Since the mid-1980s or so I have been maintaining that it will not be government playing the role of "Big Brother" when we are all being watched - it will be us. You and I, and those people over there, will all be watching each other. Historically, the sense is that this is how we will be controlling each other - directly. That we won't allow strays to drift askew, that we will enforce some form of normalcy.

However, what has actually happened now that we have had the technology for over a decade is more insidious.

"Big Brother" hasn't had to actively "watch" us, per se, so much as we have willingly given access to the way our minds function to the machinery with which we interact - and it was designed to harvest that data, to varying degrees and in several ways.

With every click or tap or swipe on modern "social media" - which are just data-gathering programs disguised as "family and friends get-togethers" - we have been feeding the largest databases ever constructed, and the most computing power ever assembled - with the equivalent of a combination Rorschach test and free-associative analysis (the latter due to the desire to have as little conscious mediation as possible in the response of the data sources). We have long known that the questions that precede affect the answers that follow in, say, opinion polling. We also know this is true, to a crude degree, with marketing.

But now, for a decade or so, hundreds of trillions of instantaneous reactions based on the exact preceding series of stimuli have been gathered. To be sure, the vast majority of these were not meaningful - but the program "knows" which ones those are. And those unmediated responses form a picture, a model, of how the human mind works under certain circumstances.

And those circumstances are not unusual, they are not a laboratory - they are people, going about their lives, mostly interacting with things being said or passed around by people they "know".

And what do I think has been calculated from this huge amount of data, and the model it has been used to form?

I claim that "we" have determined how to get people to add a piece of information to what they perceive as reality. To learn something that we want them to think is true, by adding it to what they already think they know. And this is with one key bit of sophistication far beyond what you might imagine: it is designed and presented in such a way that if they do not add it to their worldview, they do not also remove the things they think they know upon which it was "logically" based. They simply keep adding to the structure, their body of what they think is knowledge, and never remove anything due to new information. Imagine if science operated this poorly - that if a new piece of data, that logically and experimentally fits what is already thought to be a useful model, is discarded because we are able to see it is not valid, and yet we leave the model it was based on and fit into alone. That is exactly what science does not do.

But we have figured out how to get people to build on a worldview that they accept at a very primitive, gut level, on a basis very similar to the spiritual vacancy of "cafeteria Catholicism" (or any religiion, but it's usually Christianity these days). That presented with a half dozen new "pieces of the puzzle" over a week or two, they accept two or three, and will assert them to be Truth until their dying day, while rejecting three or four as nonsense, and never noticing that they all fit the same framework. That they are all lies and propaganda.

Remember, if you can get a person to believe in a lie, you can get them to think anything.

If you build into that lie a world view that negates the possibility of it being refuted (say, by labeling all who disagree as untrustworthy), you can cement it permanently in a person's mind.

Those two facts we have know for a very long time - perhaps centuries, perhaps even millennia.

What have lacked are the tools to measure how certain ideas mesh with and reinforce each other, and the means to present them in a steady, incremental fashion.

We know have those tools, and via the same medium, the means to act on their results.

It is interesting in that, to some degree, the model of what happens is the same as the model for gradually acquiring genuine knowledge and expertise - developing a foundation and then working to build on it with the exploration of new information and forms of analysis or understanding. Where it diverges is that it never reflects and considers altering the foundation. This makes it more amenable to being developed and promoted in certain basic mindsets, in people with a pre-existing disposition to accept information and arguments that take advantage of some kinds of logical fallacies and cognitive biases.

Conservatism, fundamentalism, literalism, "originalism", authoritarianism, and over-reliance on old texts and people as infallible guides rather than introducers of ideas are all markers for this sort of personality. If you examine their opposites, you will find yourself clearly defining those who are willing to cast aside what they had assumed was true when encountering contrary evidence. You will find those who are open to new experience, new ideas, and an ever-developing understanding of the universe.

Thus, this new - and incredibly powerful - tool is uniquely shaped to act on and hone, to mold, that portion of the population who prefer to not have to rethink anything, or even think particularly deeply to start with. They will certainly think, as they acquire varying pieces of the puzzle and assemble their arguments for what they think they think.

But we have reached a point where they will often use a string of demonstrably false claims, logical fallacies, and appeals to biases and unclear thinking with no intrusion of actual facts, data, or reason present. It is somewhat unusual for a person to present something that extremely divorced from reality, but I have been seeing it more often in the last few years. What we see a lot more of are mixes of some facts and reasonable deductions based on them mixed with the disproven (or unsupported) and illogical (or rhetorically strong but weakly reasoned). And these mixes poor forth faster than we can say "Wait, where did you read that?", let alone take the time to dissect and refute any one part of the (sometimes outrageous) claims being put forward.

Again, the modern key to this is the development of a model of the human mind that allows the continual addition of pieces to the puzzle in these minds. I do not think most of these pieces are even being developed intentionally, or by any one entity (although there are certainly quite a few entities trying as hard as they can to do so), so much as I think that the model itself is capable of a kind of self-replication now. To offer a low-rent example of how this works, anything that confirms and builds on the idea that cutting taxes is good for everyone is likely to get turned into another piece of the puzzle.

I know I labeled what is basically the political right as being more prone to building a worldview around a foundation of lies and biases (because it is), the left is far from immune. Many, many people on the left are not much different than people on the right, they just started off with some different assumptions. Perhaps their assumptions were closer to the truth, perhaps not. However, in the course of their daily acquisition and presentation of ideas and arguments to support them, they can be equally sloppy and lacking in rigor.

However, I have seen somewhat of a success rate in correcting people on the left, and it is the call for truth and accuracy that wins them over, not a call to orthodoxy or power. I have even seen small movements, on social media and elsewhere, seeking to reduce the amount of dishonesty perpetuated by what we might call the "gullible left".

That is, however much what I am describing is distributed somewhat across the entire poitical (or emotional, since it amounts to the same thing) spectrum, it is a far greater problem on the fear-driven right than the ultimately love-seeking left.

And that, my friends, is what "Q" is.

Postscript: This development did not come about intentionally. It was the result of incredibly powerful machinery directed to produce some desired results (data for the advertising industry, both political and commercial; profit for its owners) without any restrictions or concerns whatever for the value of human life or consciousness. This was both a long-term and short-term project. The longer term framework has been the hideously inhuman experiment in unfettered capitalism for at least forty years in the United States (and for up to two or three centuries to some degree in Western "open" societies in general), and the shorter term one a computer game (or series of games) designed and continually tweaked to first, be as addictive as possible, and second, gather as much "unmediated by consciousness" data as they can from their players.

Half the human race now actively participate in these games, with varying results.

10/13/21