I have been thinking about “collective consciousness” for some time now, as a corollary to the Jungian idea of the collective unconscious. My 2018 blog posts “Musings on collective cognition” and “Could collective cognition be manipulated?” touched on ideas around social media, emergent consciousness, and deliberate rewiring of group thought. What do I mean by “collective consciousness”? It’s a fun thought experiment to imagine that the consciousness of humanity could be an organic entity of itself, self-aware and capable of acting in its self-interest. But there’s no need to get that abstract and esoteric.
Let’s think of collective consciousness as a form of thought that goes beyond a single brain. We make it when we talk to each other, or write, or sing, or paint. When someone carved a poem on cuneiform, and I read a translation of it thousands of years later, that is like a message passed from one neuron to another.
Who is allowed to pass such thoughts into my brain? People, books, music . . . but that’s so twentieth century, man! TikTok, the social media formerly known as Twitter, Facebook . . . I just let those types of social media right in, past all my defenses. I catch myself “knowing” something but not remembering where I learned it. Now humanity is sharing this space with bots and AI designed by humans in order to gain political and economic power. This is a little scary.
More scary: the people who own social media, like Elon Musk, have an outsized impact on how we think.
It should be pretty well known by now that Russia has been influencing U.S. politics using social media bots. If not, here’s the news from the mouth of the Justice Department, in its September 4, 2024 press release
“The Justice Department today announced the ongoing seizure of 32 internet domains used in Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns colloquially referred to as “Doppelganger,” in violation of U.S. money laundering and criminal trademark laws. As alleged in an unsealed affidavit, the Russian companies Social Design Agency (SDA), Structura National Technology (Structura), and ANO Dialog, operating under the direction and control of the Russian Presidential Administration, and in particular First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Sergei Vladilenovich Kiriyenko, used these domains, among others, to covertly spread Russian government propaganda with the aim of reducing international support for Ukraine, bolstering pro-Russian policies and interests, and influencing voters in U.S. and foreign elections, including the U.S. 2024 Presidential Election. “
This is not a new phenomenon. A recent article from the SAIS Review of International Affairs, “Social Media, Disinformation, and AI: Transforming the Landscape of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Political Campaigns” talks about some of the ways that bots are shaping public dialogue, and it cites studies going back as far as 2011.
“During the 2016 US presidential election, Howard and Kollanyi (2016) proposed that political bots played an increasingly important role in the globalized political system in the form of botnets, fake news, and algorithmic manipulation, which was also known as “computational propaganda,” that referred to “assemblage of social media platforms, autonomous agents, and big data tasked with the manipulation of public opinion” (p. 4). In short, political bots—a subset of social bots—can be leveraged to influence public sentiment and intervene in the opinion climate, commonly known as “social media astroturf” (Ratkiewicz et al., 2011). Moreover, political bots would intensify the polarization of attitudes, amplify negative emotions, and subtly endanger democracy (Robles et al., 2022).”
So there’s something I read on social media but can’t find now. (Ironic, yes?) It had to do with Russian psy-ops bots weighing in on U.S. “culture wars” by either creating or amplifying memes such as “Karen” and “O.K. Boomer.” Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. But that’s the kind of thing bots can do: find two opposing parties, learn their point of disagreement, and fuel the flames by amplifying it. This manipulation feels more personal and disturbing than simply political bots.
I titled this blog post, “Have our brains been hacked?” and my answer is “Yes, obviously.”
Where does it stop? How far will it go? Billionaire “tech bros” now have access to a vast storehouse of public dialogue, AI tools to analyze and utilize it, and an economic interest in keeping people compliant.
And what can we do? My answer is largely metaphorical. We need antivirus software for our brains, and also for our collective mind/minds. What? How? Dunno. I’ll just fling that question out into the world and hope somebody smart catches it.
But I guess more urgently, we should be aware that if we are doing The Resistance on social media, then The Resistance has also been hacked.
Kristin Ann King 