We all wear tinfoil hats now
thenewatlantis.com
We all wear tinfoil hats now
1–10 of 145 posts
Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now
#2This is an extremely one-sided and biased article. Basically, it presumes that manipulating public opinion begins with Cambridge Analytica, being completely oblivious to the excesive lies, public shaming, character assasinations, alarmism that the agents of the "solid establishment consensus" (The Guardian, NYT, BBC, Deutsche Welle, etc) routinely perform.
Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now
#3[deleted]
Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now
#4This is an extremely one-sided and biased article. Basically, it presumes that manipulating public opinion begins with Cambridge Analytica, being completely oblivious to the excesive lies, public shaming, character assasinations, alarmism that the agents of the "solid establishment consensus" (The Guardian, NYT, BBC, Deutsche Welle, etc) routinely perform.
IMO it's also pretty far fetched to compare modern mass manipulation tools like facebook marketing to a fictional object made up by a Schizophrenic, the big difference being that facebook is real and is working for so many other instances of swaying peoples minds.
Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now
#5This is an extremely one-sided and biased article. Basically, it presumes that manipulating public opinion begins with Cambridge Analytica, being completely oblivious to the excesive lies, public shaming, character assasinations, alarmism that the agents of the "solid establishment consensus" (The Guardian, NYT, BBC, Deutsche Welle, etc) routinely perform.
IMO it's also pretty far fetched to compare modern mass manipulation tools like facebook marketing to a fictional object made up by a Schizophrenic, the big difference being that facebook is real and is working for so many other instances of swaying peoples minds.
> Well before Cambridge Analytica appeared on the scene, fears once relegated to paranoia were coming true. Consider that believing that the ads on your TV or radio were directed specifically at you would have been an unequivocal symptom of a delusional state twenty years ago. Today, the same belief about the ads on your smartphone is a recognition of fact.
I don't see what is far fetched about this claim. And I don't know about you, but being pointed out that something that was exclusively in the domain of the paranoid delusional only two decades ago is now the normalized experience for everyone without an ad-blocker does make me consider that we should pause to think more about what that situation means.
Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now
#6Bleurgh. I don't like the conflation of unsupported-by-evidence talk of telepathy and that kind of "mind control" with the heavily-funded and somewhat evidenced effect of targeted political advertising. It acts to discredit conversation about the latter by conflating it with the former. They even manage to quote Foucault on the process of labelling people as delusional in order to exclude them from politics.
I hate to bring the big hammer of logical positivism down on someone who is having fun with a literature review, but the difference between delusional and non-delusional thinking is important because figuring out the truth and maintaining the ability to operate as a rational society making decisions based on evidence is important.
> Under present conditions, is “paranoia” — a term Sconce deploys frequently but does not interrogate at length — still a recognizably distinct phenomenon? Or has it become mostly indistinguishable from the average person’s worldview?
Could do with considering https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am... (note date)
Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now
#7This is an extremely one-sided and biased article. Basically, it presumes that manipulating public opinion begins with Cambridge Analytica, being completely oblivious to the excesive lies, public shaming, character assasinations, alarmism that the agents of the "solid establishment consensus" (The Guardian, NYT, BBC, Deutsche Welle, etc) routinely perform.
I agree. In reproducing Antonio García Martínez's claim without other solid research -- that "most ad insiders express skepticism about Cambridge Analytica’s claims of having influenced the election, and stress the real-world difficulty of changing anyone’s mind about anything with mere Facebook ads" [...] -- the author himself seems to be insufficiently critical regarding the fact that public opinion can be heavily influenced and how much propaganda, public relations and advertisment can be used in that respect.
Edwards Bernays' (the father of PR) techniques to persuade the public (or "engineer consent") were so successful that Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, displayed a copy of his book "Propaganda" in his library.[1]
[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1981/11/25/releasing-the-...
Other reading:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4318333/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/02/12/the-fixer
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/jul/27/marketingandpr...
LE: typos
Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now
#8“In the ads world, just because a product doesn’t work doesn’t mean you can’t sell it.” - arguing that targeting does not work and can be sold no the less.
Seems self refuting when talking about selling Ads.
Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now
#9If you look at examples of mental illness in non technological cultures, delusions manifest as djinns, demons, succubus and so forth.
I once had the opportunity to discuss this with a journalist who spent some time researching and reporting on mental hospitals in Afghanistan. Some of the people at the facilities they visited were deeply disturbed, so the extent that their families had resorted to tying them to a tree with a rope so that they wouldn't wander off and hurt themselves or other persons.
Almost universally none of them had delusions along the lines of the CIA putting radios in their dental fillings, antivaccine nonsense, or "5G causes cancer" stuff. Their delusions were all based on traditional cultural references such as djinns.
Re: We all wear tinfoil hats now
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO it's also pretty far fetched to compare modern mass manipulation tools like facebook marketing to a fictional object made up by a Schizophrenic, the big difference being that facebook is real and is working for so many other instances of swaying peoples minds.
> Well before Cambridge Analytica appeared on the scene, fears once relegated to paranoia were coming true. Consider that believing that the ads on your TV or radio were directed specifically at you would have been an unequivocal symptom of a delusional state twenty years ago. Today, the same belief about the ads on your smartphone is a recognition of fact. I don't see what is far fetched about this claim. And I don'…
We should definitely pause ! We are steady but surely moving towards the very dystopia made up by paranoid minds ages ago. I just think the article made it sound like these fears are unfounded. It's crazy to me that it's still legal to have political advertising, heck, it's crazy to me that advertising in it's current form is legal at all.