Mission Improbable…

The Eyes of Takiea...
what was fiction is fiction no more.

Six months ago I took advantage of a situation I did not create to investigate the social media giant Facebook and in lesser degree it’s main competitor Twitter. The focus of the reconnaissance was not the people utilizing the media giants, the minor events and major drama passing across, but rather the responses of the robotically managed environments to what they (the robotic intelligences crafted into the structure itself) perceived of what the humans presented to them. My motivation? Call it a morbid curiosity concerning the unnaturally polarized nature of the current political scene.

The circumstance precipitating the recon began with the agent of the publishing house that published my first compilation of fiction, in concert with the person who agreed to work as a publicist for a percentage of any net profits, insisting that I had to have a presence on the social medias to sell any books. Their erroneous assumption was that I did not already have such accounts because I was simply frightened of the technology involved, an error I did not correct. At their urging I grudgingly agreed to allow the creation of a FB account in my pen name, which was done… an email account in that name and then a FB profile. It is my understanding it was that email account my publicist then used that to establish a presence on Twitter.

That the initial data recorded at creation for neither account would trace back to my machine or my ISP address was the enabling factor of my strategy. I worked from the assumption the new account (mine) would initially carry the personality profile indexes established for the accounts already associated to the address logged at creation. In short, I went in under the shallow cover of the robotic intelligences (let’s call him Agent Smith, just for a convenient handle) assuming it would see from the new account pretty much what it had seen from much older accounts tagged to those ISP/MAC id’s.

The tools of my investigation were crude and simplistic. They were anything but scientific. In point of fact they were the exact opposite: my knowledge of my own internal psychological makeup, and a very old (powerful in it’s day, competent now) PC oft modified over the years and an obsolete operating system. The PC was loaded in such a manner as to encourage short system hangs when being worked hard, those short system hangs when the image on the monitors would freeze for between half a second and two seconds while the operating system dealt with the difficulties I had deliberately arranged: two monitors of different size, the second and smaller requiring a custom resolution setting. The browser open on the main monitor and just the edge of its’ window moved over onto the second and smaller monitor resulted in an undefined region in the video matrix in the driver software, that undefined region what the machine was compelled to accommodate whenever the window was scrolled, that accommodation the cause of the short system hangs… a most primitive trapping tactic to intercept anything presented subliminally. That I caught what I did from no more of a trap than that indicates a frighteningly deep saturation of subliminal “advertising” on Facebook.

Beyond the ethically very questionable presence of subliminal “advertising” there was also an intense scrutiny on any facet where any commercial or governmental algorithm might be active acting as a filter mechanism for what came before a users’ eyes. In all truth that scrutiny produced more than a few chuckles, three weeks in the bots were totally confused about me, and feuding one with another as to how to handle me. On one instance the chumchum boxes along the side were presenting me these options: Modern Communism (complete to a red hammer and sickle logo), “The Modern Socialist”, and the one that cracked me up, the one with a picture of Old Glory and the caption “God, Guns, Guts and Glory.” Yes, all in the same frame. Those three selections were direct one to one to the content of comments I’d left on other people’s posts the day before. The idea that Agent Smith does not read and interpret every word input into his  system evaporated at that point.

Of course I did absolutely nothing to make Agent Smith’s job easier. I never so much as hovered my mouse over any suspect element, certainly never followed any link machine presented, the “suggested posts” were only scrutinized in relation to my words directed to another being human in the past 48 hours. I initialized the account with nine “friends” during the first week (chosen to represent the widest spectrum of society conveniently available from the folks I knew world of real life who had been active on FB for many years), I only accepted two friend requests in six months, and politely declined several by way of the messaging function, in each case citing some element of personal preference for a reason (I’m not gay, I’m not inclined to violence as a first response, no, I’m not interested in a Russian bride… my muse is a Ukrainian woman and already married) and watching what Agent Smith and his baby bots, the chumchum stuffers, presented to me afterwards. The correlation between those conversations and what was presented was beyond coincidence, Agent Smith monitors the messaging functions with due diligence and an even greater degree of subtlety in his responses. I say this with the intent of full warning: there is no privacy on Facebook.  Not from the machine itself.

At about the five month mark it was becoming obvious I’d passed some boundary, the advertising became what you’d see on TV, no connections, few correlations: Agent Smith was running me in “ABC” mode knowing I was watching HIM just like he was watching me. At the six month mark (a few days ago) I called the mission off, said goodbye, and began to sort and order my thoughts on what I’d learned both by the events observed and the psychological pressures I endured that were not explainable by any element of my own inner self. The account is still active, since I did not create it I can’t deactivate it, it is being used as an access point into several debate forums on current events, I am participating in those and marking all things observed in the interlinking universe of the social media (FB, Utube, DevArt, etc et al) for correlations to the subjects discussed. The most notable evidence of those communications is which of the many posts put up by the pages in question are presented first on my “wall” or home page for me to respond to. As is SOP for the mission I’m not giving Agent Smith much to work with.

In posts to come I’ll speak to individual events observed and present my analysis of the potentials and intents of what was observed, but for now let it stand that I consider the social media, any and all of it,  to be a clear and present danger to the functions of Democracy, and an ongoing hazard to the mental freedom and well being of all those who place even the tiniest bit of trust in them. I am ever more convinced the circus of the absurd running into the obscene of the political scene is but the tiniest tip of the iceberg created by the social media, and that the situation will do nothing but degrade into utter social chaos and collapse if the situation is not corrected as rapidly as possible.

More to come if I don’t get shot first… or wake up to find this computer and my modem a smoking pile of slag. Catch you later.