Articles

New Emotion

The Butterfly War described the concept of cyber phrenology and detailed how make automated censorship platforms target unintended targets.

 Here's the most comprehensive timeline of contributing factors for the idea:

 When I initially chronicled these events, I had done so via an impromptu AMA on 8chan that has been active for almost four months. The community's response yielded an extremely unexpected outcome. The curiosity, interplay, and revelations were genuine enough to make me start organizing my efforts in a more formal and accessible way. Ever since I started The Abusive Oracle, I've left hidden and complicated clues everywhere to protect myself and to send signals to certain types of personalities. After everything that has been going on, I believe the world just might finally be ready to tackle the problem of the new emotion and what it means for national security, domestic affairs, economic arrangements, and human destiny.

 If all goes as planed, next week will bring this act of the story to an end. To verify my involvement in that upcoming event, this SHA-512 was generated based on a sentence involving the names and actions of the event that will take place. I injected a newline after every 32 characters to improve readability on mobile devices:

                          
1
2
3
4
                          
4e80da482f38dbe5cea52278b9f921d2
ff3ac8db52b141fd8d448d51c56597ff
d346eb6e6acd472a64613a1e2a4e3936
6ab591925ceb6a20d63ec36b4d431ec8

 By Friday of next week, I will release the sentence used to generate the hash above. I used the following command on a Debian-flavor of Linux:

echo "<my hidden message to reveal next friday" | sha512sum

UPDATE: I had begun writing this on January 10th, 2018 and the date was incorrectly published. I've since updated the date and URL to reflect the date the article was actually released. (Thanks @eli_schiff)

The Butterfly War Begins

 In the Butterfly War, I detail how Silicon Valley uses cyber phrenology to violate civil rights legislation.

 In The Ravens Will Starve, I detail how the Chans have begun to utilize cyber phrenology tactics to show that metadata can be used to violate civil rights.

 Last month, Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former vice president, was asked at a Stanford Graduate School of Business event about digital companies exploiting consumer behavior. The New York Post revealed his response and I'd like to draw attention to a specific statement:

"The short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works."

 This is the only snippet where Mr. Palihapitiya admits the technical details behind Facebook's abuses. The rest is an artful attempt to deflect additional blame onto its users, as if Facebook was just a hapless witness to animistic human nature. Regardless of the dodge, he is admitting Facebook intentionally utilized psychological, sociological, and, most importantly of all, phrenological techniques to maximize advertising exposure. In a critical phrenological example, Facebook allowed advertisers to exclude ad exposure by race. This means Facebook has assembled a detailed list of behaviors associated with black people so as to control their ad exposure. This type of behavior tracking is the very essence of cyber phrenology and it is a core part of the effort to ensure the "short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops" Mr. Palihapitiya regrets.

 The smoking gun is in and now we have a few people putting the pieces together. Over at r/The_Donald, a screenshot of a 8chan comment explaining how Facebook civil rights violations can affect the California 2018 primaries is gaining traction.

 Here's the screenshot for posterity:

null - The Butteryfly War Begins

 Because of the legal precedents set by redlining, a case could be made that Facebook intentionally created an environment where the civil rights of blacks were violated due to their increased exposed to predatory ads or being intentionally denied ads, specifically of financial products that could lead to disparate impact suits. If this is true, the impact Silicon Valley has on politics would be in serious trouble as civil rights violations typically result in federal government involvement. If conducted intelligently, this type of play could result in significant Republican wins in the California 2018 primaries and beyond.

 It's a powerful idea in a political world where the old rules are no longer reliable. If a deep red state can go blue, couldn't a deep blue state go red?

The Ravens Will Starve

My last post has created the desired effects. The intended first-order audience reacted correctly and has began to experiment with cyber phrenology in a manner that will immensely destabilize the civil rights cornerstone of material humanism. Many in the West will consider such experiments abhorrent, but they are no different than the cyber phrenology Silicon Valley has been doing for years. It is fair to assume the intended second-order audiences (state actors, academics, and brand managers) who monitor the Chans will be incorporating the feasibility of the Butterfly War's metadata insurgency into their current metadata arsenal. For as long as Silicon Valley can raise money and secure subsidies, that kind of metadata insurgency will continue to metastasize until it completely consumes the crown jewel of Baby Boomer moral supremacy: civil rights.

If something were to happen that could significantly interrupt the flow of investment into Silicon Valley, their reliance on ad revenue would sharply increase, forcing Google and Facebook to engage in the most overt and insidious manifestations of cyber phrenology. As long as the Chans also engage in a variant of this activity, it will be easy for social justice advocates to emotionally demand the regulation of Silicon Valley, the very financial engine that granted them political power to begin with. This self-sabotaging behavior is the purpose of the Butterfly War: suppressing the Praetorian voice by hijacking their assets en masse.

 The Praetorian voice has enjoyed a prolonged influence over cherished journalists, abstract art, feminism and other core institutions of material humanism. They have already sunk their teeth into memetic warfare some time ago and hope to bring it into their wheelhouse. This voice routinely weaves a false reality that promotes destructive military conquests to create endless supplies of cheap labor through displacement and migration. If that voice can be suppressed for a time, then a core part of the cheap labor harvest cycle can be disrupted:

null - Real Cost of Humanism

 Depriving a nation of cheap labor derived from warfare will create demand for an alternative in the form of robotic labor. Without such feasts for the carrion, the ravens will starve long enough to irreversibly settle for that alternative.