Good news

 

Good News

 

There’s a way through the darkness of our pandemics. It’s in the values of liberty, freedom and justice for all in our nation’s foundation. That’s where we’ll find restoration of respect for all our rights to exist. That’s the rights all of us feel endangered, across our polarized boundaries.

 

We can secure them together. It depends on seeing our common enemy hidden in the middle of our families’ fascination with social media. It’s the commandeering of our attention capacity for outrage for profit, without regard for the destruction of our liberties, our values of democracy, and the strength of our family life in America.

 

This fascination for outrage fired up the crowd that terminated in a violent mob our Capitol this January 6.  It has also drugged our children via handheld screens into a secure bubble of common outrage against all sorts of real and imagined ills in our society. Hooked for long periods of time, even our children turn into products of public attention for advertising, to be sold for profit. It’s the big reason most digital technology experts in Silicon Valley keep digital screens away from their children well into high school age.

 

This is the other, more real and dangerous conspiracy behind the January 6 breaking and entering our nation’s capital. Google and Facebook, yes, did likely aid and abet the election rigging story behind the outrage the mob shouted in breaking and entering our capital. Even worse was the money to be gained in children’s and adults’ minds around the country with face time with a trusted avatar of outrage, face time that easily turned into advertising time. The psychological research into keeping a child or adult in that bubble, away from normal family engagements, was and remains profitable.   

 

Most remarkably, the outraged disinformation flood is lessening. Two years ago executives of Google, Facebook, Twitter and other digital platforms gathered together with Netflix leaders to create documentary, The Social Dilemma. It’s been on Netflix since a year ago. It predicts our insurrection January 6, and sheds valuable light on how our business economy grew Google and Facebook upon untruth, up to six times more profitable than truth.  

 

As it stands now, Google search words “global warming,” for example, brings up glaciers melting and seas rising in one user’s phone, proving global warming is real. On another they bring up evidence of a total natural set of phenomena, proving global warming is a hoax.  Each individual user’s secretly stored record of clicks and attention time determines the results of a search. It also determines content of notifications, pop-up ads, and even email message ads. 

 

The Social Dilemma documentary has evidence of the cost of  in teen addictions, mental illness, suicide, loneliness, and extremism is rooted in the addictive nature of our social media and artificial intelligency. It’s manipulated by a neglected crack in our worldwide social media platforms led by Facebook and Google.  On that day, that crack turned into a cavernous crevasse dropping into a torrent of fabricated outrage that the election was rigged. The same torrent directly undermines our families and damages the minds and growth of our children. It works against  progress being made in Missing and Murdered Ingenous Women, in Black Lives Matter, and in reversing the job loss in the energy crisis in Montana and here in Big Horn County.

 

Since our nation’s foundation we have come a ways toward respect for all.  Is it possible we could thank the marchers of January 6 for unwittingly opening the light of truth with their outrage leading to five citizen deaths? What do we see now, that such obsession with outrage, driven without real trusted human relationships, can go to terrible places for our children and our nation? And that it comes not from some mysterious avatar or matrix, but from the reality of social media platforms and artificial intelligence designed for profit over truth? It’s possible we can learn from the marchers and their victims that day.

 

Outrage that the election was fraudulent fueled the violence, because media messages ignored truth. The outrage itself is now proven fraudulent. Thankfully, it could not forge a way through the defenses our nation has built to protect our government of the people, by the people, for the people. But the corporate interest in citizen outrage to build profit remains entrenched and codified into our digital world of artificial intelligence and social media platforms. And outrage peddling for profit remains almost totally unregulated, even peddled by secret invasion through social media into our children’s minds. It will continue lying.

 

Sophocles, as quoted in The Social Dilemma, said thousands of years ago, “nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.”  We here in rural southern Montana have the courage, tenacity, and intelligence to act to avert the curse of our vast digital empire, reclaim it under human control, and restructure it like we have placed organ donor icons on our licenses to legally prevent profit from our deaths. It’s time to stop the profiteering from the likes of that attack on our Capitol, our democracy, and our children all originating from our dysregulated digital social media.