Our Feed, Their Power: Contemporary Brainwashing in the Age of Influence

Two little girls enthralled with a feed on their laptop, Llewi034 at English Wikibooks, via Wikimedia Commons

Our tech bohrs and our hardware evolves. This modality bears true for nigh century. And yet, the way our tech is bent is what decides its effect.

So with our ever-capable tech, what sort of advancements have we seen in the last century? What has humanity’s alleged best and brightest come up with?

Naturally, we must look to the most successful because our society says that’s where morality lies. Right?

Morality aside, let’s take a look at what people attracted to power do with our tech today. In fact, let’s go even deeper and dive into the history of our feeds. Yours, mine… and theirs that is.

The feed needed a foundation, and that was laid by the crafty Dave Winer, a software developer and blogger. This was RSS. And we should bear in mind that Dave is hardly to blame for contemporary doomscrolling. As far as we know, that is. And yet, he did provide quarters for the “feed.”

One of our first feeds was Reddit. As early as 2005, with user-subscribed content and a browse by “new” or “top” interface, we could tailor our own feed or view top-rated content throughout the site. These options gave us a unique yet tunnel-visioned view of the world that was, by comparison, borderline refreshing.

Subreddits are still, today, essentially microcosms of curiosity, ingenuity, and passion. They are generally made up of devout content creators and lurkers. Both are essential for the meme subreddits and–in some rarer cases–the educational subreddits.

As the subreddits burgeoned, they filled with like-minded people from every corner of the globe. This wasn’t unprecedented–many had specialised blogs and devoted sites. However, a unified platform for all curiosities was a sight to behold. Ideas were passed, memes were born, and a platform capable of proliferating doge WAS.

Reddit was essentially a burgeoning continent in the archipelago of information that was the internet. It was a place we could curate our perception and discuss niche topics our RL friends had little interest in.

If you find yourself at odds with many others’ ideas of a good time and are overflowing with disjointed information, this is where your divergence likely began.

Pre reddit we all had similar likes and thoughts. Many of us discussed Seinfeld, Friends, and Michael Moore docs. And we didn’t have much of a choice. It was popular.

That all began to change with the internet and the subsequent choices we faced. The divergence had begun. Many of us who were obsessed with our own curiosities went full bore into our dreams. Inspired by bits of information plucked from the great minds of our rock.

Reddit not only gave us the divergence we so desired but also threw us into rooms with all sorts of tisms we never knew we liked. We now had affirmation from total strangers. Or just affirmation, it was new for many of us. Especially when we divulged our nerdy passions.

By 2006, Twitter and Facebook were building their own RSS feeds. Twitter was feed-based. Its whole purpose was to feed. While Facebook was more localised, but already looking to its neighbours for inspiration.

Both Twitter and Facebook leaned on high cultural relevance. They achieved reach.

Now it was time to start leveraging that reach for profits.

Facebook started the revenue train with small advertisements.

Facebook’s early success was the proof of concept. Partially justifying Twitter’s one billion dollar evaluation by 2009.

And now that the companies had old money investors, the game was set. These were no longer communities despite their founding promises. They were now marketing platforms, or in other words, echo chambers.

The real irony being, the second they went public, they were no longer free.

Essentially, these B2B products convinced investors that they could not only achieve the reach they required but also gain more influence.

And yet, despite this potent. Many politicians dragged their feet for years.

In the meantime, Silicon Valley technocrats grew so large that they were invited to power-broker surrealist balls and even tropical islands. They were now more important than the plugs at the podium.

So where does that leave us? Well, since tech companies aren’t beholden to us or any of their founding principles,

It leaves us speechless in echo chambers we’re told are ours.

So what does that mean? It essentially means the better they can prove they can exploit us, the more investments they’ll receive, which will help them exploit us better in the future.

The feeds business model is influence. And who wants to influence? Well, many companies want us to buy their products, but a billion-dollar bot farm is often beyond their price range.

Enter state actors.

The first state agency to utilise the Ether was probably the GRU (Russian Foreign Military Intelligence Agency). But we’ll never know, cause the better you do it, the less obvious it is.

However, we can see the influence the early GRU troll farms had, especially on Twitter.

The 2016 American election, Brexit, and the 2019 Honduras and Moldova elections were influenced by Russian bot farms like Fancy Bear and Troll Farm.

And again, just because these were the first to be discovered, it doesn’t mean the rest of the world’s agencies were still using invisible ink. They were no doubt weaving words into copper and ideas into stygmas.

For instance, Reddit was being manipulated by the DMC, GOP and allegedly Ghislaine Maxwell. All of which were grooming their chosen targets, or in this case, subreddit-categorised demographics.

These domestic campaigns were proven to be more focused on misinformation and identity politics. Whereas foreign interference seems to focus on rewriting history or our perception.

And yet, they all proved the concept. They all influenced our decisions.

By 2020, it was very clear that the key to manipulating democracy was in our feed all along.

Feeds were a direct link to the consumer. And the consumer craved controversy. So it was fairly simple for state actors to find rifts and wedge them into warring factions.

These rifts create divides. They corrode our commonalities. Corrupting our perception and subsequent empathy.

After the consumer or target gets deluged with the same ideas, they tend to repeat the horrible anecdotes and unsubstantiated claims. And said target becomes more concerned with what they don’t want than what they do want. Thus, politics devolves into “you don’t like this cause your racist”, or “you don’t want tradition because you’re a lesbian”. Essentially nonsense and radical divisive rhetoric.

So, to reiterate. The people who developed our feeds were pressured by our consumerist society to monetise their communal platforms. In doing so, they sold their influence to people with strong incentives to manipulate.

And here we are.

In a world where the last thing you’ll hear is the silent majority.