WE are ALL Lab Rats NOW

The Center for Garden State Families would like to continue our discussion regarding the Great Reset. As we have learned, there is now a consolidation of power amongst the Technocratic Elites. To know the direction we are going in, we must understand the impact of technology on our lives. Because in many ways, we live in a dystopian world, and many wonder how we arrived here so quickly or so it seems on the surface. As a result of a virus that we have learned poses no existential threat to society, we are now confronting contact tracers and mass surveillance.

In his book, Covid 19: The Great Reset, Klaus Schwab writes, “The most effective form of tracking or tracing is obviously one powered by technology: it not only allows backtracking all the contacts with whom the user of a mobile phone has been in touch but also tracking the user’s real-time movements, which in turn affords the possibility to better enforce a lockdown and to warn other mobile users in proximity of the carrier that they have been exposed to someone infected.” This level of surveillance even pervades our working lives. In Covid 19: The Great Reset, we read the following; “The corporate move will be towards greater surveillance; for better or for worse, companies will be watching and sometimes recording what their workforce does. The trend could take many different forms, from measuring body temperatures with thermal cameras to monitoring via an app how employees comply with social distancing.”

It is evident we have fallen into a behavioral modification experiment. Jaron Lanier wrote the book called Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. In it, he notes that we are losing our free will because of algorithmic behavioral modification. He says, “We’re being hypnotized little by little by technicians we can’t see, for purposes we don’t know. We’re all lab animals now.” Mr. Lanier’s book lays out how we suddenly found ourselves in a new normal of “pervasive surveillance and constant, subtle manipulation – which is unethical, cruel, dangerous and inhumane.” Mr. Lanier refers to the Social Media Empires as “Behavioral Modification Empires.

Sean Parker, the First President of Facebook, has said, “we need to sort of give you a dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever….it’s a social-validation feedback loop….exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” Also, Chamath Palihapitiya, former Vice President of User Growth at Facebook, said the following, “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works….no civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth.” Also, Mr. Lanier from his book writes, “so the problem isn’t behavior modification in itself. The problem is relentless, robotic, ultimately meaningless behavior modification in the service of unseen manipulators and uncaring algorithms. Hypnosis might be therapeutic so long as you trust your hypnotist, but who would trust a hypnotist who is working for unknown third parties? Who? Apparently billions of people.” We have now entered an alarming stage of groupthink. We are being herded like cattle. 

To make matters even worse, we have the equivalent of herding dogs due in part to an industry in counterfeit humans. According to the New York Times, the going rate for fake people on Twitter in early 2018 was $225 for the first 25,000 fake followers. These fake people are bots that are in many ways powered by Artificial Intelligence. Even the companies that sell counterfeit people are often fake themselves. All of this leads to massive simulated social media activities that influence real people. Then we wonder why we feel as if we are living in an alternate reality. Perhaps it may have something to do with the fact that we are not even interacting with real people but a pre-programmed agenda powered by bots to manipulate our thoughts.

To make matters even more stunning, Shoshana Zuboff, author of the book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” in a separate documentary highlighted Facebook’s massive “Contagion Experiments.” In the documentary, Zuboff said that Facebook in these “Contagion Experiments” used subliminal cues and language manipulation to see if they could make people feel happier or sadder and affect real-world behavior offline. As it turns out, they can. Two key findings from those experiments were:

1. By manipulating language and inserting subliminal cues in the online context, they can change real-world behavior and real-world emotion.
2. These methods and powers can be exercised “while bypassing user awareness.”

In the documentary, Zuboff also explains how the Pokemon Go online game – which Google created, was engineered to manipulate real-world behavior and profit activity. She also describes the scheme in her New York Times article, saying: “Game players did not know that they were pawns in the real game of behavior modification for profit, as the rewards and punishments of hunting imaginary creatures were used to herd people to the McDonald’s, Starbucks and local pizza joints that were paying the company for ‘football,’ in exactly the same way the online advertisers pay for ‘click-through’ to their websites.”

