We live in the strangest of days. It's really something.
I am not an educated man, but I'd bet the farm that this type of rapid societal transformation can't really occur without being accompanied by massive destabilization. We've changed the terrain, and now we're lost.
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Or more accurately, the terrain was changed for us, but it happened incrementally, so we almost didn't notice. There were other factors, but I'd have to guess that the primary driver was technology.
Let's consider the TV for a minute.
They put a magic box in our living room.
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They put it there to tell us stories. Stories about what happened, or more accurately what they wanted us to believe had happened. And stories about perfection.
Perfect families. Perfect villains. Perfect heroes.
The handsome man always riding off into the sunset.
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It seems nice, but I believe that herein are contained the seeds of radicalization.
That was the first time our society got to take a collective peek at Ward and June Cleavers Instagram story, and and when we started to realize that ours wasn't so pretty.
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We didn't have what they had.
Our house wasn't as beautiful, or as big. We didn't have Ward's good job or June's nice dresses. It wasn't okay for the kids to take over the farm anymore, they wanted more, so they started moving to town.
The changes accelerated from there.
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And the people telling us stories on the magic box started to hone their craft. They got really good at convincing us that we couldn't possibly be happy without whatever it was that they needed us to need.
And it was easy to tell what we wanted, because we would buy it.
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They started to figure us out, so they could sell us more of what we wanted, or more accurately, what we thought we wanted, because we didn't actually use most of it and still don't. We wanted better jobs, so we could have better stuff, thinking better stuff = better lives.
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But they were inside of our heads by then. Tinkering.
Turning screws and pushing buttons. Changing things, and consequently changing the course of human desire and therefore human history.
Siloing us down so that they could give us more and more of what we wanted.
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Slicing us into thinner and thinner slices.
It completely transformed global society, we were prisoners of the screen, and slaves to the things that it told us we needed to be happy.
But it takes more than that to radicalize people, you have to concentrate on the siloing.
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A movie from 1992 came on the TV today. Basic Instinct.
If you're old enough to remember that movie you know that it was considered particularly racy at the time, because it gave us a minute glimpse of a womans private parts as she uncrossed and re-crossed her legs.
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It was truly shocking at the.
The Republicans were up in arms over it.
But more importantly, we collectively liked it, so they gave us more of it. Films got racier, nudity became more and more acceptable and "abnormal" became mundane.
We likely wouldn't notice it today.
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I'm not making a moral judgment, I'm only trying to illustrate how technology has accelerated the pace of societal change, particularly as it pertains to what is normal, and what is not.
They give us more, but not of what we want. They give us more of what we consume.
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If we think about how that's applied today in social media, they're actually able to give us more of what we consume in real time. The algorithm makes calculations on the fly, and the more we interact with the horror, the more horror they feed us.
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You don't have to want see what they're serving you, it can literally be a car crash. Nobody wants to see a car crash, but we can't turn away from it either, so they feed us all car crashes until we can't stand to see them anymore and start tweeting about car crashes.
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And once we enter that portion of the cycle, the "they" that we are talking about, is us.
Now we are the machine.
But it's actually darker than that. It's way worse.

Facebook for example, likely has 15 years of user data on every one of us. 15 years of texts, clicks, likes..
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Page scroll pauses... You get the idea.
You know how you read your ex-boyfriend's posts, but don't interact with them thinking no one will know? Facebook knows. They've got you figured out. Siloed down to the most broken parts of you, sliced into the thinnest possible slices.
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We don't have to imagine how this plays out for the psychologically fragile among us. We've got a real-time window into that, thanks to the Q thing. I guess the island of misfit toys is more densely populated than we thought.
Thin slices. Pushing buttons.
Turning screws.
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Turning all the misfit toys into button pushers and screw turners.
They feed us, what we become, and we in turn help others become.

They.
But who TF are they?
Seriously who are they?
This group of no-give-a-fuck individuals that we've handed the keys to our subconscious to?
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They're not our friends, that's for damn sure. They don't have our best interests at heart, or the best interests of our country, or any other country for that matter.

The social/non-social media platforms that we're discussing could be loosely defined as "businesses"
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But not really, because once a business has more annual revenue than the GDP of a small country, can you really say it's just a business?
I don't think you can.
At that point you have to define it as a geopolitical player.
Don't you?
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Facebook has the financial resources of a country, and the legal muscle, political influence and lobbying capability to rival any democratic nation on earth.
And they have all of your data. They know everything about you, and everything about your elected officials.
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Psychological profiles, you and everyone you know, siloed down to the brokenest parts, and sliced thin enough to see through. They know more about the choices that you are likely to make, then you do.
And we just gave it to them, so we could stay in touch with our kids.
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We could tell ourselves that there's a possibility that we could survive all of that, and that these social media companies are benevolent businesses, and that it's in their interests to perpetuate the public good. We could.
If we didn't know what they've already done.
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I actually don't want to give you the impression that I'm picking on Facebook.
I'm not. The problem is actually bigger than the blue bannered nation state in the cloud that is Facebook.
There's more pieces in play.
Other people and entities are involved.
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The problem is that hostile nations, religious zealots, former US military personnel with intelligence training, and billionaires that desire specific geopolitical outcomes, use the silos to, and slices of, you, and I, with deadly precision.

And that they have my sister.
/End