Synthesis of "technical" and "human" technologies

Brother · Nov 8, 2021

In politics today we have a synthesis of "technical" and "human" technologies.

We live in a world heavily transformed by technology. Past technologies were important, but they didn't interfere with our brains so much, being just technology.

The invention of, for example, the steam engine did not affect the mental processes of mankind as much as the invention of the computer. Modern generations began to see and understand the world in a different way, hence the so-called "clip thinking" and other new processes that are not even fully realized.

Modern technologies like Facebook not only interfere, but generally view us as part of their "manufacturing processes." This, of course, started with advertising and public relations, which were used to build a consumer society, for this reason they were aimed at "automating" the behavior of the person who created the consumer out of it. As a result, he, as it were, became part of the production chain - a conditional worker in the shop for the consumption of products.

Emotions have also been mastered by technology, only by the technology of working with the human brain. As a result, there is a coupling of technical and human technologies. Today they even started talking about posthuman and posthumanity. This term hides the idea of the loss of the "human" and the growth of the "technical" in the person himself.

Technology combined with a person gives rise to new types of "human-technical structures", an example of which can be recognized as social media.

They are directed at an individual person, but he does not control them, although he considers himself their creator. They exploit an important human property - his desire to share new information with others. As a result, in social media, he finds himself in the "information paradise", when for the first time he is surrounded by more information than he can cover.

Social media has become a field for discourse wars, when opposite points of view function in the same information space. Previously, they "lived" in different spaces, today a person falls into "informational schizophrenia" when he simultaneously receives messages of the opposite content.

Discursive wars controlled by other countries have become a feature of the internal life of many countries [1-5]. Any situation that carries a deviation from the norm is immediately used in order to start an internal discourse war, leading to a weakening of the country's unity. That is, its identity is being destroyed. This happens especially often in a situation of elections, when many "players" from the outside want to help a candidate who is more advantageous for them.

Past geopolitical adversaries have become similar adversaries today in the realm of discourse wars. And this is understandable, since these are cheap wars that can be waged anonymously using social media. At the same time, everyone remains alive, only their brains are transformed in the direction necessary for the communicator.

All this happened very quickly and before our very eyes. As A. Martinez, who ran Facebook's targeted advertising, says: “If you came to me in 2012, when the last presidential election was raging, and we were looking for more and more complicated ways to monetize Facebook, and told me that Russian agents in the Kremlin would buy ads in On Facebook, to undermine American democracy, I would ask you where is your tin foil hat. And now we live in an inverted political reality ”(quoted from [6]).

In parallel with the creation of conflicting discourses, cyber attacks are carried out on the servers of the attacked country with the destruction of databases. The leading American computer magazine "Wired " spoke in detail about a number of such cyber wars on the part of Russia [7-9]. In 2015-2016. such attacks were on the servers of the US Democratic National Committee, in 2017 on Ukrainian government structures with their infection with the NotPetya malware. There is a detailed report by the US Department of Justice on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the first volume of which is 448 pages [10].

True, today the effectiveness of Cambridge Analytica in Trump's election is a little questioned. A. Martinez, who did ad targeting on Facebook, says: “What they did was bullshit, mostly. This has been done before. There is no reason to think that this is particularly effective ”[11]. Another specialist E. Wilson says: "A psychographic date is as good as the amount of creativity you can generate."

Well-known Cambridge Analytica character K. Wiley told NBC News: “Large volumes of information operations are about distorting people's perceptions. This company [Cambridge Analytica - GP] was born out of military contracts. There does not have to be the task of standard political communications, where people understand that they are trying to convince them of something. It is a change in what people think and perceive in the real world ”( ibid. ).

Regarding Steve Bannon, he said in another interview: “Steve wanted a weapon for his culture war. We gave him a way to achieve his goal of changing the culture of America."

At the same time, Clinton's campaign was characterized by broader targeting based on age, location and gender. The same Martinez explains this, adding “This is an old style work. Like television on Facebook”[12].

