I feel like it’s a special hell to be stuck in a democracy with people who are so fickle and easily manipulated. Frankly, the best thing that could happen is that we walk away from social media and instead start walking toward places where we meet other people, like a bowling league, bar, maker space, library, or whatever. Sure, some places will code right-wing, but people don’t like blowhards and usually just want to bowl, or have a couple of beers, or work on a project, or find a good book. At the end of the day, in spaces with people, blow-hards have their moment and flash out. You find your people. The people who you look forward to seeing the next time you go there.

But we aren’t doing that as much as we should. We just scroll through phones and social media posts. Like, share, re-share, or maybe even re-mix if you’re bored. And before you know it, another hour or two has gone by. That happens for most of the week and you lose days worth of time before you know it. You look and see things aren’t going so well in other areas, so you jump back on social media. Its a combination of an escapism factory and a dopamine dispenser. How should you feel about something? How did you react to that meme? Did you re-share it? Or did it change your gut reaction to a story? Did you switch teams on that one? Did it make you feel smarter? You’re not a sheep. You think for yourself! Except, did you?

It’s a special hell to be stuck making decisions with people whose frontal cortices have shriveled and are driven by their amygdala and limbic system. Feed enough of the right trash into the chum-bucket that is their media diet and a president trying to become a dictator is romanticized as a Tony Soprano, having the guts to go for what he wants. Not pausing to think that it’s against the basic idea of American democracy. Reaching that conclusion requires logical thought. Having an instant reaction to a meme, an image, a video that has to be shortened to seconds to deal with a decaying attention span, requires no thought. Feed enough of those images and you get powerful reactions.

All the while the people that are making money by monetizing your eyeballs are entering into a new and dangerous relationship with a dictatorship-coded regime. One of patronage. Special privileges, tax breaks, or rewards for being a swell pall. The people who decide what to feed your atrophied brain have an interest in feeding the message the dictatorship wants. What Orwell missed about dictatorship was not that government ministries had the ability to sway citizens. It would be the private companies, beholden to the state, that would do the state’s bidding to pursue personal wealth. It wouldn’t be faceless bureaucrats. It would be opaque content policies that might decide which image to feed you, based on careful targeting.

And with all the noise about the Blue Wave, I imagine we have yet to see the content that will be pushed to fire up fear, resentment, and anger to counter that Blue Wave. Whether it’s voter suppression by making people feel their vote is meaningless to stem the authoritarian tide, and they should just protest, or drowning them in emotional counter-narrative, the push back is coming. They don’t have to hire an army of content creators. They just have to push what ever is working and amplify that. That is the same tactic Russia uses to push its narratives in the West. Don’t push all at once. Seed it. See what works. Amplify that.

In addition we have the novelty of AI to prod the narrative. Imagine an Open AI signaling they need government investment to be profitable, and the only condition is they inject some additional prompting. If someone searches about specific topics, inject a small push to the government’s position. Not overt. Not blaring. Just a nudge. Offer content from a set of friendly sites to back up the claim. Not Fox News, just friendly sites. It can’t be obvious they’re being nudged. Maybe let Google and Meta know that a government ready to invest asks that they just treat sensitive subjects in a way the government desires.

Oh, but won’t they fear the Democrat’s backlash? What backlash? Backlash from people who are making their platform “we follow the law?” The Trump platform is “if you can’t help me – I’ll keep you out of jail and make you rich.” That’s why he’s pardoning scammers who now no longer have to provide restitution to their victims. And if he’s willing to bail out a scammer, he’ll definitely cover for a big-tech CEO. And they have no problem lying, even under oath. If anyone ever asks, it never happened. As we get past labor day, expect your feeds to get a little ‘odd.’ Nothing big, but … wow …. you did not know that Islamic terrorists were among the Minnesota protestors. I wonder what else those people with whistles lied about?

This is truly a special hell. I stay off social media not because I’m immune to manipulation (no one is, regardless of their self-image), but because I am just as susceptible as the next person. I had the misfortune to hop on today and was reminded how addictive scrolling the feed can be. Especially when people react to a comment or re-post. But millions of voters hook themselves to it, willingly reshaping their minds to big tech’s content.

[Note] I originally used the phrase “Red Wave”, when I meant “Blue Wave.”