The Face of America to Come? Facebook, AFP and the Koch Brothers

I recently found a magazine from 1955. It brought up the image of a world so peaceful in comparison to this one and I’m not talking about war and physical bloodshed. I’m talking about visual advertising. The ads in the magazine are so simple in delivery and the psychology behind them is psych kindergarten. In the 50’s understanding of psychology was pretty rudimentary. People were still having lobotomies and shock treatment for depression.

Between then and now understanding of psychology has gone way beyond psych kindergarten, and of course the advertising industry capitalized. Their understanding of psychology graduated into sociopathic. Baser instincts, fear, paranoia, vulnerability were all targeted. So were children. So were mothers. And fathers. And siblings. And grandparents. The poor, the wealthy, the in-between. Nobody escaped. If you had half a brain you knew how much your capacity to choose was affected. You had to work hard to maintain independence of mind. Some people never did and died victims of the advertising industry, none the wiser. May they rest in peace.

The sociopathic targetting still happens. It’s still impossible to live in a city, having access to TV and the internet, and be in touch with what’s going on around you, without being barraged with the clamoring of thousands wanting your attention and/or your money and having no compunction about how they get it. 

But get too much of anything that intrudes on peace of mind and we develop blocks. Anybody sensitive to sound who lives on a noisy city street will attest to that. You just don’t hear it after a while. Ironically, in a world where the advertising industry still punts ‘new and improved’ as the biggest marketing advantage, it’s lost its own edge. There’s nothing new about the concept of new and improved, so advertising gets noisier and more invasive in a desperate attempt to fulfill its promise to individuals who pay for it, and exponentially less effective. Their victims are now their clients, who are the slow ones. They haven’t realized that the advertising industry’s greatest success now is conning them into believing advertising still works as well as it did back in the day when astute understanding of psychology was used so effectively as an exploitation tool.

Take Facebook. How many ads appear on your homepage? Ever clicked on one? Do you even notice them anymore? And most ironic of all, as Catherine Rampell pointed out in the Washington Post the algorithms that Facebook and Google et al use to measure what we’d be interested in are so rudimentary it’s laughable. These tech, megalomaniac giants, that’s all they can do with all their brilliance? I guess they haven’t found a way to measure when a person likes something out of sarcasm.

CNN anchor Ali Velshi once said what’s all the fuss about Facebook ads? We get Facebook for free, so to have a few ads on a page is a small price. Stop whining, he said, and block them out. And that’s the beauty about it all. When things get annoying we block them out.

Facebook’s success lies in its capacity to retain members, garner new ones and deliver advertising to clients. I wonder how truthful the stats are about that so-called capacity. I wonder how long it’s going to take before investors realize that.

But that’s all about what we can see. What about the stuff we can’t see? We place a lot of trust on privacy policies that assure us our data is only used to deliver ads to us of products we’re likely to want. But this is a global monopoly. Zuckerberg didn’t have the greatest ethics when he was a student, so the idea that he’d have developed integrity as he’s amassed massive power is beyond a joke. 

FaceBook is a megalomaniac giant that has exploited our most vulnerable aspect - the need to be connected – and very cleverly. We may not respond to ads as much as FB likes to tell its investors, but we do now all kind of feel that unless we expose ourselves to the nth degree to as many people as possible we're isolated. And if we’ve got friends, we can’t control our privacy because every time they sign up through Facebook onto a new site to comment or just belong they give away their friends’ data. And their friends don’t get asked. Courtesy FaceBook’s privacy policy.

The problem isn’t what we can see; it’s what’s hidden and how much escapes us because we still inherently trust and because we want to be connected. And now FaceBook has turned conservative. Ostensibly because Zuckerberg is angry at President Obama for NSA invasive activities. If ever there was a pot calling the kettle black it’s Zuckerberg in this.

Facebook recently sponsored CPAC, which represents and backs the most conservative political element in the US. Along with the billionaire Koch brothers, who’s mouthpiece is Americans For Prosperity (AFP). According to Mother Jones they sank $411 million dollars into trying to block Obama from being re-elected in 2011. AFP is working hard to ‘persuade’ Americans that anything Obama is ruinous for the US, particularly Obamacare. The ads they’ve put out have no truth, which makes a thinking person, well, think. Unfortunately they’re not targeting us. They’re targeting the unthinking, the paranoid, the fearful, the prejudiced. 

And their message succeeds. Imagine how much better AFP and the Koch brothers can do if they join hands with Mark Zuckerberg. All that data. And people worry about the NSA?

Conservative Political Nonentity Sarah Palin to Close CPAC Today

And CPAC, “the granddaddy of conservative conclaves, a multi-day, big-budget ideological extravaganza put on by and for the unabashedly conservative wing of the Republican Party” (The Daily Beast) draws to a close today. 

Speakers have ranged from has-been-but-wanna-be-again politicians like Sarah Palin to gun toting multimillionaire politicians who nobody likes like Mitch McConnell – yes, he really did bring a gun to the Conference. Rumor has it that he brought it because he’d been told there would be a shooting range at the Conference and he had been practising like crazy, hoping he could improve his popularity if only he could hit the bulls eye. 