Bannon, who was Trump's strategic advisor during the presidential campaign, came up with the idea that if they can control culture, then from there they can control politics. That is, to manage one space with the help of another. We are accustomed to only one rule - the media space can control the political space. Bannon brought something different - the cultural space can also govern politics.

Wiley, who originally wrote his dissertation on fashion, talks about this intersection: “Politics and fashion are both about identity. They are both very cyclical. There are many different aesthetics in politics and fashion. More broadly, fashion and politics are both products of our culture. You can think of political movements as a fashion trend, when a lot of people suddenly adopt a new idea or concept. And the way we accept fashion and politics is connected with who we are, what our personalities are, for me they are just manifestations of us in different contexts. What are we shouting about in the city square, and, on the other hand, how do we decorate our bodies? " [13].

He describes the essence of his work as follows: “This is profiling people, as well as targeting them in order to create dominance in the information environment around them. Once you sever their ties to other sources of information, you place them in an environment where you have more control over the information than they can actually see. This is a very important thing, since they still feel like they are in charge, as in their heads they themselves make the decision to click on something, share something or say a word with some random account that they really do not know. They do not see the thought process and strategy that are behind it all ”[14].

And this is the most vivid description of the control of the discursive process, which is carried out beyond the understanding of the one who is the object of this control. Everything seems to him quite natural.

Regarding the 2020 election forecast, Wylie says: “Looking at 2016 as a case, it was clear that Russia would be the first to understand that you could use many of these platforms to manipulate voters. Now it is not only Russia. There will be a wider range of threats. These are China, North Korea, Iran and, frankly, some American allies too. If you have a trade dispute, who can say that Mexico will not interfere ”( ibid. ).

In that election, there was another detail that resulted in an uproar that Trump was paying less than Clinton for Facebook ads. This is both true and not true. The point turned out to be that Trump's content was more provocative, making a fuss on social media, and he was better at managing likes, comments, etc. than Clinton, and the Facebook click model helped him. As a result, it turned out that the Clinton campaign paid 100-200 times more than Trump's to reach the same number of people on Facebook ([15], see also [16]). The problem is also that social media turned out to be full of negative comments [17-19]. And research also shows that if the first comment is negative, it will almost automatically be followed by the same. That is, one negative generates the next, and this is already a stream of negative ...

Ukraine became tied to the elections through the figure of the original head of the campaign, P. Manafort, whose name is often mentioned in the pages of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report in contexts such as this: “Manafort instructed Rick Gates, her deputy for the campaign of a longtime employee, to provide Kilimnik with new information on the Trump campaign including internal sociology, although Manafort claims to have no memory of such an assignment. Manafort expected Kilimnik to share this information with others in Ukraine and with Deripaska. Gates sent this data from time to time to Kilimnik during the campaign period ”([20], see also [21-22]).

At another meeting, Kilimnik passed on a letter from Yanukovych, who had already lived in Russia. It contained a peace plan for Ukraine that enabled Russia to control eastern Ukraine. A few months after the elections, Kilimnik wrote in his e-mail that if Manafort was appointed as the American representative and the process began, Yanukovych would secure a meeting in Russia "at the highest level."

And this information is in this official document: “Manafort's contacts in Russia during the campaign and transition period arose from his consulting work for Deripaska from about 2005 to 2009. and his political consultancy work in Ukraine from 2005 to 2015, including assistance to his company DMP International LLC (DMI). Kilimnik, who speaks and writes Ukrainian and Russian, facilitated many of Manafort's communications with Deripaska and Ukrainian oligarchs. "

K. Kilimnik graduated from the Military University of the Ministry of Defense, where they train translators for the military intelligence of Russia, who often later become intelligence officers themselves [23-29]. He knew English and Swedish well. There he had the nickname "Cat". And only this information, as well as his connection with Deripaska, support the version of his connections with the power structures of Russia.

In a Senate Intelligence Committee report on social media work, it was stated that African Americans were the main target of the use of force: the committee found that no particular group of Americans received more impact than they. [30] The source of this impact was an Internet agency based in St. Petersburg. At the same time, Russian activity even increased after voting day: by 59% on Facebook, by 238% on Instagram, by 84% on YouTube and by 52% on Twitter.

