The title of this post prompted me to write this - it's a theory I've had for some time, but haven't written about it since the days of Voat.
Let me start with a basic example to set the ground work:
- you're in vacation in Italy, from NYC
- an Italian man sees you have an NYC belt buckle and decides to mess with you
- knowing NYC people flip each other off, he flips you off, just to get you to flip home off back
- you respond by flipping him off
The Italian man has remote controlled you, by exploiting some basic knowledge about you.
Taking it to the Next Level
Secondly, let me use a more complex example to lay the framework for understanding this risk:
You receive the following email:
Hey <name>, you don't know me, but I got your email from <somebody you knew when you worked at <prior job>. I'm writing this to let you know that <your wife's name> has been cheating on you. A friend of mine recognized her during a gang bang and told me... [continues, goes into more detail, knows about a private tattoo on her body and even mentions some kinky things she's into, etc.] (things gleaned from audio spying via your mobile phone, social media, etc.)
If you're married, then even reading this hypothetical email probably triggered some parasympathetic reactions in your body; imagine how you'd feel, if you received a message like this...
The aforementioned example is extraordinarily simplistic, compared to what I'll get into, because A) the secret details are actually pretty basic, B) the result is most likely not deadly, and C) ... the really important bit ...
C) ... the M.O. of such an attack works from a basic premise, namely that the victim will likely react emotionally to the purported news that his wife is cheating on him in a really nasty way. But, people get over such things, dump their wife, talk through it and realize it was an elaborate scam, esp when they hear on the news that others have received such messages, etc.
Where Things Get Truly Scary
I posit that there exists sequences of words and social cues, for each person, which will cause that person to take each specific action within their capability, including committing violence and/or suicide.
Think of the secrets that make up your ego, the littlest things that you feel, have shame about, your nervous ticks, things you're afraid of, things you regret deeply, people you miss, moments in your life that you hate, your secret mortal enemies, envies you hold, etc., down to the deepest and most intricate detail.
Imagine something, with hyper intelligence, using that kind of knowledge, gleaned via what would essentially amount to a tempest attack on the human mind (e.g., sending minute signal modulations from your phone's antenna to a super computer with all fMRI and other telemetry data in existence) that, combined with the full corpus of available digital data available about you, to construct a sequence of words and social cues, whether all at once, or over a long period of time, through conversation. Now, imagine that happening to everyone in the US, all at once.
I believe this kind of attack will happen, at some point, and it'll likely work from the inside out, first using secret information to drive couples apart, and then to drive society into a state of unthinkable chaos.
Interesting theory, and there is definitely some merit to this.
I imagine that there are many people who this would work on. But the best protection from it is actually to practice virtue: those who do not hide their sins or indulge their vices in secret have far less buttons to push this way.
A good dose of cynical skepticism is also a rather impenetrable defense as well. I swear those of my sub-generation (who are the blurred line between Gen X and Millenial who grew up in the earliest days of the consumer internet) are most immune to this and other online scams. When your formative experience with the internet was that it was a wild and anonymous tool but that you NEVER give real personal information and NEVER give full trust to ANYTHING online, then you have a sort of firewall against these schemes.
What I DO see as a potential method of attack that would be far more effective than the extent you say would be for these technologies and data to be used to do things such as break interpersonal relationships by seeding doubts and mistrust... even things as simple as manipulating suggested search results to make it appear a husband or wife was searching porn or hookup apps would be achievable with only cursory data and the ability to manipulate their browser remotely.
It is also already used to manipulate online social groups into echo chambers. Reddit, 4chan, maybe even here already do this with the most pernicious methods being making hidden "shards" (discreet individual virtual servers that separate access to the site) where certain people never see other people's interactions based on whatever tags are assigned to the given user. Threads and homepage results are created procedurally by sampling the entire site and curating which parts of the total data is delivered to any user experience. On 4chan this is often done by generating threads that will continue to be updated until the user makes a comment, at which point it is "killed" (action Al posts are not delivered to that user's shard, or that thread only existed in that shard and was generated to terminate upon interaction.)
