2020: Will Data Officially be Declared the New Oil?

How the Internet Overlords Win the Best Memes

My discovery into the great big world of data-mining started back in 2017, unbeknownst to me at that time. It was right after having dove head first into the great abyss of online interconnectivity, through back-doors and hidden alleyways, I eventually found myself studying the medium I was surfing itself.  

I then described limbic hijacking symptoms related to social media as spiritual awakening symptoms, and to be fair, I had taken an ayahuasca journey around that same time, for which integration lasted about a year. 

Now exactly which parts fuelled major life changes, near death experiences and a mystical travel through time and space is still unclear. What I do know is that China became an important focal point for me. So for those that are new to my storytelling, the best way to preface what you’re about to read is to say that I am a truth seeker, like many, the way I experience time is not linear, and things often appear stranger than fiction. 

What I will describe is to the best of my research, which has been fuelled by my subjective, objective, intersubjective and metaphysical experiences. How else can we do it? Life has been granted and so I continue trail blazing till the very end. A trail of which many have tried to steer me off of, to which I say, “let the universe be the judge of where my attention goes”. I seek to empower human beings and wish the best for the future of humanity. 

Back to 2017

I began surfing the web like a mid-night postmodern sentinel on a mission to digest the meaning of life. Out beyond the red pill I rode past the grey pill with barely enough sanity to keep me moving on to the next access nodal point on the web. Nervous system completely shot and hair dishevelled I swam my way out of cult land, a mystical magical tour that led me from Utah into the heart of Arizona. 

Researching cults leaves you way down in the dumps. It’s a dirty business of internet overlords playing with the lives of people to keep their egos afloat, their sexual desires fulfilled and their pocketbooks thick. The back-end is ruthless and cut-throat. Their meta-conversations dark and nihilistic. 

As I kept on moving, I stepped into the understanding that they were just the tip of the ice-berg. The real deadly cults were being discovered entrenched in the homes of the rich and famous. In the core of everything celebrity, deep state, academic, political, government and military. 

“Wait a minute”, you might say, “what exactly defines a cult?”. My definitions have changed over the years, it’s now evolved to mean something much deeper than culture, the dark side of cult in culture I will describe as “consciously organized mind-control”, an appropriate word to highlight here is perhaps psycho-technological weaponry. 

It’s true that since the beginning of time every one’s been trying to sell you their memes. We are meme generating creatures and we need the cult in culture to evolve our memes and evolve as a species. We do this by clinging onto the me in the meme (ego identification).

What we ought to be doing more of is scrutinizing what memes we’re allowing into our minds to fuel our evolutionary fate. It’s a collective undertaking and yet many of us are unaware of exactly how these memes have shaped our text books and current economic affairs. How they summon wars and are being used to destroy the planet.

Dawkins likened the process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution. Dawkins defined the meme as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation and replication, but later definitions would vary. – Wikipedia

So what do cults, memes and data-mining have in common? They’re used in combination to shape the way in which we experience reality. In that sense they’re all dependant on our time and attention, our inputs and outputs. They shape what we eat, think, what we buy and how we live. Basically our overall health as a species. To that effect they even shape the ways in which we have sex. They’re especially shaping the future of humanity. 

As I made my way through the cults that were born from the meaning crisis I came upon a little nihilistic researching-hole, an online social media page that collected data through OINST (open source intelligence tools) and used the data to do research on those that connected with the main contributor.

What many of these meme sites are doing can be described as cyber-warfare, especially the political ones but they expand out into almost every arena of the web. To quote myself in a previous entry: “If you understand the overall rules and constraints of the game you find yourself in, it changes the whole landscape of the playing field. Needless to say, if you’re unaware of the rules governing the playing field, they become sophisticated weapons that can be used to keep you looped into high level of arousal.”

Little to my knowledge at the time, even humorous memes are very sophisticated weapons. The person doing the meme research on me and a few others was one of the “internet overlords”.

After catching on, I decided to begin researching the person doing the meme research. I had to follow the trail, I knew it would lead to more important discoveries. It eventually led me to Texas and into the heart of California, but first, here are some of the technics being used by meme overlords. Note: not all those engaging in these activities are actual “bad” guys, some of them are badasses using these techniques to take out predators and to conduct both academic and rogue research (which is an ethical slippery slope, one you don’t want to get caught on the wrong side of). 

