Master of the Digital Collective Unconscious
Zuckerberg's crystal ball may have foretold the election results.
Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg sent a contrite letter to Jim Jordan and the House Judiciary Committee. He admitted that he was wrong to cooperate with the regime’s requests for censorship. He mentions that the Biden administration asked him to quell COVID-19 disinformation and that the FBI warned him that the Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation. In both cases, he states that he was wrong to cooperate and that he will not do it again. But why in the world would Zuckerberg admit that this was wrong?
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” he said. Even if he was compelled to tell the truth, he could have at least used some Orwellian doublespeak to cozy up to the regime and play nice with the system. But he has not. His statements amount to saying I was wrong to manipulate the flow of information on behalf of the regime and I will not do it again.
In 2020, Zuckerberg contributed $400 million for election fortification. Many conservative publications have noted that this only served to help Biden win the election. But this year, he says he will not help fortify the election. Why not?
What is going on with Mark Zuckerberg?
Swiss Psychoanalyst Carl Jung promulgated the idea of the collective unconscious, a shared subconscious substrate that crosses between human beings. Out of the collective unconscious bursts certain archetypes and symbols have stood in for ideas beyond language throughout human history. Whether or not you believe Jung’s collective unconscious is real does not matter. Technology has made it so in the form of the internet.
The internet is humanity’s collective dream, the global village that McLuhan described. We dump ourselves into it, uploading and downloading information. We spend a lot of time there, and we put in a lot of attention. Byung Chul Han describes social media as a digital confessional. We pour all of our vice and sin onto the internet as well. Unlike the priest in the confessional, the internet does not throw out your garbage and your vice. And it does not have a seal of secrecy. It keeps everything, relates everything to you, and packages it into a neat little profile. That attention is valuable for marketing purposes. It is valuable for training artificial intelligence. And it is valuable for political projects.
Facebook is the biggest social media platform in the world. They have a dizzying amount of data. One decade ago, Facebook announced that they were extending their data storage to 300 petabytes. A petabyte is 1000 terabytes. Your computer or cell phone does fine with a half or quarter terabyte, and unless you are dealing with lots of video files or video games, storage has likely never been an issue. It is for Facebook.
Just to get a sense of scale - a single petabyte stores about as much information as 20 million tall filing cabinets or 500 billion pages of text. Meta’s data holdings are dizzyingly large.
What can this data tell us? This amount of data is useless on its own, and it’s useless when poured over by human eyes as well. Algorithms are required to make meaningful sense of the data. And algorithms are used.
An Application Programming Interface (API) is a software intermediary that allows two applications to communicate with one another. This allows one party to access and interpret information from someone else’s app. An API allows microtargeting. An entity can look at all the information about a certain individual and learn a lot about them. This enables the entity to draw meaningful conclusions about product preferences, family relationships, and political beliefs.
The Bipartisan Policy Center states:
Some examples of how open graph was used include President Obama’s campaign, which built an app that would connect known Obama supporters to potential supporters. The idea was that these two groups of users–demonstrated supporters and potential ones–had something in common, such as being friends on Facebook or that they both liked a particular sports team. In a non-political context, apps like Farmville would use the API so people could see which of their friends were also playing their game and how users might interact while in the app.
This spawned the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting firm, used Facebook’s API to psychologically profile 87 million users. They did this by sending out surveys to a few hundred thousand Facebook users, telling Facebook it was for academic use. Meanwhile, they collected data from the survey respondents and their friends, creating tens of millions of psychological profiles. The scandal was that the firm used these psychological profiles to assist Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign and the Brexit referendum.
This scandal implies that Facebook can easily in house psychologically profile all of its users regarding their political alignment. It is not a big jump to say so. The business model for social media generally is psychologically profiling to get the right consumer profile. Political preferences vs. product preferences - no big difference.
If you were Mark Zuckerberg, and you had access to this “real-time global human sentiment machine,” as one X poster put it, would you not take a peek and see if you can predict which way the November election is going to go? I certainly would.
And let us say that you realize that a particular candidate is almost surefire to win. And this is the candidate that you bet $400 million against last election cycle. Would you not start trying to make amends?
Mark Zuckerberg has a crystal ball. Big data is Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report made reality. Zuck has seen the future. He has peered into the digital collective unconscious and divined the archetypes. And he saw that Trump is going to win the 2024 election.
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White pill if true.
The doomer in me posits another scenario - the regime is confident it has contained the emergent populist threat, and feels comfortable placating conservatives by throwing them a rhetorical bone (eh, ya you're right, we rigged the election) without really holding anyone accountable
Good thought and not impossible, but I don't think he has that good an insight into the result. His data can surely serve as a sentiment indicator, but it would be a lot more useful in a world where we don't have polls. Instead it's a very messy indicator that by itself is worse than good poll analysis. At best, it has value as a minor supplement to those polls. I'd guess it gives you an edge worth a few percentage points in the prediction markets.
I honestly think the man has had a change of heart, just as Musk has, but not as large (they haven't taken a kid from Zuck, yet). 4 more years of the Democrats beating up on him and everything he stands for, he's had enough of going to bat for them. Simple as that.
Kamala probably wins because this thing is close, which means it comes down to turnout. All the reports I've heard from the frontlines from both sides say that Democrats have much better ground game this year. The RNC is a shell of its former self.