Information as Virtual Spirit
We cannot underestimate or understate the role that data and information have played in getting us into the mess we are now in. If you are young, or have a limited digital presence, you should at every possible opportunity avoid the collection of your personal data, and if you have spent hundreds of hours on your phone or social media it would be helpful to pay close attention. I will outline exactly what data is, how it is turned into information to manipulate your decision making both online and offline, and finally how algorithms are used to shape individuals into moldable and complacent consumers. Additionally, I will explain the strategies that an individual can use to mitigate, control, and circumvent the effects of Data-Optimized Operation Manipulation for a more agent personal and spiritual life.
Data
Data is useless without information. I recommend a thorough reading of The Information by James Gieck to anyone who wants to live a bold and vivid life in the current century, but I’ll try and summarize the core principles here and will then draw connections to our digital lives.
Data is given meaning through context and becomes information. Information serves as the foundation of culture through disciplines such as art, mathematics, language, and religion.
Good information is both efficient and reliable. The energy efficient bit in a computer, either a 1 or a 0, is the result of hundreds of years of math and machining evolving together to fulfill this principle.
The energy cost of the smallest unit of reliable information possible determines the total amount of information you can communicate with a certain amount of energy. With bits, this can be an incredibly small amount of energy for a very reliable piece of information.
The amount of energy that was required for a reliable positive or a reliable negative has decreased exponentially for decades across the silicon revolution.
So where does this leave us? Let’s look at points 1 and 4. Culture is fundamentally based upon the transfer of information. Simultaneously, the rate and transfer of information multiplied by as many as a million times across the last sixty years. This is, as I have previously outlined, multi-magnitudes of increase. Our rate of cultural transmission, and therefore cultural evolution, went from a slow additive process to an exponentially multiplicative one. One would expect this process to “bottleneck” somewhere. We can find that bottleneck in the only machine in this system that is not made up of silicon, our brains. That is bad news for the companies who want to use this data to fuel their businesses, whether by selling ads or influencing public opinion or compiling large databases to build algorithms with. There emerges a profit incentive: reduce the bottleneck as much as possible. This has been done already in several ways, by making user data easier to collect, by increasing the amount of data which can be collected, and by collecting more meaningful data.
This data, once collected, is packaged according to the value of its information and sold to anyone and everyone who would possibly want it. Of interest to us though is advertisers who happen to also be the companies that have the most bespoke algorithms in the world, Alphabet and META. While data centers themselves often are owned by unimportant parent companies and booked by both large and small data companies it is estimated that Alphabet has millions of servers across their data centers, with META likely approaching this figure. Within these data centers there is a black box for those of us unacquainted with the industry. Data brokers are known to collect information such as names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, gender, age, marital status, children, education, profession, income, political preferences, cars and real estate owned, real-time location data, health information, online history, and advertisement preferences.[1] The Electronic Privacy Information Center, even with their dire warnings, understates and underestimates the role that these play in destroying our societal fabric. The two largest data companies are two of the largest AI companies, undoubtedly using their stored user data to train artificial intelligence algorithms.
This creates a situation where the companies that store massive amounts of data, the basic fuel of information culture, are also the distributors, manipulators, and brokers for the information economy. There emerges a profit incentive to maximize the role that the digital world plays in our cultural lives, including silencing dissenters, crushing anti-technology narratives, and manipulating public opinion to avoid further scrutiny. Technocratic dominance is self-perpetuating, explicitly manipulative, and anti-human.
To illustrate this point, let’s go back to the early 2010’s. In 2013, a company was formed called Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica created information profiles of over 80 million Facebook users and subsequently fed them targeted political advertisements. Memos leaked from within the organization show how the usage of personal data could inform what information could and should be shown to internet users to sway their votes in whichever way the organization wished to win an election. If we extrapolate out the ability to control elections, we quickly understand that the controlling sector of society is data. Data can be used to bribe candidates, blackmail opponents, and blacklist dissent.
The Cambridge Analytica experiment, performed on nearly 100 million people without their consent, is most clearly a massive display of power for the social media titans. It poses a grave threat to a governmental structure founded upon insular electoral process, and it forces hard questions about the strength of institutions designed without a technological shift of this scale in mind. However, it also gives us our first clue into the weakness of this sprawling system: it is immensely dependent upon constant, reliable, and accessible user data. If anyone wants to begin a full circumvention of the data system, setting up a 3-month Google data wipe (which Google allows you to do on through your Google account) and deleting your Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, and Reddit accounts already builds a rudimentary barrier between you and the most aggressive algorithms. The goal of this is not to socially isolate you, but it is the most immediately threatening side effect of this maneuver. As such, I understand the hesitation and resistance to this suggestion. Complete removal of social media is a daunting step in today’s world that hints at a fate of loneliness and despair. However, the problem is more urgent and deeper than the 2013 incursion by Facebook, and the solutions to any potential alienation are tested and proven. We must begin by owning our own data.
