Ours is a psychic war
The war of our generation will be had over our minds. Mind control is real. It’s not like the Manchurian Candidate. It’s not MKUltra. It’s so much more sinister than that. Instead of helmets with antennae and hypnotism, the real mind control is more like Inception. Plant the seeds of an idea in someone’s head, and they will think they came up with it themselves. That planted seed, and the subsequent fruit it reaps, is a terribly valuable resource. As such, there’s a new resource war brewing - and the resource is sentiment.
Our opinions, our perceptions, and our feelings are some of the most valuable and desirable resources on earth. Organizations spend trillions a year trying to capture them. Propaganda is the tool used by the organizations to extract your sentiment, bottle it, and turn it into money. Your sentiment can buy clothes. It can start wars. It can buy the presidency. Cheaper than oil, more potent than heroin; The right combination of propaganda can change the world.
Sinclair media. Fox Media Corp. Truth Social. Meta. These are Sentiment factories. They take raw emotions, feed our minds with a formulae of selective facts and perspectives, and distill the results into refined sentiment. Refined sentiment has compound effects. People are predictable - if you can change the way they see the world, it will become difficult for them to un-see it. We only have so much resistance to these perspective changes, most people do not have the capability of changing their fundamental worldview more than once. The second order effect of refining sentiment is that it becomes virulent. People freely share and convince others of their beliefs, and it’s through this mechanism that the cost of the Propaganda begins to yield compounding dividends.
Once the Propaganda has taken root, the worldview changed, and the ideas propagated, the results begin to speak for themselves. You can make armies of like-minded sycophants that believe your reality rather than the objective one right in front of them. They must have those shoes. They must read that book. They must support that candidate. It’s their only hope. It’s the last chance to do the right thing. It’s required to understand your culture and generation. It can be as innocuous as ‘there’s nothing that bad about eating fast food’ and as dangerous as ‘immigrants having rights is a fundamental threat to my liberty’ - no matter the message, its implanted in the same way.
This leads us to now. AI. The AI we have today is rudimentary, it’s a hat trick and not much else. Im sure you’ve noticed though; some people are convinced by it. Some people are already using it to speak on their behalf, to think for them. To ‘assist’ them. Let’s be clear; anyone convinced by AI today is probably not smart enough to see why it’s not yet convincing. It demonstrates though that there is a threshold of intelligence that will accept AI as assistive, and sometimes even as factual. That tells me two things: the Smarter AI gets, the more people will rely on it to be a stand in for their own thoughts, and once they reach that threshold, AI companies will have the most essential and direct path to raw sentiment on earth.
OpenAI announced they would be testing advertisements inside ChatGPT. Rightfully, many people were upset and affronted that they would do such a thing. However, be assured: Propaganda is the goal of AI. As profit making enters the AI space, the owners of these systems will look for the most cost-efficient pathway to profit and inevitably, the answer is Sentiment Mining. Once they realize (no doubt most of them already have) that they can use their systems to sway millions of peoples mindsets on pretty much any subject - they will use it to full effect. The medium through which we get and trust information will be fundamentally warped by their targeted messaging. If they get everything they want, even the point at which information is synthesized will be compromised by algorithmic tweaking with the sole goal of shifting perspective to meet their desired outcome. It will be subtle, it will be sinister, and it won’t be noticed.
The only winning move is not to play. Do not allow them to warp your perceptions. Fight back, before it’s too late. You still have your free will. Use it.