“It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.” Joseph Goebbels

I’m sure it was some time in the mid-fifties when we got The World Book Encyclopedia. I could ask my brother, who has a much better memory than I do, but it would have no bearing on the story I want to share with you. I was somewhere in elementary school at the time and the only way to complete homework that had anything to do with anything was to go to the library. All the facts resided in them. With the encyclopedia, you didn’t have to leave the house to be smarter than you really were.

The World Book worked for quite a while, but the more serious the homework, you still had to rely on the library, sifting through index cards with weird numbers and letters, directing you to the right shelf, where the books stood at attention, waiting for you to get under the covers with them.

I am not sure things changed much until the mid-nineties, when the internet magically sprung to life, carrying more information imaginable, answering questions you never even thought you had. Computers were around years and years before that, but they lived in their own large windowless rooms, bigger than life boxes with all sorts of blinking lights and spools of tape, winding and unwinding. Now, we could have desktop versions of those silent, metal monsters.

For a while, it was all about the availability of information, electronic offspring of those glossy-bound alphabetized volumes of the brilliant encyclopedias. I suspect newspapers started out the same way. You paid a couple of cents and got several pages of news, often from around the world, but always about your community, too. I don’t know when the first snake oil salesman realized you could use these pieces of paper to sell products to readers and influence their thinking as well.

I worked at NBC in the mid-sixties and news bureaus at the networks were still considered these sacred vessels of information sharing. In the beginning, they were populated by journalists from the newspaper world, where the separation between editorial and advertising was considered inviolate. Inevitably and predictably, money won out and content became measured by its impact on those well-dressed snake oil purveyors. They became the priority. No medium was immune from this pandering pandemic. In the beginning, the internet made all of us as brilliant as our fingertips would allow. It was an academic wonderland and it still is. However, it, too, fell prey to both commerce and the coercive manipulation of information.

I wonder how many thousands of years ago the first lie was told and for what reason. Some of those early progeny of the falsehood must have gotten really good at it. You could play on people’s insecurities and get them to do just what you wanted. Greed is by far one of the most potent forces in our make up and every single time there is an opportunity to flex that muscle, rest assured it will find its way into the mix, sometimes without our awareness. So, you could purposely mislead people and you could also make money as a result of the misdirection, a delicious combination.

Advertising legitimized the psychological manipulation of us all and we became the consummate consumer, a dehumanized, knee jerk responder to the sirens of the marketplace, purchasing goods and services we can’t live without. 

Ideas are also a commodity, a far more potent force to fool with than consumption. It didn’t take long for the powerful, those seeking it and those who already owned it, to understand the immense muscle of propaganda, before it even had the name when it was initially used too long ago. This relatively new technology became a breeding ground for both, commerce and coercion. The Big Lie certainly had a deadly history in our past. This incredible new tool invaded our privacy in ways we never could have imagined. It’s like it knows what we’re thinking, what we want to buy and what we believe in, teasing us toward the former and reinforcing us with the latter.

Today’s technology dwarfs it’s precursors and the big difference is that our sacred privacy is now public fodder. So, if your objective is to sell me a widget, you will know what widgets I have shown interest in and when. If you are seeking people vulnerable to your ideation agenda, it is effortless to ferret them out of any crowd. The road maps of our lives are part of this huge atlas that is readily available to those with the money and power to access them and they don’t even need a damn library card.

I don’t think anything has really changed, we have just gotten so much better at taking advantage of each other. We are doing what we have always done, but the tool kit has really improved and that’s the difference. I was totally amazed when the World Book Encyclopedia arrived. All of a sudden, it seemed like the world was at my finger tips, which was the same child-like reaction to the introduction of the internet and the machines that accessed it.

All this technology, both its hardware and software, rivals the wheel as our greatest invention. Unlike that wheel, which was a phenomenal tool, this technology has also been weaponized and that’s what prompted this story. In a way, these screens, whether on a lap top or a phone, are mirrors that reflect who we are and how we treat each other.

For the record, Who is on First. What is on Second and I Don’t Know is on Third. 

My podcast: Mind and the Motorcycle

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Foster and Feinstein on Youtube

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