As it happens there is a shooting range – courtesy of the NRA of course - but it’s virtual only. Just kidding about McConnell’s motive for bringing the gun. He actually bought it for a buddy. 

In today’s line-up there are non-politicians like Dr. Ben Carson, Professor Emeritus, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and there have been lunatics like Donald Trump. Trump, in an interview with The Washington Times (not to be confused with the Washington Post or the New York Times whose script it imitates), said when asked if he was a Tea Party member “I certainly seem to be in a sense. They like me, and I like them. And we have very much the same principles. When I speak to the Tea Party, they have the biggest crowd of anybody.” I almost feel sorry for the Tea Party. Their only celebrity is Donald Trump who gets crazier by the day. He really takes himself seriously though. I’m not so sure that CPAC did, however. Go to the page on their website that lists confirmed speakers. Donald is last. In a row all by himself. 

In today’s schedule speakers will make themselves available to meet and greet. Dr. Carson, who wrote It’s One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America’s Future has a Special meet and greet. There’s one itty bitty little requirement: you have to have ordered or pre-ordered his book.  Hmm. As far as I can see from the CPAC programme, Dr. Carson is the only one to have a special meet and greet. And he’s not even a politician.  There are plenty of book signings and people who have written books meeting and greeting, though. Huh. Not a bad place to market your books. Not that that’s the purpose of the Conference. I don’t think so, anyway, but you never know with these Republicans. 

Chris Cox, Executive Director of NRA Institute for Legislative Action, speaks on “More Guns, Less Crime: How Law Enforcement is Beginning to Embrace a Well-Armed Civilian Population.” Well, that’s a relief. I'm trying to imagine cops armed to the teeth with assault rifles hugging civilians with pistols in their pockets and taped to their ankles, and one assault rifle in each hand. Oops. Did somebody's gun go off? Sorry my friend, my dear friend. I just shot you in the foot.

Dan Garza, Executive Director of LIBRE Initiative, has half an hour to elaborate on part 2 of  “Healthcare after ObamaCare: A Practical Guide for Living When No One Has Insurance and America Runs Out of Doctors.” I guess Garza prepared that talk back in 2010. Obviously hasn’t looked at the statistics lately. Poor sod doesn’t know that Obamacare popularity and functionality is on an upwardly mobile trajectory. 

For anybody worried about the environment, Alex Epstein, President & Founder of the Center for Industrial Policy, will reassure with a talk on his book Fossil Fuels Improve the Planet. 

As far as I can see there’s nobody talking about why women shouldn’t want equal pay, thank God. But the topic “Why Conservatism is Right for Women: How Conservatives Should Talk About Life, Prosperity & National Security” will be discussed by four women. That title looks like a bit of non sequitur to me, but who am I to say. Personally I don’t understand why any women vote Republican. Some kind of Pavlovian conditioning I guess. 

Ralph Hallow, Political Editor of the Washington Times (again, not to be confused with the Washington Post or the New York Times) will stimulate the serious politicos with “Clairvoyance and Hard Data: Electoral Trends for 2014, 2016 … and 2040.” Seriously?

There’s plenty of entertainment, most notable of which will be a screening of the movie Persecuted. Interestingly, if you go to CPAC’s website, there’s a rotating list of sponsors, in various groupings. Get to Associate Sponsors, though, and there’s only one. Koch Industries. Next to their logo is the logo for Persecuted. Subtle. Sinister. Frigging scary, actually. Oh, and did you know that Facebook was a sponsor? Yes, it really is. Along with organizations like the NRA, Koch Industries, and the series Amazing America with Sarah Palin. I knew there was a reason why I don’t like Facebook. 

The day, and the Conference, ends on a dramatic, politically earth shattering note with a 20 minute closing speech from The Honorable Sarah Palin who will be introduced by Chris Cox, who is, remember?, Executive Director of the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action. You go, girl. 

Well I’m sure it’s been fun. Whatever CPAC achieved, one thing it did illustrate perfectly. Nobody stood out, nobody shone, nobody said anything of particular importance. Some people said some pretty ridiculous things. For example, everything Donald Trump said. See The Daily Beast for some great satire on him. Then there was Paul Ryan who, earlier in the Conference reassured a crowd of adoring fans that the GOP isn’t falling apart; in fact the very opposite is true. All this “infighting” is nothing more than grand creativity expressing itself. Politico quotes Ryan as saying “What I see is a vibrant debate. We’re figuring out the best way to apply our principles to the challenges of the day. Sure, we have our disagreements, and yes, it can get a little passionate. I like to think of it as creative tension. For the most part, these disagreements have not been over principles or even policies. They’ve been over tactics. So I think we should give each other the benefit of the doubt.” 

I wonder what the moderate Republicans who want to get rid of the Tea Party extremists thought about that. And what are we to make of 26 competing candidates? As Dana Milbank of the Washington Post said in a great article on this topic, “When you have 26 conservative combatants, you don’t have war; you have mayhem.”