THE SUBTLE SEDUCTION

From the R.M. Dolin novel, “An Unsustainable Life – The Book of Darwin.”

Chapter 21: The Subtle Seduction

Anyone alive when President Kennedy is shot or old enough to remember the horrific events of 9/11, knows exactly where they were and what they were doing the moment these tragedies transpired. Ironically, no one can recall the moment they sold their soul in exchange for the conveniences of the information age because the seduction was so subtle the consequences couldn’t be discerned. While vicarious tragedies shake our sense of security, the dark mastery of methods used to soften and seduce our souls make even the most righteous clerics blush with envy.

The information age was not initiated with the Internet as most assume, it doesn’t start with smart phones either or even personal computers; the information age is launched on an innocuously quiet afternoon in a nondescript department store when, for the very first time, the mechanical machine used to imprint credit card receipts on paper is replaced by the soft sound of a digital swipe and the silent swirl of technology reading information about you off a magnetic strip and adding back information about your transaction for later retrieval. With one hapless swipe, society collectively surrenders a small slice of its privacy; but “what the hell,” we contend, it’s an insignificant consequence for the convenience of being a player in the opening act of technology’s golden age.

Tools and techniques enabling this credit card convenience rapidly evolve and with each advance, layers of privacy we protect like children are mined with the ease of water being pumped from an ocean; the more we spend, the more information-collectors learn about us and the more new and improved ways to control and manipulate our lives infiltrate the zeitgeist. With each new swipe another element of who we are is surrendered; where we go, what we do, our hidden desires providing slivers of hopeful happiness; each bit of information enabling the sorcerers of our souls, access to the necessary alchemy to further ensnare us under the spell of their seduction.

Soon other avenues infiltrate our lives at the small cost of information surrender. There’s email, instant messaging, electronic banking, social media, Internet news, digital markets, eBay, Craigslist, Marketplace, Amazon, telemedicine, on-line pharmacy, virtual meetings, chat rooms, pornography, Facebook, Instagram, Internet-streaming, and a whole host of other venues, each capturing different elements of you.

As we each become digitally defined, our habits, eccentricities, and proclivities are aggregated in rapidly evolving data centers of increasing complexity representing the collective whole of humanity distilled into each Information Oligarch’s perfect avatar. From there, two simultaneous avenues of manipulation are launched: one avenue creates technologies encapsulating your unique contribution to, and migration toward, their perfect avatar. The other avenue develops technologies to advance your metamorphosis into becoming their perfect puppet.

The fait accompli arrives not in the cataclysmic cyclone of a biblical apocalypse but in the subtle merging of information technologies with unscrupulous marketing to devise sophisticated ways to utilize the ever-increasing information we freely provide to target innovative avenues for manipulating our lives. An early indicator of their success is the ease in which Information Oligarchs manipulate weak-minded but otherwise peaceful people into riotous actions. At a whim they elevate any issue, object, or person into the most detested thing on the planet while inciting mobs to violence even to the detriment of their communities and beliefs they hold dear. We witness in collective silence as people are canceled for brief amusement, monuments get torn down, and cities are taken over by ridiculously irresponsible radicals.

Once Information Oligarchs validate their ability to control humanity’s low hanging fruit it’s time to tackle the next demographic on the evolutionary ladder. For this, technologies evolve at a pace no one can foreshadow as the trend toward total manipulation proves easier than imagined. Software engineers and their lackey code developers get so intoxicated by their consuming need to do more faster, they disregard the cautious warning of people who see how this all ends, people like Darwin and his small cohort of like-minded idealists who understand from their own redemption journeys, “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

In the highly competitive pursuit of being first to innovate, there simply isn’t time to monitor morals, there are futures to define, opportunities to exploit, and a potential for wealth and power that’s never before existed. Marketing ploys are skillfully crafted to seduce each one of the vulnerabilities and deficiencies defining who we are with unimaginable precision. From there the leap to subliminal up-selling becomes too enticing for even the most righteously disciplined technologist to resist. Because of the data we so willingly surrender, the Information Oligarchs know what to feed us to solicit any Pavlovian response and understand the most effective ways of ensuring success. These overlords of our minds know with pinpoint precision every aspect of our lives, like if and when we’ll marry, if and when we’ll have kids and take them to Disney Land, and if and when we’ll need a mortgage or other vestige of servitude, allowing them to make fortunes surpassing the wealth of most nations. The Information Oligarchs become masters of creating our need to be continuously stimulated and with each subtle seduction, they softly steal one more element of who we are in their quest to define who we will become.

