Friday, September 27, 2024

New technology and its possible uses and misuses for covert influencing

As I peruse older books and realize that some people in the publishing world have apparently been sending messages via unusual marks, font aberrations, overly-early line breaks, careful wording, and similar details for over a hundred years, I can't help but think that newer technology has to have been put to use by the same kind of people.

What newer technology would they use? 

First, they couldn't abandon the old methods of underground messaging immediately, or lower-level people "in the know" would realize that something big had changed. So we could expect the newer technologies to be used side-by-side with the older covert techniques.

Second, it would almost certainly take advantage of the connectedness we now all share in thanks to cell, wireless, and satellite communication inventions of the past few decades.

Third, it would have as a primary objective the concealment of its own existence. It would need to be very subtle, like the odd-but-not-obvious printing choices of last century.

I think, after decades of fMRI tests--the kind that figure out what brain wave patterns correlate to what thoughts and emotions--we should all be asking, "What has been done with that accumulated data?" Has it been reverse-engineered yet so as to allow us, from externally, to induce certain emotions and thoughts in people? I find the absence of any public discussion of this even as a possibility to be a fairly good indicator that such reverse engineering has already been done to some extent. Can you imagine that ability quietly being sold off to the highest bidders? I think this would explain a lot of our current societal contention and confusion.

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