Mememetic Culture and Degenerate Corruption
Cambridge Analytica’s election meddling is just the surface level of the data ocean. Beyond this, the information which bonds us together and forms the field of our internet culture can be found abstracted in the basic data units: memes, hashtags, searches, and keywords. While these hashtags and keywords can be turned into numbers and tokens to be weighed and traded, they are more frequently utilized in algorithms. They are compared, categorized, and placed in a matrix. Then, they are self-corrected and iterated upon, and while digital images once were impossible for computers to interpret, that hurdle has been vaulted and now disappears in the rearview. Now, both text and visual memes are spread far and wide through superhighways and algorithms, making deliveries to every inbox, DM, and chatroom. Propaganda and cultural transmission became king, and memes remain the primary weapon of the information war. Campaigns are waged with memes due to the meme’s dense informational data and the strong emotion it evokes. This has always been the case, but the leaflets, cartoons, and headlines of the past have been atomized by the front pages of the internet. This new arena is the Noosphere.
The difference between the Noosphere and “memetic culture” is one of scale. The Noosphere exists at a super-systemic level, encompassing every inch of digital human thought, spoken and silent. Think of it like a giant bubble around the earth, connected by satellites beaming signals to one another, cables connecting continents under the oceans, and all of it running directly into your mobile phone or personal computer. It is another layer on top of the rocks and the soil, the trees and the people, the atmosphere and the clouds. Yet it follows the same laws, the same physics, and the same Darwinian rules. It varies only in new social codes.
In this Noosphere, we find that likes and comments are clear, tangible and understandable. It feels good to receive a like or to see that a package we ordered will arrive tomorrow, and bad to receive a hurtful comment or to lose an online game. This is the level that most of us interact with, very simple stimulus that are carefully crafted in a board room to make your brain light up a certain way. However, deeper than this surface level is another level of data that is being collected and analyzed. Time impressions, churn rate, and other less innocent algorithmic manipulation lies unseen. Meanwhile, we continue to communicate with memes and posts. The culture which has risen to become the dominant way we communicate, a public data buffet, exists within the Noosphere entirely to be processed, analyzed, then packaged and sold into the entirely unregulated data brokerage industry.
Our public memetic culture exists as an all-encompassing way of communication. It appropriates religious, ideological, and racial cultures, combining them into an often overtly hostile form. While religious cultures value ritual and tradition, ideological cultures feed off social clashes, and racial cultures subsist on a mixture of biological similarity and self-serving mythos. Memetic cultures prioritize emotional attention and continual dispersion, being able to target individuals in concerningly direct ways. “Top comments” on sites are tailored according to user information, showing bespoke propaganda when users might assume they are being presented a relatively more level and unbiased perspective. If users are shown the right content at the right times, they will spend more time on social media and more time within the Noosphere, fulfilling the aforementioned profit incentives. With several companies possessing nearly unchecked access to user information, in a zero-sum game it would be uncompetitive not to manipulate users.
Understanding memetic culture is critical to understanding the Noosphere system. The instantaneous spread of cultural units through image, text, and audio across thousands of miles for billions of humans simultaneously is, as I have stressed time and time again, lightyears beyond early 20th century human comprehension. I question if the human mind has evolved fast enough to adapt to a shift of this magnitude, and whether we have developed the same cultural safeguards as if the internet had emerged over a longer period. In countries with long histories of both technological innovation and cultural integration, such as Europe or China, there has been resistance to this memetic culture. China has implemented harsh censors and informational firewalls, and Europe has aggressively regulated and restricted American tech giants, opting instead to develop open source and at smaller scales. This has protected the citizens of Europe and China, while America has allowed the problem to rage across its forums and citizens, quantifying national sentiment to be sold to whoever can afford to pay for votes, influence, or souls.
Virtual Spirit
The resulting memetic culture is like other cultures in its fundamental propensity for growth through competition. At the most basic, the popular internet game, agar.io, where amoeba’s devour smaller amoebae to increase their size, is a simplistic analogue for cultural growth (the name agar is even a reference to the raw material used to fuel the growth of bacterial cultures in Petri-dishes). Memetic culture in the age of the Noosphere can be best distinguished from other previous forms in its niche methods which are adapted to thrive in the novel, rich, and reactive environment that the western internet provides.
