How Sure Am I?
Manipulating People Is Easy--Manipulating Reality Is Tough
Manipulating people is easy. Manipulating reality is tough.
Those whose job it is to manipulate people do so for the purpose of having people meet their needs and expectations, not the other way around. That should be obvious enough, but apparently many people are easily fooled. Products and causes are placed before our eyes and ears incessantly, not for our benefit, but for someone else’s benefit.
Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc make countless BILLIONS every year, yet we pay them nothing. How can that be? Where does their money come from? It comes from people who pay those sites to put their sites up front. When you search Google, there are paid placements that go straight to the top. Beyond that, there are algorithms designed to assure that you will see what they want you to see and not what they don’t want you to see.
A search will likely have thousands, even millions, of hits. Who reads past the first page? FB, Instagram, TikTok all rake in billions from corporations that pay to be placed where the most people will see them.
But where do corporations get THEIR money? That’s right, they get it from you. You drink more Coke, Pepsi, Beer, and watch more shows, buy cars, buy phones, clothes, furniture, and go to colleges based on what shows up on that first page of Google, FB, Instagram, etc.
Perhaps you think you’re more independent minded than that. Maybe you are. Maybe you aren’t. Think of all the things you’ve bought lately, and of all the opinions you hold. Think of all the things and people you like, and all that you hate. Where did any of that come from? Can you honestly say that it all came from even-handed research, with due consideration of all possibilities, careful vetting of all sources of information, and with disregard to outside influence of even your peers? Maybe, maybe not. If you bother to consider this question, be sure to contemplate that influencers spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year, because they know they can get most people to go along, if they keep repeating their message enough. The saying is true: If you are not paying for the product, you ARE the product. Google, FB, TikTok, Instagram et al are selling you to the highest bidder.
So much for manipulating people. How about manipulating reality? If a building is unstable, can you prop it up with propaganda? Will a plane that has malfunctioned stay in the air, if all the passengers have the courage of their convictions? How about if the plane is full of democrats? Of republicans? Can we count on a bridge to carry the traffic without collapsing, because it was built by minority contractors?
Here’s a thought: If, in your job, nobody dies if you screw up, maybe your job isn’t as essential as you thought. Tradesmen and engineers don’t have the luxury of being able to ‘try things out and see what happens’. The law of averages is useless. Get it right, or else.
So, that’s why I have little respect for the professions of lawyers, politicians, journalists, and celebrities. One way or the other, they are selling. We are the product. Skilled tradesmen and engineers have only a passing regard for ‘what people think’. Their concern is for providing people with workable physical realities that won’t get anyone killed. That gets my respect. We are all betting our lives every day that those engineers and tradesmen are good at what they do. Yes, they fail. People die. People are injured. But in our physically complex world, that is an amazing rarity.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it: The high school graduates that build our buildings, our bridges, our planes and everything else, are experts at manipulating reality. That is orders of magnitude trickier than manipulating people. Manipulating people is generally within the job description of liberal arts majors. When you get down to it, it doesn’t take a lot of brains to do that. Brains may just get in the way.
Perhaps all that I’ve said offends some people. Oops. I guess I’ve failed to adequately manipulate some people. Did anybody die?
Different points of view are welcome here. Feel free to comment.
Hello Radical I. I really like what you say, both here, and on your About Page.
You rightly call to awareness, (what we all know), Big Tech. makes Billions but we pay them nothing.
Your first premise is that we buy what they advertise. (And I do appreciate it when you say, "PERHAPS you think you’re more independent minded than that.") Of course I do think that??? And I don't really buy very much of anything. Even my phones were given to me used, when someone did buy a new one.
Your second premise is that they sell our personal data. My data alone is worthless, but aggregated with many millions of others, it is proving to be worth the price. That takes us back to your first sentence: "Manipulating people is easy."
Actually an Internet advertisement is a computer program, (like buttons are programs too). With it, the platforms go-around their privacy statement, because "how can we be responsible for our advertisers"? They watch what your are reading and writing, monitor your searches, and record all the pages that you access. But "they" are confined to the browser that they were opened on. So the way to foil them is called "browser isolation". I have a half dozen (privacy, like Brave) browsers and each is dedicated to a different task. Big Tech is confined to only one corral. Delete cookies often also.
The question is where do we go from this awareness? I know quite a bit about privacy through experimentation, but most people I know are into heavy denial, even though they have known for a decade that Google collects data. But there are many more subjects that just privacy.
With discussion we can share ideas of how to live life with less intrusions, and still have all the fun that we are entitled to.
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"So, that’s why I have little respect for the professions of lawyers, politicians, journalists, and celebrities. One way or the other, they are selling."
Oh, this whole essay is so quotable. Good one.