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Quote by Christopher Wylie

“The underlying ideology within social media is not to enhance choice or agency, but rather to narrow, filter, and reduce choice to benefit creators and advertisers. Social media herds the citizenry into surveilled spaces where the architects can track and classify them and use this understanding to influence their behavior. If democracy and capitalism are based on accessible information and free choice, what we are witnessing is their subversion from the inside.”

Quote by Christopher Wylie

Book:Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
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Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

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Christopher Wylie

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“The first tool of authoritarian regimes is always informational control—both in the gathering of information on the public through surveillance and the filtration of information to the public through owned media. In its early days, the Internet seemed to pose a challenge to authoritarian regimes, but with the advent of social media, we are watching the construction of architectures that fulfill the needs of every authoritarian regime: surveillance and information control. Authoritarian movements are possible only when the general public becomes habituated to—and numbed by—a new normal.”

PoliticsTechnologyPsychologyPsyops
Book:Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
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“We can already see how algorithms competing to maximize our attention have the capacity to not only transform cultures but redefine the experience of existence. Algorithmically reinforced “engagement” lies at the heart of our outrage politics, call-out culture, selfie-induced vanity, tech addiction, and eroding mental well-being. Targeted users are soaked in content to keep them clicking.”

PoliticsTechnologyPsychologyPsyops
Book:Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
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“We like to think of ourselves as immune from influence or our cognitive biases, because we want to feel like we are in control, but industries like alcohol, tobacco, fast food, and gaming all know we are creatures that are subject to cognitive and emotional vulnerabilities. And tech has caught on to this with its research into “user experience,” “gamification,” “growth hacking,” and “engagement” by activating ludic loops and reinforcement schedules in the same way slot machines do. So far, this gamification has been contained to social media and digital platforms, but what will happen as we further integrate our lives with networked information architectures designed to exploit evolutionary flaws in our cognition? Do we really want to live in a “gamified” environment that engineers our obsessions and plays with our lives as if we are inside its game?”

PoliticsTechnologyPsychologyPsyops
Book:Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
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“Since 1945 there has been no Third World War. The development of nuclear weapons may prevent such a catastrophe. In the two World Wars words were one of a variety of weapons in the armory of the belligerent powers. In future, because of the advent of nuclear weapons, words may be the only arms which the super-powers can employ without risking annihilation.”

IntelligencePropagandaSubversionPsychological WarfarePsyopsGreat Power CompetitionStratcom
Book:The Art of Psychological Warfare, 1914-1945
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“Now, just to understand better what's going on, let's imagine the shoe on the other foot. Let's imagine that hundreds of thousands of badly-educated Americans, white Americans, were pouring across the boarder into Mexico. And let's imagine that they were insisting on instruction in school in English rather than Spanish. Let's imagine they were asking for ballot papers in English rather than Spanish, they were celebrating Fourth of July rather than Sinco de Mayo, buying up newspapers, publishing in English, television stations, radios, all publishing and broadcasting in English ,and that there were so many of them coming in that they threatened to reduce Mexicans to minority. Do you think the Mexicans could possibly be tricked into thinking that this was enrichment, this was diversity, that this was great? No. No. They wouldn’t stand for it for a moment. This would be to them an impossible unacceptable invasion of their country. And you would find the same reaction in any non-white country anywhere in the world. Can you imagine say, the Japanese or the Nigerians, the Pakistanis, the Costa Ricans accepting this kind of wholesale demographic change that would change their country, transform their country, and reduce them to a minority? No. These things are impossible to imagine.”

ImmigrationMexicoDouble StandardsUnacceptable
Author:Jared Taylor
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