We cannot help but point out that we may be living in the most significant “Contagion Experiment” of them all. The Covid 19 Pandemic led to large sales and profits related to products being purchased from hand sanitizer to face masks, face shields, and vitamins of all sorts. Essentially, we are being manipulated every day in countless ways. As a result of hidden surveillance in our lives, we are being mined for data for these Dystopian Social Media empires.

Shoshana Zuboff, in her January 24th, 2020 New York Times op-ed, states that “you are now remotely controlled. Surveillance capitalists control the science and the scientists, the secrets and the truth.” She continues by saying, “We thought that we search Google, but now we understand that Google searches us. We assumed that we use social media to connect, but we learned that connection is how social media uses us.” Also, she writes, “Surveillance capitalists exploit the widening inequity of knowledge for the sake of profits.

They manipulate the economy, our society, and even our lives with impunity, endangering not just individual privacy but democracy itself.” Ms. Zuboff discusses something called “Epistemic Inequality,” which refers to inequality in what you are able to learn. “It is defined as unequal access to learning imposed by private commercial mechanisms of information capture, production, analysis, and sales. It is best exemplified in the fast-growing abyss between what we know and what is known about us.”

Further, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft have spearheaded the surveillance market transformation, placing themselves at the top tier of the epistemic hierarchy. Zuboff continues in her New York Times op-ed that “They operated in the shadows to amass huge knowledge monopolies by taking without asking, a maneuver that every child recognizes as theft” and “Surveillance capitalism begins by unilaterally staking a claim to private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Our lives are rendered as data flows.”

hrough these data flows, the technocratic elites turn us into lab animals and a commodity to be manipulated through data harvesting and artificial intelligence. We are now the puppets on a string dancing to the Orwellian siren song of the technocratic tyrants and profiteers. Shoshana Zuboff writes, “Now people have become targets for remote control, as surveillance capitalists discovered that the most predictive data come from intervening in behavior to tune, herd and modify actions in the direction of commercial objectives.”

In 2010, Nicholas Carr wrote the New York Times Bestselling book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. This is a groundbreaking book that delves into the impact of internet usage on individuals and society. In his book, Carr delves into what he calls the Juggler’s Brain, informing us that “when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.” Carr also states that “it also turns us into lab rats constantly pushing levers to get tiny pellets of social and intellectual nourishment.” He also adds that “our use of the Internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have the greatest long-term influence over how we think is this one: the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it.

We focus intensively on the medium itself, on the flickering screen, but we’re distracted by the medium’s rapid-fire delivery of competing messages and stimuli.” Many psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators say that heavy use of the Internet and Social Media has neurological consequences. Carr also writes in his book that “The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention.” Ziming Liu, a library science professor at San Jose State University, has stated that “the advent of digital media and the growing collection of digital documents have had a profound impact on reading.”

The findings, said Liu, indicate that “the digital environment tends to encourage people to explore many topics extensively, but at a more superficial level,” and that “hyperlinks distract people from reading and thinking deeply.” Also, Liu states that a “screen-based reading behavior is emerging,” which is characterized by “browsing and scanning, keyword spotting, one-time reading, and non-linear reading.” The time “spent on in-depth reading and concentrated reading” is, on the other hand, falling steadily.

Nicholas Carr adds, based on his research on the impact of the Internet on people’s brains, that “given our brain’s plasticity, we know that our online habits continue to reverberate in the workings of our synapses when we’re not online.

We can assume that the neural circuits devoted to scanning, skimming, and multitasking are expanding and strengthening, while those used for reading and thinking deeply, with sustained concentration, are weakening or eroding.” Carr adds further that “every click we make on the Web marks a break in our concentration, a bottom-up disruption of our attention -and it’s in Google’s economic interest to make sure we click as often as possible. The last thing the company wants is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. Google is, quite literally, in the business of distraction.” Worse, Don Tapscott, the technology writer, puts it more bluntly. Now that we can look up anything “with a click on Google,” he says, “memorizing long passages or historical facts” is obsolete. Memorization is “a waste of time.”