Meme psychology by James Stantagata

What value is there in using humor?

There are several, and learning to use humor as a characterization tool as well as a weapon is key.

1. Humor allows one to communicate and even implant different, distasteful or even dangerous ideas into another person’s mind, slipping past their filters

2. Humor evokes reactions, those reactions, especially when using self-deprecating humor allow one to quickly characterize another party through both their reactions, actions and inactions to the humor. In particular, self-deprecating humor is powerful as it is directed at oneself, thus, removing the feeling of an attack that may arise if directed at another person.

3. Humor allows one to further test the person’s intellect as well as their liking of the person delivering the humor.

As a quick cheat sheet those seeing only a joke (assuming it is layered as such) demonstrate lack of intelligence or low character as they actually are presenting dislike of the person delivering the humor but hiding it as “I don’t get it”.

That can be further disambiguated by simple questions to the other person.

Those that dislike self-deprecating humor present that they have low self-esteem and thus assume you are honest but weak to admit that weakness or are jealous that you have the courage – to them it is courage — to engage in such humor or interactions.

Read that again. 

So let’s go one layer deeper. What type of research is being done with these techniques other than trying to get a person into a vulnerable state to manipulate them, implant ideas into their minds, harvest them into prostitution rings or perhaps even influence them to commit suicide? 

Corporations, academia and governments want to know a few things about their population to more easily understand how memes propagated can sway the opinions of the public mind. They do this to understand what makes you purchase their products, follow their laws and keep you looped into lifestyles that support corporate agendas and produce unsustainable economic prosperity and war. 

In order to create policies that match their goals they need to understand how humans make-sense of the world around them, what empowers them and what keeps them in control. Here are some examples taken from ASPA’s website describing how and why research is being conducted for creating and maintaining policies governing our waking and digital landscapes. 

Agile Policy Making: How Complexity Theory, Big Data and Data Science Research is Changing the Practice of Policy Making

• Map the landscape – understand the policy arena’s issues and current challenges.
• Identify the protagonists –know the players and stakeholders in the policy arena and their relationships to each other.
• Model the struggle – create multiple scenarios to understand how the policy landscape may evolve.
• Watch for tipping points – identify the triggers that could dramatically shift the structure into a new form.
• Tune the landscape – use analytical tools and discussions to move the policy arena into directions that are more productive.
• Energize the protagonists – help some of the protagonists build capacity and take other actions to encourage cooperative behavior toward win-win situations.
• Civilize the struggle – help create win-win situations and limit destructive behaviors by the protagonists.
• Watch for predators –keep one or more protagonists from unfairly tipping the balance of power and creating a destructive struggle in the landscape.

— Anyone seeking to understand the landscape has a political, academic and/or economic or personal agenda.  

Who currently has access to our data? Hackers, Google, Facebook, Government both foreign and local, Intelligence and Academia. These institutions and corporations are comprised of individuals. Individuals that have their own limited understanding of the more complex global interconnection between all life.

Some of the researchers are in it for causes you don’t want to even fathom. Many other data researchers believe they’re working towards the greater good of humanity through their institution, and perhaps indeed they are, but both are constrained by the nature and intentions of their institutions. Despite the fact that separately our views are limited, working together increases awareness, especially when done in a decentralized fashion.

“We envision a world where technology supports our shared well-being, sense-making, democracy, and ability to tackle complex global challenges.” – Centre for Humane Technology

Current News 

More recently in global news we’ve become aware of a Technological company called Huawei. They are described as a research company based in China. The same company that will potentially be in charge of installing the 5G networks into our neighbourhoods. A company that the US has currently refused to do business with, Canada is still in debates over whether to use their services which seems counter-intuitive given all the information we have access to.

Using them would allow the Canadian Government to increase their data-mining capacities among other things like increasing surveillance and the speed of interconnectivity. This would also indirectly give China a backdoor into our electronic devices. 

The biggest danger is in the weaponry’s capacity through the 5G frequencies used within the network. They’re essentially powerful enough to penetrate human flesh. Meaning governments on both sides would have the ability to cook a population in no time. China or not, 5G might be the latest prototype of psycho-bio-electromagnetic weaponry up-to-date on the market.