Data Weapons

I want to introduce an idea to you, which is that one of the primary things that tech is manufacturing is actually DATA WEAPONS, weapons which are *purposefully and knowingly* designed in such a way that result in LARGE SCALE, NEGATIVE CHANGES on wide-area, global scale populations. A data weapon is a weapon that uses data as its primary attack mechanism. 

I’ll talk about a few ways that data is weaponized (turned into a weapon) in this piece. The first is in the creation of large-scale human misery and addiction, which has been extensively documented and incredibly discounted, as well as taken as a matter of stasis when it is a complex and dynamic process that is being managed on an ongoing basis by technofascists. The second is in creating a “data gap” between technofascists and the people, creating a level of information asymmetry between the company and its users that deprives us of really important information and makes it very difficult to even see what is going on; it is a weapon of obfuscation and control and dominance. The third is enabling predation and fermenting predation that it has a huge amount of control over; as we are seeing on Twitter, where Twitter can opportunistically make its platform available to hate groups, as it has done fairly consistently since inception as a tool of political and economic manipulation. The fourth is by sharing data with groups, agencies, governments, organizations who are actually at war with the American people and other peoples all over the world, and thus, without our consent, is using our data to build up the tools of our oppression via the usual actors and historic villains.  

These data weapons are recipes for authoritarianism, for a surveillance state, for depression and oppression of the masses, for a propaganda machine. For a fascist state. Facebook is the backbone of tech authoritarianism: its source of data is in fact the “data core” that the industry runs on, its primary source of intelligence. If there is one place I would attack (now that the opportunity to seize Twitter has passed), it would be Facebook; it is a gem of the Valley and a hyper concentration point of their power.  

The popular assumption about consumer products emerging from the Valley is that negative properties on these platforms emerge organically from the scale and complexity of the system and thus are, for the most part, something out of anyone’s control. Not only that, but we actually blame *ourselves* for these negative properties. We locate the blame in that we, ourselves, emerging from our inherent human character, overuse the platform because we are jealous, attention-seeking, self-obsessed, addicted to screen time, etc; the platform REVEALS what is wrong with us rather than CREATES it.

I want to zoom in on this because one of the data weapons that Facebook employs is that it can reliably, productively, and more or less without meaningful comment from the public, produce massive addiction to itself. This is seemingly addressed in a never ending stream of articles about device addiction in mainstream media, that recommend at the end, for example, “taking more time for your family”, “establishing phone-free hours”, “replaying screen time with more self care (click on the Facebook ad below to purchase bath bombs)”, and so on. 

This CONSISTENTLY locates the blame *in us*, as if we are VOLUNTARILY or through CHARACTER FAULTS, becoming addicted to a tool run by fascist mad scientists who benefit DIRECTLY from that addiction… because it produces more data.  

Something that can consistently inflict devastating addiction on our lives, using only data, is a clear data weapon. And I think that addiction to Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and Oculus, is just an absolute catastrophe, and one that is just not taken seriously anymore because social media has been totally normalized, and the entire normalization of suffering from social networks obscures a really painful phenomenon that billions, literally, are suffering from but are also too embarrassed to admit, again because these things are located in personal flaws even though they can reliably, across extreme diverse and broad populations, produce the same result. 

It’s almost awkward to talk about, because I think secretly, this “addiction” is severely ruining our lives, that this is something that people are struggling with silently, and that it isn’t a game or a minor side effect, but rather a devastating blow to families, relationships, and quality of life. We find in study after study that Facebook is causing this; and there are no corollary studies to point to its benefits. 

They also consistently manipulate our feelings in a way that we can isolate to Facebook and Instagram also. Happiness is such a complex thing and yet with this app, they are able to RELIABLY produce a result of addiction, increased loneliness, jealousy, self-esteem problems, anxiety, depression, and particularly in the youth, suicide, eating disorders, body dysmorphic disorder and bullying. This has been “normalized” as the result of “vanity”, “frivolity”, “superficiality”, “attention seeking”, etc., a really common pattern we see when the primary victims are teen girls, as in the case of Instagram in particular; the girls are looked down upon by all of society for taking pictures of themselves, feeling self conscious and being “image obsessed” on a platform that literally breeds image obsession and eating disorders and body dysmorphia. And we are talking about actual, inflicted, mental disorders consistently and causally linked to Facebook, being blamed on, and hidden behind, teen girls; this fits right in with a previous article I wrote on how Meta manufactures mental illnesses particularly targeting teen girls. 

WHAT IS A WEAPON IF NOT THIS? THIS IS THE DEFINITION OF A DATA WEAPON: YOU HURT PEOPLE USING DATA AS THE PRIMARY MEDIUM OF ATTACK. 

