“This need to get in front of the pack has created a lot of the looniness we see on-line. People generally have a bias towards the sensational and get bored by nuance. Moreover the folks who become addicted to ‘doom scrolling’ tend to be emotionally excitable types who enjoy the rush of being outraged about one thing or another. Given the simple set of commands that the social media corporations give to their AIs---namely ‘get eyeballs on screens and clicks on URLs so we can sell advertising’---the most efficient response by influencers is to pump up the emotion to ‘eleven’. And emotions don’t give a damn about the truth.”
“We are trying to develop a methodology to be able to create effective social influencers on command by using Audio Ketchup and the Voice of God, but we also have to jump the hurdle of becoming famous---and there’s no easy way to do that just by modifying our content. So instead we do it by creating artificial ‘virtual populations’ that we can tell to click on specific accounts. This trains the social media AI to see the site we are promoting as being ‘an up-and-comer’. If we can create enough artificial clicks, then the AI will start recommending the site to real people. At that point we hope that the “Ketchup” and “Word of God” programs will keep them and create a following of real people that follows the needed exponential growth curve.”
Nate looked perplexed. “How exactly does this program work?”
(At this point Sally returned and handed the two men ceramic cups of very good drip coffee from the computer lunch room. She had also found fresh croissants---cheese, chocolate, and, butter. It appeared that the Elders treated their chipheads well. Jokes were told, tension was released, and eventually the host brought the meeting back on focus.)
“We’ve infected a huge numbers of people’s home and work computers with a relatively harmless virus that allows us to use a fraction of it’s computing power to connect with a given social media system. To the algorithm it looks like someone has actually logged in and read/listened-to/downloaded content. (The viruses are designed to do this during ‘down time’---when someone is off at lunch, over night, weekends, at work, etc. Whenever the screen saver goes on, the bots do their thing. They have zero impact on the functionality of the CPU and it has no malicious effect on anything.”)
“These virus-controlled computers are called ‘bots’---a short form of ‘robot’. And when a person has control of thousands of them that she can control to do her bidding, we call that a ‘bot army’.”
“It’s routine for hackers to use bot armies to initiate ‘denial of service’ attacks on websites. What happens is they order their virtual soldiers to make the same demand on a website all at once. Since servers can only handle so many commands at the same time, organizations tend to know how many connections they can expect to have at one one time---and plan accordingly. A tidal wave of too many commands happening all at once will slow down and crash a server. Many businesses, political parties, government agencies, and so on, do an enormous amount of their work on line. And if a denial of service attack shuts down their ability to gather information, process financial transactions, connect with customers, etc, it can threaten the long-term viability of the operation.”
“The Word Made Flesh does same thing, but our aim isn’t to shut down the server and cause a denial of service attack. Instead, what our bot army attempts to do is convince the algorithm of a social media service---like FaceBook or YouTube---that a given posting on their system is a lot more popular than it really is.”
“We do this because the core problem with social media is that the prime directive of its artificial intelligence is to find that fraction of postings that encourages the readership to click on the most advertising. Please note, I’m not saying that the AI is looking for the best writing, or even the most popular---I’m saying it is just looking for the posts that create the most number of clicks on advertising. Clicks are where social media companies like FaceBook makes their money. And a very popular posting that doesn’t encourage clicking doesn’t make FaceBook any bucks. A very unpopular post that creates a high percentage of clicks/viewer doesn’t work either. I’ll repeat this point for emphasis: a post that is moderately popular but creates a high percentage of clicks will beat out an extremely popular one that generates a small percentage of clicks, and, a post that is unpopular yet creates a lot of clicks by the few people who see it.”
“It just seems to be a fact that what works best in the social media ecosystem right now are hysterical posts aimed at gullible people. Unfortunately for our political system and society at large, however, the people who fit into this category are also the ones most susceptible to conspiracy theories and authoritarian politics. In effect, social media is like a town hall meeting where the village idiots---and the grifters who prey upon them---always have privileged access to the microphone and the voting booth.”
“What the Old Ones are trying to do with Audio Ketchup, The Word of God, and, The Word Made Flesh is to drown out the grifters and the village idiots and replace them with a more accurate analysis of what’s really happening in the world. The hope is that this will ‘nudge’ humanity into something that makes more sense than the current insanity.”
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