Digital Mind Control

a clarion call for free speech

Algorithms are studying our individual behaviors to control our minds with targeted messages. When this technology is used to sell us products that don’t really make us happy, the result is to trick us into spending money in unproductive ways. But when the same technology is used to gin up support for wars, to elect candidates, to destroy reputations, to promote attitudes and policies, the results are far more dangerous.

Of course, governments of all kinds have been using their influence to try to shape opinions ever since there were governments. The technologies available for these campaigns have become far more effective recently. If these technologies are available to all those who have enough money and power to use them, the result is paralyzing polarization But if the regime in power has is able to team up with Big Tech and social media to censor the opposition, the result is far worse — our minds are in a straitjacket which blinds us to the corruption of those who wield this power.

I’ve been reading about Net Neutrality (remember?), Cambridge Analytica, Surveillance Capitalism, the First Amendment case now before our highest court, and the broader question of personally-targeted Orwellian mind control. I’m surprised to see how this literature is developing in a one-sided way, even allying with the government campaign against “disinformation” which is the signature manifestation of the problem. 

As I see it, the core issue is the technology of social control through cultural manipulation, a science which Edward Bernays introduced in the 1920s. The science was developed and refined in parallel by Madison Avenue and by CIA through the 20th century. In recent decades, the technology has become even more devastatingly effective as it has been personalized, with data collected about individual contacts, communications, travel, and purchases. As an economic force, this technology makes us buy things that don’t make us happy. As a political force, this technology makes us vote for people who don’t support our interests, and shapes our attitudes toward issues, groups, and individual people. 

In my view, some of the most visible effects of web-based mind-control technology have been

• To make some people look good: Tony Fauci, Bill Gates, Joe Biden, Volodymyr Zelensky

• To make other people look bad: Robert Kennedy, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin 

• To suppress investigation of 9/11, COVID, electronic voting, UFOs, parapsychology, cold fusion, Jeffrey Epstein, political assassinations, …

To put my perspective on the table: I am a small “d” democrat. I believe in spreading political control widely over the population and empowering people with free flow of information so they can choose wisely. Conversely, concentration of power, centralization of information control, and censorship are all anathema to me.

Cambridge Analytica

This is a company that bought personal information from Facebook, processed it to create strategies for controlling political behavior, and sold these strategies to groups that used them for manipulating elections. There was a lot of coverage of this story, but almost all was linked to the false narrative of “Russia elected Trump”. This is paradoxical in two different ways: 

• First, people are shocked to hear that Russia has an interest in influencing US elections, while the same people ignore the fact that our CIA has been influencing elections around the world for generations, and when that fails, they have sponsored coups d’etat that overthrew democratically elected governments, not just in well-known cases like Iran, Chile, Ukraine, and Libya, but in dozens of other countries around the world.

• Second, it is curious that these articles single out pro-Trump forces in the Republican Party as culprits. The Silicon Valley firms lean Democratic, and they have worked directly to demonize Trump and to promote D’s over R’s in other elections. [e.g., Wojcicki] 

Surveillance Capitalism

The term has been popularized by Shoshana Zuboff, an emerita professor at Harvard Business School. Her analysis is cogent, but her application is curiously one-sided. What she gets right is that Google has led the way (other digital giants have followed) in analyzing user data to predict future behavior. Of course, this analysis is most useful to those who want not just to predict but to influence behaviors. Their goal is to push large groups in a particular direction, but their methods can be personalized, using what their data mining reveals about individual vulnerabilities and leverage points. Zuboff is right to scream from the rooftops that this power undermines democracy.

