It’s Raining Hats & Frogs

Carytown

I do love words and absolutely adore words accompanying images. I smile when “word thoughts” come to me triggered by some combination of objects, lights, or just happenstance, like this image. Walking into a shop in Carytown, Hats & Frogs just reached out and gave me cause for pause. And made me smile. In Oscar Wilde’s play “The Importance of Being Ernest,” Algernon says, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Indeed, pure and simple seem to fade away and shimmer in the tribal biases we each carry in today’s social media driven world. Most of us believe what our “tribe” believes and we reinforce those beliefs by only listening to the truths offered by those in our tribe who believe what we believe. So, we don’t get the truth, we only get a feeling of warmth and self satisfaction.

Now we have AI, artificial intelligence, amping up the exchange of truths. AI accesses data collected about us and overlays the sender’s message with the tribal tones that will convince the listener of the sender’s righteousness. Big Data knows what we buy, where we go, who we talk to, who we give money to…well, pretty much everything we do is collected and made available to “Big Data.” Supposedly, our actual personal information is removed from Big Data mining activities, but think about it, how many other single data points (phone calls, destinations, spending profiles, etc.) are exactly like yours. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to correlate all that data into A+B+C(to the nth) = ME.

But knowing what resonates with consumer groups might not be the compelling reason to use Big Data, rather the most compelling reason might be that by connecting all the dots, Big Data users know how to push our buttons…get us fired up, to believe some story that’s actually a crock of bullshit. I have a vision of dark rooms in Russia and China lit only by dozens of computer screens, techs hunched over inventing fake news using an anti-American script to enhance political and social discontent in our country. Reagan may have won the Cold War by getting the Soviet Union to overspend on its military budgets, but now, Karma, as Russia and China feed the racial divide in America and constantly fan the fire of discontent. Most of what they send over here is a crock but people listen and believe. I guess that’s what people do.

Raining hats and frogs…that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. And that’s the truth…pthhhhhpt!.