The chairman of this committee, Richard Barr, said: "Russia is waging a campaign of information war against the United States that did not start and did not end with the 2016 elections." Such an "optimistic" forecast ...

One of these St. Petersburg trolls named the level of payment at the agency - he received $ 1,400 a week: “They paid to write. I was much younger and didn't think about the moral side. I just wrote because I love writing. I was not trying to change the world ”[31]. The latter is not very true, since this Internet machine was just trying to change the world. This can also be seen in the themes on which they worked day and night during their twelve-hour watch: President Putin or President Obama, and often both at the same time; Ukraine; the heroism of the Russian Defense Minister; Russian oppositionists and even America's role in the spread of the Ebola virus. As you can see, we have before us an emotional entrance to absolutely all corners of the American mass consciousness.

Mysteriously, the goals of Trump and the trolls' campaign coincided - they were supposed to "suppress the vote of African Americans" [32]. It is interesting that at one time, as S. Dorenko said, during the elections of Yeltsin they tried to make sure that pensioners did not come to vote against Yeltsin in the same way. Then the program "Vremya" showed a plot with the arson of the dacha, which before that the TV people themselves set fire to, so that the pensioners in the morning rushed not to the polling stations, but to the dachas.

In the case of the Trump campaign, the Russian side used social media. The Russian trolls aimed to "confuse, distract, and ultimately discourage" African Americans and other pro-Clinton voters from voting for her, for example by launching bogus information that Clinton was receiving money from the Ku Klux Klan. [33]

Oxford researchers found that black Americans received more ads on Facebook and Instagram than any other group. The bottom line is that over 1000 different messages were sent to Facebook users interested in African American issues, and they reached 16 million users.

Let's call it an informational waterfall, when everyone, whether he wants it or not, gets into the field of this influence. And since it is not random, in a systemically organized information flow, no one can avoid its influence, although everyone will believe that no one can influence it.

Analysts have called this an "immersive ecosystem" where different pages can post information in support of each other. As a result, a sufficiently large audience coverage was formed with deep penetration into the brain from various sources. Moreover, the audience at the time of elections is simply eager to receive more and more information. The fictitious account Blacktivist, created by the Russians, received, for example, 4.6 million "likes". It said, in order to divert voters from Clinton, that one should vote for the Green Party candidate J. Stein, and in general that “non-voting is an expression of our rights” (see also the analysis of African-American voters for Trump's election in 2016 [34-35]).

In conclusion, we will mention that in the set of court documents there are many e-mails from Manafort, recommending very detailed "talking points" for Yanukovych and Azarov [36]. That is, everything that we listened to from their lips on TV screens was actually written by others.

Manafort writes, for example, that on election night he sat for five hours with Yanukovych, and today's articles directly speak of Kilimnik as a representative of the GRU [37-39]. And the following is also emphasized, which is very important: “Both, Manafort and Kilimnik, tried to promote the narrative that Ukraine, and not Russia, interfered in the US elections in 2016, and the ledger with Manafort's payment was fake” [40 ]. And more: "The report says that Kilimnik" almost certainly helped to organize the first public messages that Ukraine interfered in the American elections. "President Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, later repeated this" ( ibid. ).

Kilimnik developed a set of nicknames: in Moscow he was known as "Kostya, a guy from the GRU", also KK, in Kiev he was called "Manafort Manafort" [41]. One explanation for his closeness to Manafort is: “Language was so important because you had to grasp the nuances. And since Paul does not speak Russian or Ukrainian, he always needs to have someone next to him at meetings, so KK was always with him. He was very close to Paul and enjoyed great confidence in him ”(ibid.).

Because of all this, the Senate committee had potential counterintelligence questions that Russia could use incriminating information to influence the then presidential candidate in his relations with Russia [42]. Two options were possible here: an operation of influence from the outside and a disinformation operation within.