It is my sincere belief that, if we are to have any future, the mass, global impact of lowering the self esteem of, inflicting addiction on, literally making people less happy and more isolated; on more than 3 billion people — that someday, this will be regarded as one of the largest human rights violations in all of history. And note that it has never gotten better, not even once. It is a continuous downward pressure on a huge percentage of the entire world’s population; despite knowing about this for close to 20 years, nothing changes. They can produce pedophile attacks, addiction and eating disorders, but not a little happiness.

Weird!

Why have no reports come out saying that Facebook changed its entire deal and now everyone is actually feeling BETTER than they do WITHOUT Facebook? Where have been the announcements and analysis and research that show that, in particular, teen girls are feeling more confident and more beautiful and are experiencing less predation from pedophiles? These are things well within Facebook’s power; but it is a weapon, it hurts people. You will never hear them announce the Facebook Human Happiness Project; they are too busy pumping up the heat with the Metaverse.

Really challenge the idea that misery, mental illness, addiction/obsession, isolation, is a natural product of social media and “the price you pay”, if you will, for being able to connect with other humans; this means you literally need to pay with data and misery for their contact; it is the commoditization of human interaction at its most base. They are making you suffer for each connection point to the world. And again, the fact that these core issues on these platforms haven’t been addressed, doesn’t mean that they COULDN’T address them.

Facebook has over 32,000 computer programmers, and access to *the absolute best* technical talent around the world. Please remember that they have been operating since *2004*. They have had 18 years of extraordinary financial access, of extraordinary access to infrastructure and talent, of extraordinary collaboration with, I.e., the NSA and the CIA. Furthermore, Facebook is comprised of way more than computer scientists. They have fuck tons of data analysts, statistions, they have MDs working there, they have a ton of ex (or current) intelligence agents of all formations, psychologists, psychiatrists, physicists, economists, dieticians, chemists. They have 87,000 employees people, wake up. This is a RESEARCH LAB for weapontry. The impression that we have of Facebook is that we give it our data and it shows us some data from our friends, and then once in awhile they screw up the ad algorithm, and we feel bad, or something like that, is totally delusional. 

Facebook is an ecosystem around stolen data, and that data serves many purposes in their ecosystem, most of which, frankly, you don’t know about and may or may not even involve you. The way that companies like Facebook and Snapchat operate, they extract as much data from you as they possibly can. To these people, you are a bottomless well of data, and they want all of it. Again, THEY DO NOT SEE YOU AS PEOPLE; they see you as DATA. They build weapons to fight you -as data-.  

Early in my career, I went to a tech conference. It was a conference on Big Data, somewhere around 2013ish, and the CTO of the CIA was speaking. And he said something which has haunted me ever since: that the CIA’s charter in life was to collect and store all of the information in the world, forever. It is the same charter of Meta. Not content to get our data — in the form of pictures, birthdays, text inputs, usage patterns, interactions, partnerships, friendships, our families — from Facebook and Instagram, Meta has its eyes set on the “Metaverse”, which will require all of us to literally strap Meta to our bodies and interact, in huge part, with each other and the world through this device. It will solidify even more Facebook as the data core of technofascism, as it will open up unprecedented access to corporations to build their own “sticky” (addictive) experiences in the Metaverse. 

People have yet to think thru the giant leap in data extraction that is going to occur as a result of this transition, which WILL be happening; we do not choose these technologies, they are engineered in over decade + long scams by the most powerful people in the industry. Zuckerberg has dreamed of this going back to the platform’s early days. 

We have very little idea about what they are actually doing with this data. VERY little idea. We do not have, either as governments or as bodies of residents, the processes or the technical access or the technical talent to independently analyze what is going on. The team it would take to go into Facebook and actually figure out, even with full access, what exactly they are up to there, would be an enormous undertaking; Facebook is sprawling and undoubtedly operates using a technique called “compartmentalization”, which was developed during Project Manhattan to make sure that almost no one would know the full scope of what was being planned. This strategy was most famously adopted and adapted for the modern tech company at Apple; the people who WORKED ON THE iPHONE did NOT know what they were building; they found out when Steve Jobs announced it. 

Let that sink in. Think of the implications of every single major tech company being operated with huge parts of it totally unaware of what the other parts are doing or how they will be integrated by the top to create, god knows what. It is insulation from even internal transparency and potential dissent and even whistleblowing. For this reason I have advocated repeatedly for independent weapons inspections of these major tech companies. We have a right to know what is going on in there, with OUR data, and we have absolutely no idea. Facebook is constantly manipulating, shifting, aggregating, meta-analyzing, doing large-area population studies (“A/B testing”, often referred to in less sinister contexts), bringing entire fields to bear on their data store, etc. The data is their medium; and their goal has nothing to do with what is good for us. 

