FORCEBOOK: THE SOCIAL DRAGNET

When I first started Ground zero in 1995 I was still experimenting with how the show was supposed to go. I knew that in time I would find a way to adapt to what my listeners needed and what I felt was interesting. The synergy between the audience and me was the most important thing about what Ground zero is now.

I really don’t know how long it took me to find my niche, but I did and in many forms Ground zero remained a show that tried to surpass the mainstream agendas and the narratives that tend to deliver passionate arguments the eclipse actual needed information.

The mainstream media has found a way to become a springboard for numerous repeat posts on Facebook and twitter.

This means that information that is fortified with the agenda of the corporate masters goes straight to Facebook and Twitter where it becomes a raw “quick glance” headline that in a small amount of letters and words creates an emotional investment either good or bad.

Social networks can be a necessary evil and they provide instant access to things and information that in the past we would have to wait for. The same goes for twitter.

Thanks to social networking we are now subjected to what can be called disposable information that we can equal to gossip or throw away ideas that link you to a mini URL that you can either browse or ignore depending on your interest.

All things we see and perceive are electric stimulus and light that transmits information that we can pay attention to, and then of course there are those details that we don’t.

This is where I have spoken before about a temporal blind spot where events happen or we perceive they do and then later we are schooled on the idea that everything we have perceived is wrong, that what we think we know is not exactly what is and that somehow we reach a point where we are satisfied with our opinion and even then all that it is based on is once again nebulous stimuli that we agree to.

The process of selective perception is necessary because if we did not do this we would be transfixed by the hyper reality and sensory overload. Today our brains are being filled with all sorts of sensory overload. Think about it, we have simple perceptions of life, light, love, survival, spirituality, God, etc. Then we are exposed to media, print, Television, internet, video games, telephony, and many other things that is pushing the brain further and all of that stimulus is placed in a limited area known as the brain.

If our model for perceiving our environment and time is limited or if we happen to perceive something while in crisis or after a traumatic experience, we run the obvious risk of missing important information that may be crucial for our well-being and survival; or conversely of hallucinating imaginary information that may be misleading or hurtful.

There have been an infinite amount of times where I have tweeted information or have posted information on Facebook that have links to the full body of information provided by a news source or in a blog.

The unfortunate thing is there seems to be an inordinate amount of Facebook and Twitter users that don’t even bother to click on the link provided for the information or news blurb and literally gather the information from the headline or state that they are at a loss as to what the headline means.

There seems to be no impetus for seeking or learning or even using Google to read the information. The headline becomes the spring board for reactionary comments.

Many of the comments posted do not even apply to the information offered and there are also a significant amount of what are called trolls available to disrupt the flow of commentary if it is significantly anti-government, political or perhaps thought provoking.

This type of activity literally is a jamming action that bogs down the information chain which intentionally destroys that impact of the information provided.

Once again we are unaware of the impact of these actions. We are unaware that social media in all of its convenience is affecting us on a deep psychological and even physical level.

How many times have we heard about cyber bullying, or we hear about those who are exhibitionists with regard to their personal demons, and how they are quite capable of parading them out to their followers to the final end where they either threaten suicide or even committing it on camera ready for a load on Instagram or You Tube?

Very few average people have the discipline to check their views and beliefs with the criteria of consistency. The average person when listening to proposed authority needs to also internally decide if any claim that has been made provides verifiable documentation to your satisfaction. Do all of the pieces of information provided fit the dialogue and time line provided?

If they do not then do you reject the claim or do you investigate further? The average person will not even go that far. While the experiences of the world differ do you still decide that what you have seen in the narrative is reality?

Who in the world has the ambition to weigh everything based on what is really transpiring and not what the narrative provides or what the inner core belief you possess tends to cloud?

Social networks are getting smarter and they are fully aware of what you care about, what you click on, and how this reflects your potential for being a future criminal, a terrorist, an activist or someone else that needs to be flagged for potentiality towards mental illness and instability?