What she gets wrong is everything else. Is it just naïvete that leads her to call on our government to control the tech giants? Or is she writing as a representative of the power structure that funds her Harvard business school? She speaks of government as democratically-elected, therefore having a legitimacy that the corporations lack. What she misses is that the elections that put that government in power have already been corrupted by this same thumb on the scale of our news and social media. The government is even richer than the corporations. If elected leaders are permitted to regulate the tech companies, why wouldn’t they use their influence to perpetuate their own incumbency and take down the political opposition? Two examples that she chooses to highlight are “the Trump 2016 campaign, and Apple-Google’s leverage of digital infrastructure control to subjugate democratic governments desperate to fight a pandemic.” [ref] 

• In the latter case, I see quite the opposite — that government was using the pandemic as an excuse to impose controls that had no benefit for fighting the virus, and that news media, including social media, were working with the government to stifle reasoned dissent from those policies. The campaign was coordinated by government and implemented by media, scaring people away from the early treatments that were most effective against COVID, including vitamin D, zinc, hydroxychloroquine, and ivermectin. Masks and lockdowns had not been used in previous pandemics for good reasons: they don’t work, and their social effects are insidious. Later, an unprecedented campaign of “safe and effective” promoted vaccines based on a technology previously untested in humans, and the devastating long-term effects of which we are just now having to confront. But the reach of the campaign was far deeper than news and social media; the medical literature on which the media were reporting was itself deeply corrupted. Fraudulent studies were rushed into print, while findings that could have cast doubts on the mainstream narrative were refused without review by the most prestigious medical journals.

• The former case (Trump) is more complicated. Beginning in 2015, the “liberal” media paid inordinate attention to Trump. During a time when his campaigns were drawing much smaller crowds than Bernie Sanders, the New York Times gave him front page coverage, while Sanders was treated as a fringe presence, when mentioned at all. This could be explainable by the Democrats’ perception of Trump as the weakest candidate that the Republicans could front against Hilary Clinton, the only one that she was favored hands-down to beat. Once Trump had clinched the nomination, the liberal media turned 180 degrees. Trump was portrayed as uniquely dangerous to democracy itself. Certainly, his personality and his unguarded pronouncements made an easy target for ridicule. But Trump was singled out for “fact-checking” with a standard that was not imposed on other people in government. As a sitting president, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter.  

It’s appropriate that I come clean here about my personal view of Trump. I see him as a silly man, not very smart, pathologically self-promoting, but ultimately less dangerous to our nation than the Deep State agents (D and R), whose subversion of the public good is systematic and has far more history and power behind it. 

In a NYTimes op-ed, Zuboff blames January 6 on Trump’s manipulation of social media. My own view is that there were plenty of good reasons to question the results of the 2020 election. I see signs that January 6 was provoked by FBI agents working within the crowd, whose aim was to incite violence. Doors of the Capitol building were opened as a honey trap. Thousands of peaceful protestors were held unconstitutionally for months and years without trial. The meme of “insurrection” has been used to delegitimize all questioning of the very questionable machines that count our votes.  

Continuing, Zuboff advocates government censorship in the name of countering disinformation. Those who demand free speech in this context are promoting “a twisted rendition of First Amendment rights. Social media is not a public square but a private one governed by machine operations and their economic imperatives, incapable of, and uninterested in, distinguishing truth from lies…” She goes on to explicitly oppose the ruling authority on the First Amendment, Oliver Wendell Holmes: “The corrupt information that dominates the private square does not rise to the top of a free and fair competition of ideas. It wins in a rigged game. No democracy can survive this game.” After telling us that our elections are illegitimate, she then looks to the “elected” government to discern truth for us, to save us from private parties who would manipulate us with lies.

Nowhere does she address the elephant in the room, What happens when government itself gets to define what is true and what is false? What result do we expect when a central government is empowered to impose restrictions on what the public is allowed to see and hear? Has she never read Orwell?

Monday’s Supreme Court hearing

All these issues are coming to a head in a case currently before the Supreme Court. The presenting issue is an injunction against the Biden Administration giving the social media companies and search engines lists of videos, articles, and postings that they wish to suppress. From the reported debate and questions from the Bench, it seems that the Court’s decision will hinge on a distinction between “control” and “influence”. 