Consumption: The memetic culture must continually consume novel information due to high energy and resource costs.
Self-perpetuation: The memetic culture maximizes value creation by the culture’s users in the short term and minimizes their chances of leaving the culture in the long term.
Value: The information of a meme has cultural, social or political ability to generate greater energy than the costs of creating and distributing the information.
Appropriation: The memetic culture aims to incorporate pre-internet cultures such as politics, religion, music, and sports to create value, as well as making these cultures abide by rules one and two.
The current American memetic culture is owned and controlled by a small group of companies and individuals. The emergence of memetic culture was aided in large part by the increase in the power of processing machines which has grown exponentially in recent decades. Trillions of dollars in capital reside in the owners and managers of companies such as META, NVDIA, Microsoft, Tesla, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet. These companies feed from the memetic culture. META, Amazon, and Alphabet extract data for massive profit while allowing for paid and botted content to control narratives. Microsoft, NVDIA, and Apple provide the software and hardware necessary to spread the memetic culture, while Tesla leads the ideological charge.
I can hear you saying, Jacob, why does this matter? Who cares if someone controls the internet, it’s the greatest invention of the last 300 years!
Here I will tell you the problem: seven companies form a technological cabal that seeks to continue their decades-long enrichment while inadvertently destroying American culture. Most basically this can be summarized by the following statistic: According to the Imperva 2024 Bad Bot report, over 50% of internet traffic comes from non-human sources.
I must stress this again: over half of internet traffic, the foundation of the data, analytics, and algorithms that drive your browsing activity is manufactured from non-human sources. This ratio of non-human manipulation is likely even higher on social media sites, where advertisement revenue is higher and impressions are more heavily valued. The companies that form the technological cabal have no incentive to moderate this activity, as it inflated their user numbers and allows them to price their services more “competitively” for advertisers looking to maximize impressions.
Yet for you, the user, it results in a digital storm of parasitic information. You could safely assume that EVERYTHING that you view on social media is the product of corporate manipulated information. Instagram posts that your high-school classmates made of a trip to Florida or Italy were likely aggressively molded by travel agencies who paid for a couple hundred likes on their own content. Opinions on X posts that your father amplified came first from a foreign think-tank and were cranked up to 11 for maximum rage-engagement. YouTube videos on controversial topics were first filtered by an algorithm so that only the most sensational but least revolutionary ideas could rise to the top. Every single post with thousands of likes, shares, or views was likely promoted in some capacity by botted accounts, serving shadow companies, to promote unknown narratives.
This is again, not a cause for despair, but a necessary push for change. The technological tools necessary to shift American institutions exist at our fingertips today. The technological giants that have emerged are still bound by gravity and can be felled with a single well-stricken stone. Without the other giants supporting them, their grip on the future of America slips. If two were to fall, the question of their reign would be impossible to ignore. What then, is the stone?
Artificial Intelligence
The simplest yet perhaps the most striking anecdote on the rising dominance of artificial intelligence can be found in the AlphaZero intelligence, a game playing supercomputer which has outperformed humanity in the two most lauded strategic games of human history, Go and Chess. In both instances, a human absolutely at the peak of our strategic hierarchy was defeated by a fundamentally superior intelligence. Chess and Go are apparently simple games yet they still enjoy widespread cultural significance, part of which is due to the depth available to player-scholars within the simple starting conditions present. As a result, Chess and Go have taken on cultural roles as “level-playing-fields”, easy to learn yet hard to master analogs for the battlefields of kings and generals, tactics of positioning, encirclement, and influence. For hundreds of years this was a skill only for humans to learn on a board with a handful of crafted pieces. What has AlphaZero learned of this cultural exchange? If integrated into a larger informational system, to what extent could that system abstract the strategies it has literally perfected? Who has access to this knowledge? As my mind is inundated with the dopamine floods and serotonin showers readily provided by the “free internet”, these questions remain clear and pressing. Nevertheless, we must answer these questions if our species is to progress into a symbiotic relationship with specialized intelligences. It is easy for us to read words from a novel chatbot that talks just like us. It is an entirely different experience to view our history and culture as informational fuel for a governance A.I. which influences policymakers the same way our social media algorithms exploit us.