If there is an extreme break with the reality and the world view, there is always the consensus opinion that the mental health of the person is under suspicion. However, there has never been a consensus opinion that the breakdown of reality is happening and that people now are not exactly privy to harsh realities that are creating that blind spot in time and that selective reality that seems to be a refuge for the person in denial.

Take into account the behavior of the United States right now. How have we become so divided in such a small amount of time?

I think the answer is becoming obvious, the quick glance of a headline, suggestion, or even a meme is cast out into social networking and if you don’t believe it has power, then perhaps you should investigate what you government is doing with the valuable information provided by social networks.

Facebook recently came under fire for their Social contagion experiment.

Facebook had subjected nearly 700,000 users in an experiment without their knowledge, manipulating these individuals’ news feeds, reducing positive or negative content, and examining the emotions of these individuals’ subsequent posts.

Facebook essentially sought to manipulate people’s moods by switching their news feeds to allow for more positive and negative contact and then monitored the posts of the users to see if they would be able to influence their entire social network with something that is called Social Contagion—literally they wanted to taint the “group think” or the zeitgeist just to see how much power and influence they have as a social network.

There are strict federal regulations against unwarranted experimenting and or guinea pigging” of humans. These rules pertain, by law, to all studies conducted using federal funds, but have been extended by essentially all universities and pharmaceutical and biotech companies in this country to cover all research on humans, becoming the universally-accepted standard.
According to these regulations, all research must respect the rights of individual research subjects, and scientific investigators must therefore explain to participants the purposes of the study, describe the procedures (and which of these are experimental) and “any reasonably foreseeable risks or discomforts.”

The company has argued that the study was permissible because the website’s data use policy states, “we may use the information we receive about you…for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement,” and that “we may make friend suggestions, pick stories for your News Feed or suggest people to tag in photos.”

While Facebook declares that they can’t be held liable for experimenting with the emotions of the users of their network, there are now other programs that have been uncovered that show that the necessary evil of social networking has become a data treasure for the department of defense and several alphabet agencies.

While we hear of the so called spying that takes place with the NSA and CIA there are other government agencies that have used Facebook, Twitter Pinterest, Kickstarter, Digg and Reddit as windows into the social and emotional make up of American citizens.

Research funded directly or indirectly by the US Department of Defense’s military research department, known as Darpa, has involved users of some of the internet’s largest destinations for studies of social connections and how messages spread.

Several of the DoD-funded studies went further than merely monitoring what users were communicating on their own, instead messaging unwitting participants in order to track and study how they responded.

Shortly before the Facebook controversy erupted, Darpa published a lengthy list of the projects funded under its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program, including links to actual papers and abstracts.

The project list includes a study of how activists with the Occupy movement used Twitter as well as a range of research on tracking internet memes and some about understanding how influence behavior such as liking, following, and re-tweeting happens.

The SMISC program was regarded as a bid by the US military to become better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. On their webpage where it has published links to the papers, Darpa states the general goal of the SMISC program is “to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base”.

This means that Facebook, Twitter and other websites have given the government enough information to become better at mind control science, developing predictive programming and hyper reality, to actually approximate and exploit whatever you fear, hate, love, or need.

This is perhaps whey we are seeing so many distracting things becoming flash in the pan concerns—all because of short glimpses of headlines on social l media that are provided by the military industrial complex to insure your concern, compliance and eventual complacency.

Darpa says that “Through the program, Darpa seeks to develop tools to support the efforts of human operators to counter misinformation or deception campaigns with truthful information.”

However, papers leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate that US and British intelligence agencies have been deeply engaged in planning ways to covertly use social media for purposes of propaganda and deception.

We must understand that a lot of what is covert is not obvious and in the police state, that which is allegedly obvious can be misleading because of cognitive Infiltration.

To summarize Alex Carey, in “The Public Relations Industry’s Secret War on Activists” there are three important developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.