They could be content to own our minds and control our destinies, which they demonstrate is an easy undertaking, but it isn’t enough; they need our souls because only then can they exert complete dominance. So, the technology race continues unabated, evolving under the guise of convenience. You want to take a trip, the Information Oligarchs can arrange the whole thing; from booking airlines, to finding hotel stays, to setting up excursions. You want a romantic night out; there’s software to ensure you maximize benefit while minimizing effort and expense. You want to plan your most perfect future, the very thing that brings you peace, that’s the easiest of all because they own your future; they have from the moment you take your first credit card swipe.

Now comes the newest widely hyped weapon in their technology arsenal, Artificial Intelligence. AI enters the fray replete with promises to unburden you of your last remaining bit of humanity; the ability to think. They artfully argue why would you want to burden yourself with thought when they’ve done the work of evolving all of humanity into an optimized avatar distilling out the conflicts, struggles, and sacrifices necessary to be human on their way to making you super-human. At least that’s the marketing pitch deployed in such a subtle way you don’t realize their so-called super-human has no ability to be human because it is the very faults they seek to eliminate from our lives that makes life worth living.

It’s not that AI knows your thoughts or can ever anticipate your true needs or desires, that’s a level of clairvoyance only God can attain. The goal of AI is to sell you on the notion that what they offer is what you need and that’s Satan’s seduction. In their perfect vision of your perfect life the goal is to control your thoughts and emotions while allowing you to believe you’re the master of your destiny. If you doubt this, mention in a random email, text, or phone call that you’re thinking about taking a trip to San Diego then watch the way radio commercials in your car, Internet adds at work, and popups on your smart phone start miraculously promoting things to do, places to stay, and where to eat in San Diego.

There is but one remaining risk to the Information Oligarch’s endgame, one barrier between them and total success, ‘the Outliers,’ the dangerous few brazen enough to venture off script, humans who either by choice or evolution are immune to targeting algorithms and covert methods of manipulation. To deal with this small but daring demographic, a specialized subset of technologies are developed to shepherd Outliers back into the fold. For the most part it works but still, a subset of this subset remains unreachable and that creates a problem requiring coordination, not only of the Information Oligarchs but the global politicians they control.

The history of humans going back to the beginning demonstrates with consistent repeatability it’s not hard to manipulate the masses; the challenge has always been gaining access to them and holding their attention. Different methods have been deployed throughout the ages, often under the guise of religion but at other times ideology or patriotism. When more drastic measures are required, creating a crisis such as war, famine, or pestilence, is highly effective. The one thread connecting all these time-tested methods is their resultant outcome: a consolidation of power and influence at the cost of individual liberty, and where necessary, individual life.

What the golden age of information provides is the ability for the first time in human existence to simultaneously reach everyone on the planet with the same messaging, same marketing, and same orchestrated outcome. Our digital innocence is fueled by the naive belief that world governments will protect us from privacy pirates, but it’s become painfully apparent politicians are pocket-puppets of the Information Oligarchs and extreme profiteers in their own right, having found new ways to plunder. Whatever individual freedoms we naively think remain measure the depth of our delusion. Politicians not only perfect the art of manipulating how we vote but also the diabolically deranged way political discourse now panders into riotous aggression to occupy the masses with fabricated disagreements elevated to the level of religious hatred deliberately meant to distract us from what’s being taken. We now live in an era where angry protests are the norm and it’s obvious to anyone objectively observing that the people protesting the loudest are the ones being manipulated the most.

The Information Oligarchs continuously perform tests to measure the efficacy of their control, for example, convincing the weak-minded that someone who murders a corporate CEO is a hero, or that an illegal alien involved in human trafficking should not be imprisoned or deported, or that it’s justified to assassinate at religious leader just because you disagree with them. If you doubt this assertion, contrast today’s manipulation of the masses against what happened in 1968 following the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King; no matter how hard the Information Oligarchs of that era try to justify the slayings, humanity collectively understands it’s wrong. The line between moral and immoral today has been blurred due to increasingly effective ways of manipulating the masses via the so-called democratization of data, which promises global access to information for all but in reality, only provides access to carefully curated data. Any view not aligned with planned propaganda is censored, any challenge to prescribed narratives banned, any opposition to orchestrated outcomes canceled.

For people like Darwin, Tien, and the rest of the Outliers gathering in the Northern New Mexico wilderness, these facts as presented are not in dispute and the challenge, they’re committed to confronting is what to do about it to save humanity from the Information Oligarchs while saving humanity from itself.