A while back, I had been sitting at my desk, my phone somewhere off to the side, and I suddenly started hearting sounds from the phone that sounded like someone had pocket-dialed me, or I had pocket-dialed them… but there had been no dial-tone or ring-tone. Creepy!
It happened three or four more times. I was thinking maybe some app had dialed out… but I eventually keyed into the fact that the audio was exactly the same every time.
After some extensive head-scratching and trouble-shooting, I came to eventual conclusion that the Temu app had been launching this audio-clip as a manipulative way of getting me to look at the phone.
So, yeah… we are being manipulated, constantly. You can’t tell me that that audio-clip was some sort of mistake. It wasn’t.
Thank you for liking my song. I posted an earlier song called AI Buddha. I read “You’re Not in Control” right after I experimented producing a “demo” of my AI Buddha song in Suno. It produced a decent demo adding backup singers, piano, drums, and new vocals in literally 20 seconds. Your thoughts on being aware are spot on. The implications of where it all leads are mind blowing. Awareness is critical. I’m interested in how we hold on to our humanity - especially from a musician’s point of view - but also from every other aspect of being human. My background is in ed tech - so I’m not a luddite, but I am concerned for our humanity.
This is very well written and as scary as it is true. Micro profiling! A lot of people don’t realize that it’s not even just what we click on, it’s even the things that slow our scroll every time that we don’t click on.
I love your use of the word sovereignty. Freedom from external control. The phenomena you describe are like capitalism turned up to 11. And yet here we are in a country based on individual rights such as, you know, pursuit of happiness, life and …. Wait for it… Liberty! Individual sovereignty! (hang on, somebody wants me to donate $15).
My fear is that we’re already far past the point where the algorithms know who we are better than we do, that our legacy illusions of self stand in the way of self defense. https://erikdolson.substack.com/p/taking-a-day-off
Thing is none of this is new, They said this about books, papers, magazines. they said the same thing about radio, tv, movies, video games.
Who many of you remember rushing home to watch your favorite cartoon after school, every chance to turn on the radio or your walkman to listen to your favorite band. For you book worms, the chance to ready your favorite book.
The only thing that’s changed it the medium or tool used to consume it.
This is a perfect example why Reframed Generations is so needed, because through it we can properly track issues like this throughout history
Totally, the moral panic cycle is ancient. Every generation thinks the new medium is corrupting the youth destroying attention spans or summoning demons from the basement. Books were dangerous. Radio was dangerous. TV was the apocalypse. Video games were the fall of Rome. Walkmans were going to isolate every teen beyond repair. So yes humans have always had obsessions, and media has always been the delivery system. Those older mediums didn’t adapt to us in real time. Books didn’t monitor pupil dilation. TV didn’t track your emotional spikes. Your Walkman didn’t predict your insecurities. Cartoons didn’t alter their narrative pacing every 0.8 seconds. This isn’t just a new format. The medium changed but the mechanism of influence mutated. That’s the part that’s historically unprecedented. THAT’s why your work with Reframed Generations matters because mapping the continuity and the divergence is how we stop people from falling into its all the same denialism. Patterns repeat. But the power dynamics evolve.
The rebellion is spreading. One by one more and more people take their minds back. We have control over where they lend their attention & focus. It's only a matter of time. I can feel the rising power of the collective consciousness taking their initiatives from soulmind, not the algorithmic feed. 💫
Ohhh absolutely!! You can feel the shift happening in a quiet, disciplined, coordinated withdrawal of attention from the systems that have been farming it for a decade. Collective consciousness doesn’t rise with hashtags it rises with micro choices. And the fact that so many of us are seeing through the feed at the same time? Yeah.
But the process is still, in many ways, just more of the same, even if at some point more is different, produces a tipping point, a phase change. In particular, I've often argued that while prostitution is supposedly the world's oldest profession, advertising is a close second — some of the earliest cave writings have been translated as “for a good time, call Mona, third cave from the watering hole”. True facts. 😉🙂
Oh my god, yes if humans have been consistent about anything, it’s selling something to someone, somewhere, usually with questionable ethics and a slightly desperate grin. Prostitution may be the oldest profession, but advertising is absolutely the oldest strategy. What used to be one cave drawing is now an entire ecosystem of behavioral economics, predictive profiling, and dopamine optimized suggestions. Same human tendencies. Same selling instinct.
Yep Minority Report stopped being scifi the moment tech companies realized prediction was more profitable than persuasion. Precogs weren’t clairvoyant. They were data models in human form. And what we have now is the same thing, just without the floating blue goo tanks. We hand over our micro behaviors voluntarily, and the system builds a psychological forecast so precise it doesn’t need to prevent crime it just shapes behavior before we ever notice the choice point. The only real freedom left is awareness.
Perfect diagnosis of the problem. I call this the Age of Dissolution.
A while back, I had been sitting at my desk, my phone somewhere off to the side, and I suddenly started hearting sounds from the phone that sounded like someone had pocket-dialed me, or I had pocket-dialed them… but there had been no dial-tone or ring-tone. Creepy!
It happened three or four more times. I was thinking maybe some app had dialed out… but I eventually keyed into the fact that the audio was exactly the same every time.
