The Victoria Connection?

[dewline]

So this is growing ever more horrific. I say again: we should not have to endure living in a world where Global Evil Conspiracy Theories are actual facts proven/provable by credible journalists.

And there's a Canadian connection, in Victoria, BC. AggregateIQ by corporate name.

The people who try to organize such conspiracies ought to be serving time. Though, for what and under whose jail system...?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy

A further note: I would count the Guardian's people uncovering this info as a good thing. It's now out in the public realm, where we can figure out what useful things can be done about it.

Comments

[moon_custafer]

So I suppose the questions that occur to me are (a)whether any grassroots campaign has a chance of fighting this sort of mass organization; (b) whether part of the point of such a campaign is to be discovered, and to intimidate any opposition out of even trying; (c) whether grassroots campaigns might actually be able to work anyway by flying under the radar of people who use these big campaigns (I'm thinking of the Republican reaction to the pussy hats -- "Where and how were these manufactured? How were they delivered around the country just in time for these marches?"

Of course it's possible they were perfectly aware of the existence of knitters and are simply willing to look like fools to the Left in order to convince the undecided that the rallies against Trump are astroturf.

We can deal with this.

[dewline]

I tend to think that it's more a matter of playing "catch up". The talent base exists among the general public, and the networking to get the skills sets we need catalogued and tasked is already underway. This is part of the point of the marches and rallies we've been undertaking from the Womens' March onward: networking and figuring out the to-do lists.

[mmcirvin]

Ultimately what we're talking about here is advertising, albeit advertising with extremely sophisticated data collection and targeting behind it. And if there's one thing we know about advertising, it's that it works but its effectiveness has a limit.

The article reminds me of the 1950s exposés like "The Hidden Persuaders" about how Madison Avenue ad-men were using sophisticated psychological research to manipulate people in sub-rational ways into spending (or voting) a certain way, using then-new media like television. Reading that stuff, you'd get a real impression that it was the literal end of human free will. These days, though, it seems like the dirty secret of the ad business is how much of that money is just wasted by the people spending it. People get inured to this stuff.

I got nothin'...

[thetimesink]

'Cept maybe, Cynical since 1968...

Cynicism as a survival tool

[dewline]

Understandable to make that choice, I suppose...

[agoodwinsmith]

I can't get to the end of the article - I am so disheartened. Which I think is one of the aims of the whole project: abject apathetic submission.

Also: anyone in this day and age who doesn't think their every online sneeze is catalogued and aggregated is not paying attention. I can see the point of "allowing" the pussy hat phenomenon to be "successful" because (a) only what is wanted can be shown in mass media and (b) it makes to organizers feel clever - which then makes it easier to hamstring them later.

If these are military "1984" psycho-trama tactics (which I see no reason to doubt), then this field has had a long time to get sophisticated.

The reason I am truly disheartened is that it just doesn't matter how much the very-greedy very-wealthy people have - it isn't enough, and they want everything that everyone else has, no matter how paltry and useless to the VG VW it is. Yes, there are very-wealth not-greedy people - and they are also being eaten alive by the very-greedy very-wealthy people. How can you defend yourself from such insecure powerful people who are completely willing to flatten you entirely, using any means they deem necessary, regardless of any moral code anywhere?

[dewline]

We have the advantage of those very-wealthy-not-so-greedy people still being alive, willing and ready to spend and actively doing so. Buffett, Gates, Musk...they're probably just the tip of our side's asset iceberg (in that particular column).

In the sci-tech column, we have Suzuki, Nye, Hadfield, Tyson...