Working you to the bone

Don’t get me wrong. I am all in favour of social media. I love it. It keeps me in touch with what some friends and family are up to and, besides, it puts one right into the midst of the marketplace of ideas, whether good, bad or deplorable. Some offerings you might applaud and agree with and others not and, in the case of a few, you just shake your head and move on. On some rare occasion, some truly idiotic or atrocious contribution makes you angry, fume and rage, an extraordinary stream of emotions and reactions that track through the mind whether you are relaxing in the comfort of your home, travelling on the bus or just stealing time from your employer.

         Perhaps the major attraction in social media is that participation is free: it’s a pleasure you don’t have to pay for. Nothing in upfront money. Where do you, these days, get anything so useful and, at times, even addictive, paying? It is a deception, however, although you can’t just say “caveat emptor” because, in ordinary usage, you are not actually buying or forking out. However that may be, should not the sellers also be subject to the warning contained in another Latin expression, ‘caveat venditor’ or ‘seller beware’? But these buccaneers don’t care, do they? Even though they must be fully aware of the answer to the third of my Latin language quotes: “Cui bono?” Who, indeed, benefits from all those freebies being splashed about? Well, you better believe it’s not me or you, friend. The FAANGs, Facebooks, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Googles of this world, or to give them their full, frightening enormity, FAANGY, with YouTube rounding off the predatory sextet, are not doing it out of the kindness of their heart. They’re there just for the money. For them to make their money, they deliver you, bound hand, foot and mind, to their real paymasters: these are the ones who want to sell you stuff.

         Someone, somewhere, wants your soul and is prepared to pay for it. Once they’ve got it, the step to the contents of your purse or your mind is an easy one. You are now property, the modern-day slave-form. And, like the slave-masters of old, they work you to the bone. But this time it is not your physical labour, but instead, your eagerness to amass stuff. Whatever is in the market, they sell, real or virtual. But it is the virtual stuff that poses the greatest threat to the public good. It is now fully established that Facebook, for example, played a leading role in manipulating UK voters to do a Brexit on themselves. And, similarly, Americans who voted in their presidential election a few months later, were manipulated into making a bad choice for their leader, although that vote was complicated by external factors. Besides that kind of manipulation, social media allows and promotes the publication of lies and other fake stories full of destructive propaganda. When questioned about that kind of behaviour, they retreat behind a threadbare curtain of an amendment to the constitution of the United States which, if we are to believe the hype, prohibits censorship in the public sphere. When the platform operators are forced, they may concede, grudgingly and would, sometimes, remove objectionable material from their platforms. A recent example is that post of Nancy Pelosi that was manipulated to make her appear under the influence. ‘No, they can’t touch it’, they say. That would be censorship, horror of horrors, even though they know that the video is a lie. And a few weeks ago, it was a struggle to get Facebook to delete the live-streamed rant of the Christchurch mass-shooter as he went about his murderous business, killing scores of innocent Muslims going about their devotions on a Friday afternoon. I, too, in my own limited experience, have had to deal with Facebook when a horrible anti-Muslimism rant appeared in my feed. When I complained, I was horrified to hear Facebook say that the rant did not breach “community standards”. Which community? Which standards? So, it stood. This is just a minor example of how the platforms neglect what is a public duty to prevent civil dissention. Each of us, individually, has not the power to influence what the FAANGY’s do, but you would have thought that governments, singly, or even collectively, have enough clout to force them to behave responsibly.

         But that, sadly, is not so. Case in point, the Canadian parliament subpoenaed the CEO and COO of Facebook, among others, to explain why they behave the way they do. They were a no-show, instead, they sent lower level officials to face the questions.

So, what do we do with these all-powerful multi-trillion-dollar corporations, whose wealth, individually and combined exceeds that of many countries? The answer, my friend, lies with us. Voting with our feet will send a message that they can’t ignore. But I hear you say, “You first.”

Tell Fren Tru

The Mathematics of Hate

For the past six weeks, Sierra Leone has been gripped in a bitter election campaign in which a plethora of parties have been vying for a place in the sun. Nothing remarkable about that. After all, elections are the hallmark of democracy. However, a few election cycles ago, one might have been more hopeful about the proceedings and the apparent diversity of punters. Surely, that’s good, with all the hopefuls, telling us how they intended to make life better for us. But even then, there was something of an edge to the rhetoric that was saying obliquely “vote for me, or else”. As it turned out, the outcome was peaceful, and we were all able to settle back, once again, into the same-old, same-old state of bad governance. The constitutional order was preserved, and the atmosphere of dodgy law and order maintained.

         Now to the present. Today, each one of us has been transformed into a messaging machine over which we ourselves have little personal control. It is a system that not only receives messages, but one that can also broadcast back, frequently at a higher decibel, to a wider circle of what the puppet-masters call “friends”. Messaging has now become similar to chain reactions, governed by the processes that mathematicians call “force amplification”, through the re-messaging system for as many times as there are recipients, whether by Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Tinder, Instagram, YouTube or whatever. And so, without realising it, we are played for the suckers that we are by corporate interests that have only one objective: increasing the bottom line. Their modus operandi is to encourage and even force us to “Like” and “Share” whatever message lands on our device. Every time we “like” and “share” we expand the reach of those money-making corporations. At the same time, we, the consumers, buy more and more stuff. A win-win for the corporate interests. Fair enough. There is nothing wrong with making the kind of money they make, despite the huge gap between them and the rest of us. It is a gap that cannot be ignored however, because, we the 99%, are put at an even greater disadvantage as we lay bare our innermost selves by our choices in “likes” and “shares”: It is as if we stand naked at the market square shouting, “come and get me”. And get us they do. They exploit our weaknesses by routing to us more of the kind of stuff that we “like” to “share”, including toxic messages that we, again, forcefully amplify in the manner mentioned earlier. To be victimized in this way we need not be literate or even minimally lettered. Information can be in written or spoken words, pictographs, cartoons or videos. All that is required of us is to look down and/or listen and then hit the share symbol and the message, benign or toxic, hate speech or fake news, wings its way to the next recipient in an ever-widening circle.

So, here we are, two weeks after the Sierra Leone general election, inching towards the uncertainties of a face-off between the two main presidential candidates. Each side claims actual or potential election malpractice by the other side, one of the North and the other of the South. It is a geographical divide that provides respectable cover for the underlying dystopian fissure in the society, namely our inability to think outside the box of tribe, the sin that is not usually named in polite company, but which lies at the bottom of all that ails us.

But of policies? Not a squeak. The social media are far too busy stirring the tribe pot to concern itself about the basic issues of governance that will turn the country from backward to “developing”.

And this is just the surface. We have no idea what else might be going on in the social media empires when they allow our data to be made accessible to those who would directly influence us to vote in a particular way. It was not much of a surprise, to me at least, that the likes of Cambridge Analytica had been involved in the voting processes that delivered Brexit and the White House to Donald Trump. But what has been shocking is that CA’s Canadian partner, Aggregate IQ, received money to influence the last Nigeria presidential election.  

How many miles between Nigeria and Sierra Leone?

Tell Fren Tru

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