After some extensive head-scratching and trouble-shooting, I came to eventual conclusion that the Temu app had been launching this audio-clip as a manipulative way of getting me to look at the phone.
So, yeah… we are being manipulated, constantly. You can’t tell me that that audio-clip was some sort of mistake. It wasn’t.
Thank you for liking my song. I posted an earlier song called AI Buddha. I read “You’re Not in Control” right after I experimented producing a “demo” of my AI Buddha song in Suno. It produced a decent demo adding backup singers, piano, drums, and new vocals in literally 20 seconds. Your thoughts on being aware are spot on. The implications of where it all leads are mind blowing. Awareness is critical. I’m interested in how we hold on to our humanity - especially from a musician’s point of view - but also from every other aspect of being human. My background is in ed tech - so I’m not a luddite, but I am concerned for our humanity.
This is very well written and as scary as it is true. Micro profiling! A lot of people don’t realize that it’s not even just what we click on, it’s even the things that slow our scroll every time that we don’t click on.
I love your use of the word sovereignty. Freedom from external control. The phenomena you describe are like capitalism turned up to 11. And yet here we are in a country based on individual rights such as, you know, pursuit of happiness, life and …. Wait for it… Liberty! Individual sovereignty! (hang on, somebody wants me to donate $15).
My fear is that we’re already far past the point where the algorithms know who we are better than we do, that our legacy illusions of self stand in the way of self defense. https://erikdolson.substack.com/p/taking-a-day-off
Thing is none of this is new, They said this about books, papers, magazines. they said the same thing about radio, tv, movies, video games.
Who many of you remember rushing home to watch your favorite cartoon after school, every chance to turn on the radio or your walkman to listen to your favorite band. For you book worms, the chance to ready your favorite book.
The only thing that’s changed it the medium or tool used to consume it.
This is a perfect example why Reframed Generations is so needed, because through it we can properly track issues like this throughout history
Totally, the moral panic cycle is ancient. Every generation thinks the new medium is corrupting the youth destroying attention spans or summoning demons from the basement. Books were dangerous. Radio was dangerous. TV was the apocalypse. Video games were the fall of Rome. Walkmans were going to isolate every teen beyond repair. So yes humans have always had obsessions, and media has always been the delivery system. Those older mediums didn’t adapt to us in real time. Books didn’t monitor pupil dilation. TV didn’t track your emotional spikes. Your Walkman didn’t predict your insecurities. Cartoons didn’t alter their narrative pacing every 0.8 seconds. This isn’t just a new format. The medium changed but the mechanism of influence mutated. That’s the part that’s historically unprecedented. THAT’s why your work with Reframed Generations matters because mapping the continuity and the divergence is how we stop people from falling into its all the same denialism. Patterns repeat. But the power dynamics evolve.
Brilliant, concise and necessary reading for the resistance to spread.
Thank you, @Susan Harley ♥️
The rebellion is spreading. One by one more and more people take their minds back. We have control over where they lend their attention & focus. It's only a matter of time. I can feel the rising power of the collective consciousness taking their initiatives from soulmind, not the algorithmic feed. 💫
Ohhh absolutely!! You can feel the shift happening in a quiet, disciplined, coordinated withdrawal of attention from the systems that have been farming it for a decade. Collective consciousness doesn’t rise with hashtags it rises with micro choices. And the fact that so many of us are seeing through the feed at the same time? Yeah.
Shorter Maria 😉🙂:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheep_Look_Up
Though still some impressive images.
But the process is still, in many ways, just more of the same, even if at some point more is different, produces a tipping point, a phase change. In particular, I've often argued that while prostitution is supposedly the world's oldest profession, advertising is a close second — some of the earliest cave writings have been translated as “for a good time, call Mona, third cave from the watering hole”. True facts. 😉🙂
Oh my god, yes if humans have been consistent about anything, it’s selling something to someone, somewhere, usually with questionable ethics and a slightly desperate grin. Prostitution may be the oldest profession, but advertising is absolutely the oldest strategy. What used to be one cave drawing is now an entire ecosystem of behavioral economics, predictive profiling, and dopamine optimized suggestions. Same human tendencies. Same selling instinct.
👍🙂 Part and parcel of the process of communication, the exchange of something for something else: it's quid pro quo all the way down. 😉🙂
“paradigmatic” case of that is probably sexual reproduction, “mating dances” of one form or another in particular.
Another classic case is paper wasps:
Wasps Passed This Logic Test. Can You?
The insects frequently found in your backyard appear to be the first invertebrate known to be capable of the skill of transitive inference.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/science/paper-wasps-logic-test.html?unlocked_article_code=1.4U8.sb8q.Snhy9vqBKHP9&smid=url-share
Yep Minority Report stopped being scifi the moment tech companies realized prediction was more profitable than persuasion. Precogs weren’t clairvoyant. They were data models in human form. And what we have now is the same thing, just without the floating blue goo tanks. We hand over our micro behaviors voluntarily, and the system builds a psychological forecast so precise it doesn’t need to prevent crime it just shapes behavior before we ever notice the choice point. The only real freedom left is awareness.