These type of subtle (and easily executed) manipulations are designed to break social cohesion and information exchange as well as to psychologically manipulate the user to fell isolated or even to provoke suspic of "reality" (since the users of social media are conditioned to correlate online interactions with IRL interactions as both being equally real despite the obvious fallacy of this). To the conditioned user, if online "reality" seems controlled and fake then they extend that perspective to actual reality and think it is fake also.
I see the results of this often on these places in the utter decline of intelligent discourse in these communities (including this one) and it's replacement with amateur, naive, and absurd ignorance. **A perfect evidence of this is how this community almost ubiquitously uses the word "research" to signify "I googled this thing and read the top results and some other people's opinions about it on forums or YouTube and never consulted a single document or source that exists outside of the controlled and manipulated internet."
Interesting, I didn't realize that kind of thing happened over at 4Chan.
BTW, pertaining the "research", I agree, that is a very strange phenomenon, even most of the popular YouTube personalities, in the prepper and/or conspiracy genre, talk about having done research, and I imagine their version of research is exactly the same.
On the contrary... I do think that "research" can be achieved via a set of reasoning skills, rather than a specific set of activities and/or inputs. For example, a priori research might mean simply taking whatever corroborating information you can glean from various sources (all of whom may be simply regurgitating secondhand a posteriori information from the same source), and coming to novel conclusions based on logic. Because each of the sources will have a different understanding of the source information, developed in the abstractions they've built up over the years, in their reticular activating system (the map is not the territory), your own logic system might be able to the still a more correct truth than what can be gleaned from the original source.
An example of this can be described with regards to the Kyle Rittenhouse self-defense shooting:
Original Research (A Posteriori)
If you had access to every camera angle at the highest resolution available from the original sources, and you were being objective about what you saw, and you had decent spatial reasoning capabilities, as well as a pretty good understanding of the relevant self-defense legislation and case law, you would probably come to the conclusion that Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self-defense, as commonly defined by courts in the US. This would be an example of actual, original research.
Brainwashing
If, instead, you watched YouTube commentators analyze and comment on the shooting, and you came to your conclusion based on those commentators and the selected clips they played, you would likely determine whether or not Kyle acted in self-defense based on your bias. For example, if you watched The Young Turks, you would likely come away thinking Kyle Rittenhouse was guilty, while, if you watched donut operator, you would likely come away thinking Kyle Rittenhouse was not guilty. This would be an example of basically not doing any actual research or thinking.
Secondary Research (A Priori)
The third scenario, which I'm proposing adds value, involves a bit of both of the above, the former (watching original footage) for the purposes of being able to fact check statements and ideas, and the latter for the purpose of introducing yourself to ideas you wouldn't have, otherwise, come to know (relevant case law, things you may not know about, such as "stand your ground", etc.). Obviously, if you're not very diligent about your understanding of the original footage and/or the analyses that you watch, then, at best, your interpretation is subject to the same shortcomings that you would expect in a "byzantine generals problem" scenario. But if this is what you do, you quote research" by consuming information in thinking critically about the source and the arguments, I think that may well provide just as much, or more, value when compared to only original research.
One might be tempted to leave that a posteriori information (e.g., viewing the original video) is also necessary for this mode of research, but the court system proves that second hand accounts can be just as valuable. Secondarily, once you've established a source that you can trust, or in which you distrust, some trusted information can be gleaned purely from secondhand accounts. For example, if CNN says something is definitively true and seems to be pressing the point and trying to convince the viewer, one can be assured that the inverse of this information is likely true, or at the very least, the information is suspect. Simply using that reasoning, while watching CNN, can, in fact, introduce new, a priori information to your mind.
I agree fully with you. For years my practice of reading news has been to check several sources from every bias group and kind of assume an overall average is the closest to the truth. I.e read the reporting for the same event at NPR, MSNBC, VOX, FOX, WSJ, THE FEDERALIST and so on. If you balance out the bias you at least come close to reality for most normal things.