Heard a creepy conspiracy theory.
You know sometimes you're thinking of something, not even saying it out loud, and then an ad for it pops up on your screen? There's a claim that scientists have developed mind-reading nano particles that have been put in food and water, humans consume them and then they read our thoughts and of course, this being a capitalistic society, use our thoughts to try and sell us stuff.
What do you think?
I once saw a lecture by a psychiatrist who was talking about schizophrenia.
He used the example of a person sitting thinking "gee I'm hungry I could sure go for some pizza" when suddenly an ad for pizza pops up on TV.
The problem comes when you start inferring some kind of causality between the two. Either that your mind caused the pizza ad (because you have power, or your thoughts are being monitored), or the pizza ad was strategically being played when They knew you were hungry. Maybe as part of a larger plan.
The truth is that pizza is good, people get hungry, and if you watch TV there are ads for pizza all the time. It is highly likely things will line up sometimes and you will experience coordination.
It is too much pattern matching; everyone is susceptible to it. It is incorrect.
There is no plausible mechanism for your hypothesis. Furthermore it is unnecessary because the means of production, distribution, reproduction etc etc are all owned by a very small group who will make money off you in any case.
more or less
There is no need to invent mind reading technology with nanoparticles and brain scanners, when there's a very well known mind reading technology that delivers ads based on a set of just about every point of data ever recorded about you, which is shared and sold between every company you interact with. Of course they know you want pizza, you usually do on this day of the week when it's rainy and your mother mentioned pizza in a text yesterday.
You can buy these datasets yourself if you wanted to.
I have definitely felt assuming causality to be problematic, but synchronicity is still interesting. I just mumble “that’s cool. God, Jung, Chaos Magick…” now.
hilariously cooked idea, havana syndrome tier
Havana delicious piping hot chicken supreme pizza from Pizza Hut delivered right to my door in 30 minutes or less or my money back
If there were mind-reading nanoparticles in our food and drink, why would they limit it to just trying to sell us stuff?
It's just algorithms that have been honed with billions of data points from billions of people
That and I'm fairly certain that your phone's microphone is listening to you while you're using certain apps, hell, probably even constantly
That and I'm fairly certain that your phone's microphone is listening to you while you're using certain apps, hell, probably even constantly
Nonsense, people are just a thousand times more predictable than they want to think they are
The truth is both much less interesting, and far more insidious. You don't need nano particles to read the brains of the population. You don't need secret sciences, or nefarious groups controlling the world. All you need is a capitalist political economy, lax regulations on advertisements, no regulations on data collection, basic psychology, and a century of experience influencing the whims of the most propagandized population on earth.
Nowdays, these ads are targeted. There's a bot running on a database right now calculating the last time that you ordered pizza, how this gap correlates with others that they've recorded, and deciding whether it's worth spending a fraction of a cent to buy an ad on the game that you're playing. It's not surprising that a data center designed to figure out when is the optimal moment to tempt you with your favorite treat, manages to send you an advertisement The same time you decide you want that treat. Even less so when they've spent your entire life conditioning you to want that treat.
I Don't doubt for a minute that Google is using its vast data gathering abilities to target advertisements, using microphones and access to email, pooling data together from multiple websites and tracking cookies, but what's terrifying is they don't really need to. They already know my fat ass is going to want pizza sometime soon, they don't need to monitor my microphone for keywords if they know it's just a matter of time. I'm sure they read our emails, but they don't have to read your emails to know that you're single, they don't need to monitor everything you do on your phone, to know people don't like being lonely.
No lol
I have evidence of this that I'm going to present tomorrow. But first I need to board this commercial flight.
I think this is totally implausible, but on a related note, have you ever seen the documentary “The Century of Self”? It’s about Edward Bernays and how he developed propaganda/media manipulation. It’s pretty well done and still one of my favorite Adam Curtis docs.
I think it would be easier to just change what you think about by constantly bombarding you with subliminal messaging. Still insidious as fuck and we don't even get the cyberpunk ads we just have shit trying to sell you a cloth on a stick and slave burgers
They didn't and block the ads (if you are on a phone or something, dns config can dump majority of them)
Also, you will remember times when you thought of something and similar ad popped up, while hundreds of times where you thought of something and different ad popped up will be dumped in "another fucking ad" bin of the brain.
I swear I responded to this
My adblockers are always on but I had some kind of layout bug/issue so disabled them for a minute as I checked my CSS code for what might be causing an issue at that site. I googled something. I got an ad for Jewish singles. It freaked me out. Within the previous weeks in Gmail emails I had mentioned being Jewish and I made a joke about marriage.
It was a reminder to me that tech companies know a staggering amount about everybody who uses their products regularly which is most of the planet. And in most countries the companies have hardly any or effectively zero oversight because of their magic word: anonymization.