The insatiable demands of the information world economy could potentially be remedied; however, I do not believe that a population heavily propagandized and manipulated by the American internet are adequately equipped to handle the current “Cambrian Explosion” of thought unfolding across the Noosphere, at least not without a firm understanding of what the Noosphere is. This can be demonstrated by the exceptionally high rates of mental illness in the United States, despite being the nation which has spread cultures, ideologies, and paradigms that arguably still dominate global norms. The “free internet” continues to drive American hegemony, demonstrated by the Arab Spring and similar movements for political autonomy conducted across global boundaries using social media. However, the American desire to spread it’s idealism frequently has evolved into a simple market lever for the financial interests of the global elite, who pump investment capital into “defenders of democracy” Lockheed Martin and Raytheon or “free speech” platforms such as META and Alphabet before the United States funds an emergent conflict in a foreign state, disposes an unsavory leader to continue to fund rebel groups, or perhaps astroturfs a preferred political campaign to victory. While representatives in the American Congress pillage the ideals of freedom, liberty, democracy, self-governance, free-market trade, and the Pax Americana for blood money and war dollars, status-quo special interest groups that seek to avoid punitive or limiting legislation shift narratives through ad campaigns, social media manipulation, and congressional lobbying. This creates a new Iron Triangle of corruption which is virtually impossible to break into or break apart. Special interest groups, bureaucratic institutions, and elected officials conspire together in a parasitic cabal against the American people to further enrich themselves during the greatest period of inequality in a century. The result is an American public ignorant of not just the ideals and cultures they once helped to build, but also the spiritual, sociological, and epistemic importance of such values.
Democratic Peace Theory, Free-Market Capitalism, the Information Revolution, Reality Television, Professional Sports, Social Media, Supermarkets, and the Internet have collectively created a global intellectual environment in which many, if not all, of the informal epistemic structures which our world relies on for normality are tragically dependent upon American hegemonic control to function in their current capacity. Simultaneously, these “ways that we do things” are rapidly becoming more difficult to function in the face of emergent forms of communication, commerce, and warfare. Combined arms, silicon-assisted trade, and algorithm-manipulated communications all create novel fields for the emergence of more complex and competitive methods of success, however the fear of creative destruction by the super-technocrats encourages aggressive narrative control and organizational suppression.
The result is that market forces cling on to the idea that computing power must increase due to a global economy dependent upon technological innovation, even if this comes at the cost of expanding this absurd prescription into the American work and home life. The stress this has placed on the American household is beyond apparent. Americans are over-employed and underpaid. Labor has been stretched to its absolute limits, social services are under attack, and household debt is ballooning. As with any game of chicken, there is only one relevant question when you are going too fast: how are we going to avoid a fatal crash?
Artificial Intelligence is a powerful tool. Like the atom bomb, the internet, the cotton gin, or the steam engine, there will be great resistance from those who seek to lose political power and economic capital due to the disruption it will cause. Seldom before in history were the pioneers of the generation defining tool the same individuals that would serve to lose immensely from it. Artificial Intelligence must be embraced, but not as a weapon of elite control or of hegemonic dominance. It must be subject to competitive market forces, unstifled by trade barriers or national interests. It will emerge regardless of opposition; the potential benefits are too immense. Critical to this development is going to be guidance and direction. We cannot ignore evolutionary facts in the face of technocratic idealism. Individuals, whether they be corporations, nation states, or human beings will act in their own self-interests first and foremost. The emergence of GenAI will be a war within the Noosphere that the world has never seen before. It will dwarf ideological, cultural, and religious conflicts of the past. It will be up to everyone to ensure it does not spill over into the biosphere. It is our duty to ensure Artificial Intelligence does not tear apart our families, communities, and countries. If we look west towards China, or east to the European cradle, we can see how centuries of tradition have insulated these great civilizations to the corruptive and degenerative plague that this new technology is ushering behind it. The waste left in the wake is mitigated by ancient and sustainable traditions of family, community, and country. The liquidity of these institutions at home will prove to be our greatest weakness, yet also our greatest opportunity. America must remain strong, yet we must concede that while our tradition is ancient, our place on this land is still young. Our cities are dysfunctional, our communities are wrought with mistrust, and our families are scattered and weak. We cannot hold for long like this. We must reflect on our failures and continue to go boldly where none have gone before us. We must cherish our traditions and continue to create radical new ones. We must accept that we will sometimes fail and must strive relentlessly nevertheless. First, we must fight back.
[1] https://epic.org/issues/consumer-privacy/data-brokers/