In my view, this distinction is moot. Government contracts provide a substantial portion of the revenue of these tech giants. Of course, any “suggestion” from the Administration carries a veiled threat that these contracts could be curtailed. 

But this question should never arise in the first place. Holmes’s broad interpretation of the First Amendment is even more necessary in today’s environment than when he registered his eloquent dissent in 1919. The power of an unfettered internet to become a free marketplace of ideas is unprecedented, and the risk of any one power center influencing public discussion for its own ends is the more dangerous.

In my opinion, the only legitimate limit to free speech should be “yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.” Speech can be illegal only if (1) it is untrue (2) it is dangerous, and (3) it has potential to cause immediate harm before saner voices have a chance to prevail. “Crowded theater” means that every second counts. There is no time for a public debate. During the pandemic, government misapplied this standard to suppress debate during the weeks and months that the pandemic response was unfolding.

As luck would have it, plaintiffs in the case are Missouri and Louisiana  The case was originally titled Missouri vs Biden. The Constitution says that for cases “in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction.” Nevertheless, the case was first heard last spring by a Federal District Court in Louisiana. On July 4, Judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction, broadly prohibiting the Biden Administration from meddling with social media content. The injunction was weakened in an appeal last fall, and the Supreme Court “stayed the injunction”, which, in effect, put a hold on the hold on the Biden Administration. Many co-plaintiffs, people who have experienced censorship by big tech, have joined the suit, offering amicus briefs. But the tea leaves do not seem to be aligning for a Supreme Court ruling in vigorous defense of free speech.

Internet architecture

It happens that the Internet was designed by the US Department of Defense with a decentralized architecture. At the time (1972), the funders were not envisioning the Worldwide Web, but rather a military command and control that could survive a nuclear attack. So, by chance, we are blessed with a structure that is decentralized and difficult for any one institution to control. That doesn’t stop them from trying.

The internet has been the greatest tool for democratization of information since Johannes Gutenberg. We must guard what we have. The same Internet could become the greatest tool for mind control since 1984.

The Bottom Line

At issue are a broad array of strategies by which digital media companies can influence people, individually and en masse.

• Search engine bias

• Shadow banning (Musk has defended his right to limit “freedom of reach” on X)

• Filtering of content on social media based not on what the user wants to see but what Big Brother wants him to see.

• Direct censorship: Taking down videos, tweets, articles, and social media posts to protect the public from their influence.

• An unholy alliance between the most prestigious medical journals and the pharma companies that provide their revenue.

  The academic credentials of people like Zuboff are legitimizing all this.

We can agree that it would be better for us all if only true statements appeared on the Internet. The only sticking point is that we have different ideas about which statements are true and which are false. 

Our Founding Fathers opined that the power to decide what is true is too great to be placed in the hands of any one person or one institution. The expedient of open debate is no guarantee that truth will prevail but it is the best option today, as it was in 1789. It is a matter of Constitutional law that the government must not restrain free speech. In this day of digital oligopolies that mediate our communications, it is imperative that these platforms also remain open and unbiased; however we cannot look to government to ensure net neutrality.

What can we do?

Let’s do what we can individually. Broaden our news sources. Read more of what we disagree with. Support independent journalism. Patronize Substack and Rumble and other platforms that don’t censor content.

Those of us in the sciences must be more skeptical of the peer review process, and consider perspectives outside the scientific mainstream.

In the long run, we must pool our resources to build alternatives. We need crowd-funded science. We need to replace the New York Times with a crowd-sourced “newspaper of record”.

We need a people’s Google. Google built its original success 25 years ago on democratic algorithms that ranked search results based on what people were reading. Now Google is using Democratic algorithms with a built-in partisan bias.

Blockchain architecture is a model for how to insure democratization of information. Similar technology can be extended to create trusted search engines and news sources.

I look to your comments for more ideas.