My Blog Week: January 24 to January 30

A Word on the Week

Hypnosis

Let’s imagine that you start an online business.

A subscription service, for which customers supply you their email addresses. You call yourself Cerqe, and claim psychic powers (with disclaimer that the site exists solely as entertainment). Your gimmick is this: You allow each user to create a profile of her “channelways”, a favorite color, a chosen animal avatar, etc. By these channelways, as you purport, your powers will detect her aura, and at such times as she needs special encouragement, you will send a message.

On a Wednesday one week, a Sunday another, she may open her email to find words to this effect:

Precious Ocelot, the Spirit of Love who commands the Universe knows of your suffering, and all Heaven’s Angels send you their blessings… 

A skeptical customer might suppose these are easy words to write, and that sending random emails is not outside the capabilities of mailbots. But Ocelot will feel flattered by, even become dependent on, these messages. Where do we find the key to this everyday magic? We know once Cerqe has her clients hooked, she can sell them coffee mugs and calendars—and maybe political ideologies. 

The key is randomness. When something arrives unexpectedly, we can tell ourselves a magical story about it: “Today, I really needed this affirmation, and of course Cerqe just knew!”

It isn’t clear the social media platforms knew they were doing this, but if we think about the unhinged contingent in America, and the influence of Twitter, Facebook, et al., we can see how the randomness of a timeline makes the reception of “new information” more mythical than information specifically sought. Were you to search YouTube for a conspiracy video, you’d have the consciousness of doing this by choice, and you would actively reject a number of videos, making small decisions about what you feel you can believe, thus at least training your mind to discern, if unreliably.

But you can appreciate the serendipity, if someone on Facebook sends a video, the ability of a recipient to magnify this random attention into destiny.

People who group online get the worst of group dynamics. Threats have the cover of anonymity, and of effacement:

“Let’s kill so-and-so” answered by “Sounds like a plan!” doesn’t convey whether the response is an encouragement to violence, or an antisocial joke. The inability to read body language and facial expressions means all emotion is pitched to an equal height; all events turn up as sudden emergencies. Those offering a wiser caution may be piled on; they lack the influence that mere head-shaking and hesitation can have in person.

Now, for the vaccine protestors who appalled everyone with their conduct in Los Angeles: Let Cerqe teach you a conspiracy.