Your life in wartime is controlled by lie upon lie and in a police state it is difficult to trust your neighbor because they may be an informant or worse a terrorist waiting to snuff you out. There was a term that I created to illustrate this.

It is term called Psychocondria, this Psychocondira leads to Social contagion and without basic understanding of social engineering, scape-goats are created and it becomes easier to create “the other” or the group that government wants you to see as subhuman or even as traitors.

Most scapegoats are ridiculed and blamed because of a vicious rumor or circumstantial associations that are constantly being spread through organized propaganda campaigns.

Social Contagion is spread by one carrier to others who pass it on to unsuspecting people.

If you can remember, Cass Sunstein, the United States’ “regulatory czar”, co-authored a paper in 2008 entitled “Conspiracy Theories Causes and Cures”:

He states that because those who hold conspiracy theories typically suffer from a crippled epistemology, in accordance with which it is rational to hold such theories, the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups.

Sunstein is in a position of power and the frightening thing is that no one has pointed out the obvious about this stupid and extremist plan. Cognitive infiltration is flawed because it is nothing more than a means to create an elaborate conspiracy to infiltrate groups of people who believe in conspiracy theories, this is supposed to help them eliminate any idea that there are conspiracies being carried out by our governments.

We will come to point where no one will smell the excrement until their noses are rubbed in it at gunpoint.

That might sound extreme to some, and many people won’t see or even feel the effects of the paranoid government trying to confuse you or trying to recruit you into believing that your neighbor is a terrorist or that certain people deserve your attention, or that there are people out there that hold extremist views that will be censored and or eliminated.

We are people who police each other. We have been programmed into thinking that there is a threat lurking in our neighborhoods and so we must turn in those who are not following the social norm. While there is always the possibility that someone in the neighborhood might be up to no good, the new sport is to turn your neighbor in for something that may or may not be subversive.

We have developed this sick need to protect ourselves from an unseen enemy. We are devolving into the attitude that internal security is more important than any violation of human rights.

Now I know that perhaps much of what is being done through the Military channels may be something that you think doesn’t apply to you, perhaps we can demonstrate how this type of manipulation can be applied to the population and its tendency to “group think” on political and social matters.

What if there was a government campaign on Twitter supporting vaccination?

The campaign would engage with followers who are more likely to take certain action (spreading a campaign message) based on their opinions.

How many of us use social media to vent our anger at the government or post a 9/11 truth movement slogan or an “Impeach Obama” meme?

Well, with the social media manipulation provided by your propaganda vendors when anti-government messages are spread in social media, government would want to spread counter messages to balance that effort and hence identify people who are more likely to spread such counter messages based on their opinions.

They would pay a person to post counter propaganda meant to attack an individual spreading the anti government slogans and urging others that support government to go in and harass the person or group posting the anti-government information.

Social media is changing the way people inform themselves, share ideas, and organize themselves into interest groups. Your government sees some of those interest groups and the hash tags they post as harmful or dangerous to the United States.

Now you may not feel it yet and you may not even care about your freedom of expression on social networks but let us speculate on the potential of these wonderful experiments that government is participating in and what it will lead to.

Take the art of psychological warfare using social media as a weapon. Use it as part of a monitoring system to judge the health and wellbeing of the populous. Link it to the militarized police, and the surveillance state apparatus, which includes mental health monitoring and health care in general. Then use it along with the domestic authorizations operating under the umbrella of the Patriot act, NDAA and other draconian measures that prosecute for thought crime and what will you see?

A country that will remain under siege and the frightening part it will be self policed and self sustained through a social dragnet. In the 21st century, the revolution may not be televised – but it likely will be tweeted, blogged, texted and organized on Facebook.

Before it begins there will be plenty of militarized police, MRAPS, Tanks and other ordinance on the ready to fight even before the first revolutionary arrives.

It is time to understand that now your government understands that lying to the public is essential to starting wars, oppressing people, ruling over people, and persecuting others.

Now their lies can be tweeted in 140 characters or less.