Humor is the best weapon against manipulative sob stories. From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:
controversy as emergent product
if you’ve ever been to see a stage mesmerist who hypnotizes people from the audience, it’s a weird experience. they have a quick set of exercises, a patter that rapidly discovers which 1-2% of the audience are near instantly susceptible to induction. the point is not to waste your time with the difficult ones, you pick out the easy ones and you go with that. it’s the same principle as the nigerian finance minister scams. the blatancy and the typos are deliberate. they exist as a screen to help clear out those who might waste your time when they figure out the scam halfway through.
the modern age of internet engagement has blown this into the stratosphere. the reach is vast, and the feedback near instant, one-to-one, and bi-directional and that last one, the bidirectionality, really changes the game. you now know exactly who and how many are reacting to you and even, in the case of social media as opposed to just click-through, HOW they are reacting to you. they’ll tell you in their own specific words. at scale, A/B testing takes seconds and AI can instantly parse the tenor of comments.
this vast manipulation payload also serves as sonar pulses to see what you hit and what came back and this makes the game very fast and rapidly hyper-optimizes both messaging and targeting. at scale, the speed with which sloppy tracer fire turns to killshots is indistinguishable from instant.
every crack and crevice into which message or medium can flow is instantly inundated and explored for the potential to be forced larger. your joy, your rage, your silence all tell the message makers what to make more of and what to abandon.
It sounds like digital crack.
Getting ready for heel & toe with pullover, hoodie, M65 jacket!