In Kiev, Kilimnik shared internal Ukrainian information with the American embassy [43]. But, as it turned out by chance, for example, with the Italian embassy too. A huge number of articles on the topic of Kilimnik are explained by the fact that all these were contacts with a Russian intelligence officer, with whom they either shared information or themselves received it from him on internal Ukrainian problems (see, for example, [44 -45]). That is, Kilimnik was a channel for influencing American politics.

We again got to the point of great emotional tension of all the characters. This is the election of Yanukovych, this is the election of Trump, when the emotional stress of all the actors was maximum. Therefore, they were all in search of information that, getting to the right table at the right time, influenced the adoption of political decisions.

Another native of the USSR, A. Kogan, appears in the report of the intelligence committee, whose parents emigrated when he was a child. [20] There is also another campaigner there - the Israeli Psy Group, which presents its work as “Shaping reality through intelligence and influence". Kogan made presentations of his work at Cambridge Analytica in Russia. He also worked for Lukoil as well as Cambridge Analytica.

Wiley also sounded interesting information: “Cambridge Analytica has sought to use information-driven models of social change, identifying subsets of a given population that are receptive to specific messages. Rather than focusing on the nuclear segment at the heart of the problem, Cambridge Analytica's work has focused on changing the 5 percent of the population at the edge of the problem, with the goal of that 5 percent determining the majority of the vote. "

The media clung to the figure of Kogan as a direct link between Russia and the elections [46-50]. However, he defended himself by arguing that in his lectures in St. Petersburg he emphasized that “the date from social media cannot be effectively used to create forecasts at the individual level” [51]. At the same time, CNN quotes other of his statements from his lectures: “The level of prediction about your likes on Facebook will be higher than what your wife can say about you, what your parents or friends can say about you. Even if we take 10 of your friends and they give a description of who you are, and we put it all together, this analysis [on Facebook] will be better. Your Facebook knows more about you than anyone else in your life. "

As a continuation of his work in St. Petersburg, articles by St. Petersburg scientists are published, for example, on the linguistic model of stress, well-being and dark sides of character in Russian texts on Facebook [52]. Or about linguistic correlates in Facebook texts of non-clinical variants of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy [53].

The first author there P. Panicheva [54], who defended her Ph.D. thesis in philological sciences on the topic "Analysis of the parameters of semantic connectivity using distributive semantic models (based on the Russian language)" [55], where her first opponent was a doctor of technical sciences, specializing on automatic text processing.

There is a report on determining the age of online bloggers, funded from an interesting grant topic "Determining the gender and age of online interlocutors based on the formal parameters of their texts" [56]. And another topic of the SPbU project was “Stress, health and psychological well-being in social networks: a cross-cultural study” [57]. A large amount of work is being done on what can be designated as deanonymization of Facebook texts, since it is aimed at determining personal characteristics by their linguistic correlates [58-60].

It turns out that this is one of the variants of personality recognition technology, similar to visual recognition, only now it is verbal recognition.

True, at one time KGB General F. Bobkov wrote that they successfully disclosed 90% of anonymous letters in the KGB. Perhaps this was due to the fact that, as he noted, the peak of anonymous letters came when a theater went on tour abroad. That is, the list of potential authors was already easily created in advance. But on the other hand, he also had such a phrase that every terrorist attack is preceded by anonymous letters, but here there was no such clue.

Technologies rely on a person's weak spot - on Facebook he considers himself completely free and does not think about the fact that modern approaches are actively involved in analyzing the transitions from his "likes" to the traits of his psyche and character. "Likes" and reposts become his every minute psychological testing, which at the next stage makes it possible to unite such people into groups according to their susceptibility to certain messages. A person opens his mind himself, and technology makes it possible to find the right keys to it. I just want to shout: guys, you can be clearly seen and heard, even when you are sitting in a dark room, but with a computer / smartphone in your hands ...

The main conclusion that we will have to make is that technology is more and more defeating a person and that the most effective steps are taken without regard for ethics, but only for the sake of achieving the desired result. The era of post-truth hides well, posing as truth ...

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Synthesis of "technical" and "human" technologies

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