothy spinning in the tornado. Will my house land on a wicked witch? If so, can I have her striped socks? I did not realize how addicted to Facebook I had become until I stopped using it. I originally created an account to promote my books and my blog. That disappeared in the rearview long ago. Over time, I have become increasingly seduced by the Facebook experience. The platform was first created as a resource for connectivity, which is my favorite thing about it. If only it could have stopped at that and not devolved into the nefarious mechanism for global destruction it has become. You may wonder what changed for me. What changed is that I watched the exposé The Great Hack (available for streaming on Netflix), which is quite the eye-opener. It is a testimony to the power of art to change our lives that this documentary made a measureable difference in mine. It is also a testimony to the power of social-media-driven manipulative advertising that authoritarian, repressive, unethical, climate-emergency-denying governments are on the rise around the world.

Facebook have I loved. I loved that it made me laugh. I loved that it lifted me up with beautiful images. I loved that it gave me a window into the lives of others. I loved the things I learned (while carefully navigating false information). I loved that it kept me in communication with friends around the world whom I would otherwise rarely connect with, certainly not on a daily basis. Many friends I will never see again in person in this life, but we continued to touch each other’s lives in virtual space. I felt empowered to share my political views and censor what I wished to read by hitting the delete button. I instigated a few political actions with my words. I felt heartened to discover like-minded souls. I enjoyed more than a few extraordinary Facebook connectivity experiences. But I was ignoring the seamy underside. All this time, Facebook has been collecting personal data on people, mine included, and selling it in the open marketplace where it can be and is used without our consent for unethical purposes. All my Facebook loves do not outweigh the abuse of data made possible by this platform, which has caused the actual (not virtual) loss, pain, and death of people resulting from the amoral calculated manipulation of targeted advertising. Or the misuse of data that has resulted in power shifts away from recognizing and addressing the climate emergency now upon us because it interferes with the profits of a few unconcerned individuals. I’m taking the children, the cats, the books, my EV, and my cast iron skillet, and I’m divorcing Facebook.

I confess that at first I found The Great Hack somewhat confusing. I couldn’t understand what was going on or why key players made the choices they did. I couldn’t connect the dots and figure out how access to people’s data made it possible to throw an election. Until I had my aha moment. It was all about the advertising. Duh. It was about targeted manipulation. I was partly confused because I had never seen the advertising Cambridge Analytica used to influence people that was shown in the film and I didn’t even get what some of it was meant to do. I have never seen any of that advertising. I never saw it because I am not what Cambridge Analytica categorizes as a “persuadable.” I was probably not targeted because I was profiled as someone unlikely to be swayed by advertising. But others are. Others are prey. And the predators went for blood. It was Vance Packard’s “Hidden Persuaders” (can you believe his book was published in 1957?) on steroids and powered by the technology of the 21^st century as a tool of the dark psychic forces, a weapon of mass destruction.

Cambridge Analytica is what happens when children are raised to be smart but not raised to be ethical. These individuals don’t even understand why they should try to be good, or why goodness matters. Plainly stated, they cannot distinguish right from wrong. So Alexander Nix and his team (including Brittany Kaiser) did the immoral, disastrous things that they did just to see if they could actually succeed at them. The extreme consequences for individual, real, breathing, living people did not enter into it. The Cambridge Analytica interference in the election in Trinidad, where they ran a targeted advertising campaign to convince young people not to vote, is a case in point. Only someone with no morals would take pride in convincing young people to self-disenfranchise. The election in Trinidad was so close, that keeping that one segment (specifically black youth) from the polls made a difference. A calculated effort to impact the election through manipulation of a vulnerable population worked. Cambridge Analytica busts open the champagne while Trinidad goes down in flames and takes the future of a whole Trinidadian generation with it. Interference in the Brexit referendum did the same for the younger generation in Britain. The devastating 2016 election in the U.S. came down to 77,744 votes in PA, WI, and MI. That’s a tiny number of “persuadables,” and well within the realm of impact of Cambridge Analytica’s targeted advertising to paint Hillary as “crooked” to enough people who would believe. (Cambridge Analytica invented “lock her up.”) I would bet that the smart-but-unethical wonks at Cambridge Analytica viewed the whole maneuver as if they were playing a video game. It was Ender’s Game. They considered it a virtual exercise, only to see it manifested in the real world. Their interference in the 2016 election has thrown my country down in flames. Quite literally for me, because I live in California at ground zero for the climate emergency, at ground zero for wildfires.

Before watching The Great Hack, I wondered why people would vote for candidates and initiatives that would clearly bring them to grief. Why vote for a candidate who did not have your best interests at heart? It never made sense to me. How could these people be so stupid? Don’t they understand why they can’t afford the medication they need? Why they lost their house? Why they can’t afford to send their children to college? Why their food is poisoned, their planet deteriorating, the future for their grandchildren robbed? Why would a hard-working, regular Joe support a tax law that reduces taxes for a few super-rich people and does nothing to ease his struggle? Why would he oppose legislation to provide him and his family with affordable healthcare? This used to befuddle me. But now I see. Targeted advertising has done its job and convinced people to believe the message tailored to them, specifically, to trap them in false thinking. They’re not stupid. They’re just human and they’re being conscientiously misled by those who would profit. They’re being duped. And that can happen to anyone targeted with the right kind of messaging. It could happen to me. It probably has.

I would like to believe that I have used Facebook responsibly. I think I have used it for what it was intended, which is connectivity. I would like to pretend that I have protected myself from advertising and the misuse of my personal information by remaining vigilant about patrolling my borders, blocking the unwanted, checking the right privacy boxes. But I probably have not protected myself, or those with whom I am in contact on Facebook. I have no idea what “data points” are circulating in cyberspace about me or how they are being used to hurt me or influence me or others. It’s too late to recall them. It’s too late for a lot of things. But one thing I can do is choose not to engage with Facebook. I can choose not to participate. I am not suggesting that you do the same, and I do not judge. I’m just stating what I’m doing.

I am leaving my account open for now, for the same purpose that I originally created it, which is to share my writing and direct people to my blog (and because I have no other way to contact many people with whom I want to stay in touch). So I am not ready to close my account, but perhaps I will eventually, even though it will not help me recall the data points on myself that have already escaped. I am still sorting out what I think about all this and how I want to act on what I know. But these thoughts are mine, they do not originate in an algorithm run on me used to influence my choices. I will resist the whispers of the hidden persuaders lurking in the dark psychic sludge.