Samiul Bashar Samin
The soothing music we all hear overhead in supermarkets causes us to walk more slowly and buy more food, whether we need it or not. Most of the vacuous thoughts and intense feelings our teenagers experience from morning till night are carefully orchestrated by highly skilled marketing professionals working in our fashion and entertainment industries. Politicians work with a wide range of consultants who test every aspect of what the politicians do in order to sway voters: clothing, intonations, facial expressions, makeup, hairstyles and speeches are all optimised, just like the packaging of a breakfast cereal.
Fortunately, all of these sources of influence operate competitively. Some of the persuaders want us to buy or believe one thing, others to buy or believe something else. It is the competitive nature of our society that keeps us, on balance, relatively free.
But what would happen if new sources of control began to emerge that had little or no competition? And what if new means of control were developed that were far more powerful – and far more invisible – than any that have existed in the past? And what if new types of control allowed a handful of people to exert enormous influence not just over the citizens of a country but over most of the people on Earth?
Because people are far more likely to read and click on higher-ranked items, companies now spend billions of dollars every year trying to trick Google’s search algorithm – the computer program that does the selecting and ranking – into boosting them another notch or two. Moving up a notch can mean the difference between success and failure for a business, and moving into the top slots can be the key to fat profits.
We are living in a world in which a handful of high-tech companies, sometimes working hand-in-hand with governments, are not only monitoring much of our activity, but are also invisibly controlling more and more of what we think, feel, do and say. The technology that now surrounds us is not just a harmless toy; it has also made possible undetectable and untraceable manipulations of entire populations – manipulations that have no precedent in human history and that are currently well beyond the scope of existing regulations and laws.
Of course we are all being manipulated. Just remember, you cannot be manipulated if you are disconnected from it, so being manipulated is a matter of choosing to be connected or disconnected — it’s that simple. You have been warned, now what are you going to do about it? I predict you will do nothing. Search engines work at “manipulating” others because it is human nature to seek out and conform to peer pressure. It is all a part of the preprogrammed social need to belong. We pretend that the search results are based on popularity, and in today’s socially dysfunctional world we once again want to be a part of being popular; of belonging to part of a group, even if it is an imaginary one. We imagine that search results give us an overall summary of our imaginary group opinions, and so we feel like conforming. Nothing surprising or magical happening here, just simple psychology.