Facebook is almost totally opaque to us, and this creates extremely dangerous data asymmetry. The more data they have, the less we have access to and can reason about. This puts Facebook infinitely ahead of us because it can analyze data in aggregate, while we must try to extrapolate it from the very few sources of data we even have open to us: a timeline controlled by these exact forces. There have been a few leaks here and there, Cambridge Analytica and before that, PRISM. We get glimpses ever now and then. These are excellent proofs of the aforementioned pattern of Facebook supplying enemies of various communities and parties, without our knowledge, with the data stream AND the weapons they have created out of it. The CIA is among the greatest enemies of democracy, socialism, communism and the American people, that we have ever had; and yet, via their VC firm, InQTel, is suspected to have funded Facebook and had serious ties to it from the beginning, in particularly high-level leadership. Handing over our data to our literal enemies, to the CIA which terrorizes the entire world, is another way that tech companies create data weapons: they arm the most dangerous entities in the world with what they need to harm us. 

 And similarly as Facebook serves as a broker of weapons to the enemy in intelligence agencies, the Facebook data stream becomes a tool for predators of all manner and form to attack the most vulnerable and marginalized people on the site; this is best demonstrated in the way that young girls are openly served to pedophiles on these sites. Why have we not been able to use OUR data to lessen these attacks, rather than it becoming the way that predators locate and attack their prey, with huge efficiency and huge volume (See the case of Chris D’elia for an important case study)?   

How far does this go? We know they sell the weapon of low self esteem to advertisers; they sell the data weapons of sentiment, location, activity, correspondence to the CIA, they *give* the data that allows pedophiles to narrow in on targets, what the fuck else? We deserve to know, this is OUR shit they are doing all this with. What can Mark Zuckerberg see in the data? What are they able to predict, what are they able to see? Who else sits on the data lake looking for fish? Are they watching things happen that we should know about, be warned about? Don’t we have a right to be able to access the benefits of our data? 

If we are all going to submit data as a human project, it is US who should benefit from all that may be done with it; the possibilities are endless. What would you want to know? What would you want to see? Facebook doesn’t even publish INFORMATION which could be of wider value to the human race; they sit on it, it is their lake of data from which they create and sell weapons. It isn’t ours anymore. And the more they EXTRACT data from us, the tighter they wrap us. 

This is a core pattern across the tech industry: they suck up data from us, just ungodly amounts of data about billions of people and what their lives have been, and what do you get back out of them? A “timeline”. That’s all. A set of ordered information they are feeding back to you, a subset of the data of a few people you are connected to, arranged and presented in ways that are designed to elicit who knows what miseries and cash extraction experiments they are running. It is only a tiny, tiny fraction of what they have inside of them about us, that we are able to see about us. 

I would argue this is a technofascist design pattern, something I hope to explore in future articles.  

Facebook is perhaps best thought of as a laboratory. They have been busted multiple times for doing experiments and studies without consent. Their goal is to make *you* DO the behavior THEY want, and I think its a bit too simplistic in this day and age to say that that only behavior is responsiveness to advertising; but even if it was, they are using our own data as weapons against us, to take money from us using tricks and algorithmic extraction. The algorithms aren’t generated from our data. Rather, the algorithms are trying to CHANGE the data coming out of us. They see as us streams of data; their job is to take them, turn them into weapons and fire on us. They way they do this is by changing the data that you make. 

The data we are dealing with has been 100% weaponized. We have this very narrow and almost cartoonish way that we have integrated knowledge of the surveillance machine, we offhandingly refer to it as watching us, we joke about it, about Alexa, about the fishy “suggested items”, technofascism becomes almost an ephemeral, benevolent, distant authority figure that one now takes for granted, and doesn’t even see as a target.

But now is not the time to become complacent, and it is not the time for us to let incorrect assumptions like “well, addiction to social media is inevitable because humans are flawed” or even “Facebook generally cares about what the experience is for us and the experience that they make is responsive to our needs”. This is simply not the case. 

What is true is that the technofascist state, has possession of an entirely new kind of weaponry; and we have not even seen the full extent of what these weapons can do, absolutely far from. See Meta as a weapons dealer: to the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, to sexual predators, to politicians and political platforms, to oppressive regimes, to advertisers and governments. See Meta as using its weapons to its own end: to increase the wealth gap (which increasing models onto the data gap), to literally depress the users for what I suspect is a whole host of beneficial reasons for technofascism, to manipulate information and user emotion, to create meta-analysis of human behavior that is both unavailable to anyone but them and the CIA, *and* is definitively and inarguably, the right of the people. 

It is very important to start thinking about tech in terms of weapons, combat, invasion, attack and military, because what the tech industry is, is a fascist “state within a state”, and they are technofascists, which is a new flavor of fascist, but is very in alignment with all the fascism across history. 

You just have to be willing to take the cognitive leap that these are our enemies, and that they have weapons, and follow the white rabbit down. 

Meet you on Sand Hill Road.