Fight the metasystem

Regular readers know that I dislike Facebook and other social networking sites. I'm always hesitant to discuss Facebook's CIA origins, even though the Agency linkage is (as we have seen in previous posts) well-documented.

I haven't had an easy time articulating the nature of my suspicions about social networking schemes. So far, the best I've managed to come up with was this paragraph:

Maybe that seemingly innocuous information, along with all of the other info broadcast via social networking pages, can be fed into a engine analogous to the Personality Assessment System developed by John Gittinger of the CIA. Only now the personalities being assessed belong not to individuals but to whole populations. Maybe we're all being clocked.

At this time, I'm reading a book which, en passant, makes the same point. The book is the same one you may be reading: The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown.

"Dan Brown?" I hear you saying. "But whole books have been written about all the errors in The DaVinci Code." I could have written such a volume myself. But for reasons we shall discuss anon, the following passage from The Lost Symbol deserves your attention:

“…Following 9/11, the government was intercepting and crunching enormous data fields -- civilian e-mail, cell phone, fax, text, Web sites -- sniffing for keywords associated with terrorist communications. So I wrote a piece of software that let them process their data field in a second way . . . pulling from it an additional intelligence product.” She smiled. “Essentially, my software let them take America’s temperature.”

“I’m sorry?”

Trish laughed. “Yeah, sounds crazy, I know. What I mean is that it quantified the nation’s emotional state. It offered a kind of cosmic consciousness barometer, if you will.” Trish explained how, using a data field of the nation’s communications, one could assess the nation’s mood based on the “occurrence density” of certain keywords and emotional indicators in the data field. Happier times had happier language, and stressful times vice-versa. In the event, for example, of a terrorist attack, the government could use data fields to measure the shift in America’s psyche and better advise the president on the emotional impact of the event.

“Fascinating,” Katherine said, stroking her chin. “So essentially you’re examining a population of individuals ...as if it were a single organism.”

“Exactly. A metasystem. A single entity defined by the sum of its parts. The human body, for example, consists of millions of individual cells, each with different attributes and different purposes, but it functions as a single entity.”

Katherine nodded enthusiastically. “Like a flock of birds or a school of fish moving as one. We call it convergence or entanglement.”

Trish sensed her famous guest was starting to see the potential of metasystem programming in her own field of Noetics. “My software,” Trish explained, “was designed to help government agencies better evaluate and respond appropriately to wide-scale crises -- pandemic diseases, national tragedies, terrorism, that sort of thing.” She paused. “Of course, there’s always the potential that it could be used in other directions...perhaps to take a snapshot of the national mind-set and predict the outcome of a national election or the direction the stock market will move at the opening bell.”

Again: I know very well that Dan Brown has, in the past, expressed some rather unsupportable ideas about gnosticism, occultism, archeology, tarot, art history and ecclesiastical history. I laughed out loud when he revealed that he didn't know the difference between a scroll and codex. Nevertheless, I am inclined to suspect that he has sources who understand some of the odder things the government has been up to.

His first and best thriller, Digital Fortress, offers a description of the NSA's inner workings -- a description which presaged material later made public by Russell Tice and others. (This blog has discussed Tice on several past occasions; see here.) How Brown made these contacts is no secret; he explains the process in a 1998 interview. I would not be entirely surprised to discover that Tice was one of his informants.

My bottom line is this: I think that there are those within the intelligence community who take an interest in the "national temperature," just as the novel states. Social networking sites may function as a gauge. On such sites, average citizens spew forth an endless volcano of private data, the vast majority of which is piffle. But even piffle can deliver important sociological insights, if viewed en masse and from a sufficient distance.

For a lower-tech illustration of my point, think back to the scene in Watchmen (the graphic novel, not the film) in which Ozymandias makes stock market decisions while watching a bank of thirty television monitors relaying video streams from around the world:

"First impressions: Oiled muscleman with machine-gun...cut to pastel bears, valentine hearts. Juxtaposition of wish fulfillment violence and infantile imagery, desire to regress, be free of responsibility. This all says 'war.' We should buy accordingly."

"But sir, we've never bought into munitions..."

"Of course not. You're ignoring the subtext. Increased sexual imagery even in the candy ads. It implies an erotic undercurrent not uncommon in times of war. Remember the baby boom."

"So we should buy into..."

"Into the major erotic video companies. That's short term. Also, we should negotiate controlling shares in selected baby foods and maternity goods manufacturers."

Imagine what Ozymandias could do with an infinitely more detailed data-stream, taken directly from millions of consumers/citizens. Imagine software that reduces the metastream into manageable chunks and identifies large movements of attitude and perception. With that kind of data, one could do much more than make investment decisions.

One could control the entire culture.

Consider the birthers and the tea-partyers who trade in weird anti-Obama conspiracy theories. What kind of impact do those theories really have? A poll won't give you the true answer, because even the most intellectually dubious assertions may, if repeated ceaselessly, have a cumulative psycho-social impact.

Such was the lesson of 1994. Many of the claims made about Bill Clinton at that time were simply absurd. But while any individual absurd claim may have swayed only five or ten percent of the population, the sheer ubiquity of such claims contributed to a general sense of unease, fear, angst. That angst translated into a congressional changeover. Even though we had peace and relative prosperity, the American public behaved as though facing military attack and financial ruin.

Ozymandias saw an "oiled muscleman with machine guns" and saw reason to invest in maternity goods. A modern Ozymandias could glance at (say) a hundred random Facebook pages and tell you many un-obvious but accurate things about the American Id.

Let me, in a humble and stumbling fashion, try my own hand at this game.

The popularity of Twilight tells us that a growing number of young American women fantasize about using sex to reward predators. Young American males understand a message which no-one will ever state directly: Act like a predator and desirable girls will want to fuck you. So the males will dress like predators and use the language of predators.

The theme of predation can be considered an "e-meme" -- an emotional meme. E-memes, being irrational, are far more insidious and dangerous than are mere memes, which are intellectual concepts.

A clever manipulator could find ways to channel the predation e-meme into a nationwide desire for war, rebellion, secession.

Tell me your cheap little dreams and I can control you.