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Patrick Powers's avatar

Narrative control has been going on since at least ancient Egypt. They convinced the people their leaders were gods. This lasted for thousands of years so they must have been doing a good job. This continued to work so well that it was still being practiced in the Japan of 1945 and Indonesia of 1964. Emperor worship in Thailand goes on to this day.

I'd say the big advance came not with Bernays but with the Internet. It meant that They could get immediate and accurate feedback on which lies were working and which were not. If someone made a contribution to your campaign you could trace back their web history, see what caused it, and do it more. That made the big jump I think, a huge difference.

As for use of AI, surely this is happening now in secret. Needless to say, our opinion on this practice will not be solicited. Don't like it? Tough.

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Toma's avatar

It (the BS) started to accelerate in 2000 with the Bush administration when Bush, Cheney wolfowitz and rumsfeld decided that they could create their own reality. That's also when the internet really took off and was tapped by the NSA et.al. Y2K was the excuse - all the computers are going to crash with financial meltdowns , nuclear power station meltdowns, airliners are going to crash and so on. So the federal government had to Save the Day by sending programmers to "reprogram" all the code because it was obsolete. The excuse was that the code was written using only the last two digits in the years ie 2000 was saved as 00 and could be interpreted incorrectly as 1900 or vice versa. Everyone I knew at the time bought into it including 2 friends who were programmers at digital equipment Corp. I don't think there were many banks at the time running mainframe computers built in 1970. Shortly after 2000 an IT engineer came out and said that internet trunks were being tapped by the government. He quickly disappeared. Then came the Patriot act. Then came Snowden. So Y2K, 911, the Patriot act all allowed the government to read our thoughts and minds and gain ultimate control over the masses via the internet. AI does not exist yet. What is called AI is nothing more than a statistical method of reading key words and compiling them to see how people are reacting to proposals or issues in the media. Google (or Go Ogle if you prefer) has done a fantastic job of keeping tabs on us. They can keep us fighting over non issues, suppress any type of unification or dissension and create policies to maintain the status quo. If anyone becomes too dangerous they will be squashed like an insect. Marginalized at the least. "Oops your bank account disappeared? We're sorry."

But, everyone I have tried to explain this to thinks I'm a nutcase. Once you've been swimming in the cesspool long enough, you no longer smell it. Welcome to Amerika.

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