132. Transhumanism 10/28: The Digital Profit

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To maximize profit, manipulative interfaces primarily define the following three objectives as a) creating digital addiction, which means diverting our attention as much as possible from the essential to the trivial, from the absolute to the relative, from reality to pseudo-reality, from the certain to the uncertain, and from the whole to the detail, etc.; b) Increasing our dependency, which involves using seduction to increase the chance that we continuously return to the same interface or advertisement, and inducing us to persuade others to browse that same platform; c) enhancing the comfort of our individual selves with more and more diverse advertisements—for example, through increased consumption, constant purchase incentives, travel, or cars ("toys for boys"), etc. Digital platforms operate specific algorithms to achieve all three of these goals.

Among the SPM factors (surveillance, persuasion, modelling) involved in manipulation, "persuasion"—which belongs to the field of psychology—is based on the application of the Positive Intermittent Reinforcement (PIR) method. This reflects, for instance, the behaviour of the mind when we expect compensation or restitution from someone to satisfy our discontent. Under manipulative persuasion, we essentially interfere with the functioning of the mind and, through influence, "hack" its normal operation—specifically that which serves the harmonious cooperation of the body-mind, soul, and spirit—or induce it to utilize a "service" foreign to it. The essence of manipulation acting on the mind is to achieve increasingly strong individualistic behaviour, such as selfishness, envy, pain, grief, sadness, etc. By applying the method of positive intermittent reinforcement (SPM), Facebook, for example, was able to persuade its users to acquire seven new users (i.e., create seven new connections) in ten days in exchange for "treats." As mentioned, the data derived from surveillance is also used to further develop algorithms, but in such a way that the testing of these developments is carried out by the users themselves, free of charge. The users, of course, do not know that they are "guinea pigs."

Manipulative persuasion also takes into account our spiritual nature as social beings, thus seeking to influence our human identity—the fact that we have families, friends, and acquaintances with whom we maintain contact, and that we need others. What manipulation does not disclose, however, is that this persuasion aims for us to gradually abandon these human connections and replace them with machine connections. In other words, we hand over our relationships to machines (see alienation, where it is not us talking, but machines talking to each other and deciding over us).To put it plainly: we are meant to be victims, yielding to the seductive manipulation of power and accepting that machines will solve our relationships for us. This is the digital drug/narcotic being sold to us, which necessitates a negative or destabilizing psychology and the acceptance of sacrifice: the human being becomes both a free data provider and a victim of that data provision.

Furthermore, the method of persuasion induces us, in our high state of individuality, to depend on the positive or negative opinions of others. For the ignorant digital slave, the number of "likes" is important because they seek self-acceptance and the validation of their truth from the outside. Does a "like" know what order, freedom, integrity, and truth are? The digital slave acts as if their life depends on the recognition of others and the number of likes. This indicates that the slave does not experience their existence internally, but in external dependency. Manipulative equality suggests that we are equal to the number of our likes, or that if we are not present on a social platform, we do not exist at all. Why do we forget that we are the image and identity of the One—self-determining, self-regulating, universal human beings—and that our existence needs no validation from anyone, and we need not depend on anyone or anything but the One? Our private life is ours; it belongs to us and not to the public, which is why we should not display it in the global shop window of social media. If we expose our data, it may be used against us, and thus we contribute to our own surveillance.

Why does the manipulated digital slave—who might be a doorman, a minister, a doctor, an engineer, a teacher, a politician, etc.—think that their existence is merely apparent, existing only today and gone tomorrow? It is because they have built their life on short-term feedback. They have no perspective. They are only interested in how many likes they will receive tomorrow. They mistakenly long for free popularity, for a fame for which, in most cases, they do nothing. Does the expected "like" truly indicate social recognition? How can one expect to be recognized with zero investment?

For the manipulator acting on our individual body-mind, it is crucial to foster our "like-dependency" and to maintain and constantly repeat the trinity of posting–liking–recognition. The "like" makes the ignorant, individualistic person—who clings convulsively to their preconceptions and peeps at the world through a keyhole—feel important. Machine-driven like-dependency, besides increasing the number of ignorant people "functioning" on the basis of the individualistic self, also takes away that sacred time through which a non-digital slave could experience a full life and exist in the NOW, rather than spending it as a believer in a digital religion. Among the religious members of the machines, we primarily find young people aged 12–25 who live in a surplus of time and in the comfort created by their parents and grandparents. Often not knowing what to do with themselves, they undertake risky ventures, such as becoming subjects of manipulation. They do not ask the simple question: what lies behind the back of the computer, the laptop, or the mobile phone? Who operates these seemingly innocent social media platforms, and for what purpose? Young users do not realize that social media grows rich off them because they are the moneybags carrying the data. Nor do they realize that manipulative algorithms were not created for charitable purposes, but for profit—for someone's enrichment.

According to Hajdu, the internet social platforms exploit the ignorance, individuality, lack of information, weakness of the body-mind and soul, and the credulity of users, including the dissemination of fake news. Through these, platforms generate approximately six times more revenue than by publishing real news. Platforms operating with artificial intelligence derived from warfare have developed specific business models for spreading fake news, which have not detached themselves from the deceptions known in military strategy. Deception is the lack of certainty, or the lack of verifiability. As Nahema Marchal et al. demonstrate in their analysis, Generative AI Misuse: A Taxonomy of Tactics and Insights from Real-World Data, the system is capable of self-monitoring within the boundaries of a given algorithm. However, external verification is only possible by the operator. The system cannot verify whether the shared data is true or false outside of the machine, which also means the system is incapable of eliminating lies. Thus, the problem is not with AI-powered platforms as tools, but with what we use the tool for. If the tool gains profit from phishing private data, its legitimacy is questionable. Those who wish to exit the manipulative SPM matrix must first wake up to the fact that they are in it, as exiting is only possible after this realization.