The Perpetual Conspiracy Machine

 Review of Joel Dyer’s - The Perpetual Prisoner Machine

In the book, Joel describes a well known and disturbing facet of life in America.  The recidivism rate (returning to a life of crime after alleged rehabilitation stands at nearly 50% within one year and 70% overall.  I leave you to research more particular numbers on your own as they vary greatly from source to source.

Instead of rehashing old cause and effect stories of how violent video games cause crime, or marijuana is a gateway drug to a life of drug related crime or heavy metal music makes our children Satan worshipping criminals we get - there’s just too much money in crime to give up on crime.

You can tell your society is pretty messed up when soap making companies donate money to politicians spouting tough on crime laws to keep a plentiful supply of users in a setting to need to continually use a product.   Of course, these are genuinely debatable and it’s not my position in life to lay claim to the veracity of the books conclusions or have rough experience on the topic to lay claim to any authority.  Especially since I haven’t read the book yet.

And that last sentence is part of the problem.  I don’t have to read the entire book to get a sense of what’s going on.  There is ample coverage on the internet for the basics.  A deep dive is in order and maybe I’ll be gifted a copy for my birthday, but for my purposes today I have sufficient material to latch on to my own confirmation bias.  Namely how I find this a nice parallel to social media “community standards”.

As I’ve often said, the social media approach is heavily geared towards saying “Please stop being naughty.”  Which is as it should be.  And the grifters hate that so they (at least the bigger ones) do everything to pollute that social media to keep their targets unhappy about any genuine solution.  And the end result is, “Stop, or I’ll say stop again”.

There is a form of perpetual conspiracy machine operating.  The grifters are big on giving the target what they want, what is missing in real life interactions.  The Attaboy!^TM for parroting the wrong answer.  Positive reinforcement for acting naughty, as if just remaining neutral is not bad enough.  There appears to be a strong correlation between how much positive reinforcement is doled out compared to how much money the grifter is receiving.  And the prison system (the social media site) has a profit motive as well, endlessly having soulless algorithms chaining likes and views to whatever else has similar cross pollinating qualities.  Stop, or, oh who are we kidding - just keep going with it - you rock!

The demographics* of the gematria accounts show a favoring of teenage males.  Fairly well represented by race, but if anything skewed to minorities.  Which makes sense as you don’t want to alienate your target audience before scoring the payout.  They are already marginalized and have life experiences where they already know they don’t play well with others in real life interactions.  The weird shit in the sky crowd demographics*,  middle aged, spiritual if not outright religious, more females involved.  But still people that give every indication they aren’t a lot of fun to be around in real life.

Seemingly, that younger crowd finds out how the bat shit crazy and cockamamie the gematria narratives are and move on.  Because they still don’t get along with others as their replacement belief system still adds no value to getting along with others.  They are prisoners in their echo chambers and rabbit holes.  Unable to become one of that minority of the 30% that escapes completely.  Bouncing around different conspiracies in a prison that openly projects they are “social” when the prison is just for generating $.  And, while in prison they learn from other prisoners on how to do other dead end counterproductive criminal things!  Lots of fun for the normies!

These are the kinds of issues that should be included in any Congressional chambers discussing banning Tik Tok.  Balancing giving people the benefit of the doubt while punishing the hard core offenders is beyond what I should be able to do myself - and certainly should be beyond those that lay claim to being Constitutional experts because they want to rip people off on the internet undeterred.  Just like making money off fossil fuels, ignoring actual evidence that there’s something seriously wrong with social media in its current forms won’t help out the grifters in the future.  How are your grifting children going to have anybody to grift off of in the future?  THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!  Just finding money to survive leaves no money left to be stolen.  It’s amazing how many people in the weird shot in the sky demographic post prayer requests, mention they are homeless, talk about how they lost their job, talk about how they hate their job, talk about how they hate grifters competing with their chosen messiah, talk about the world ending tomorrow…

And they still have time and resources to post daily or almost daily videos being involved in the last place they should be.  Their prison cell on the internet.

*personal opinion not backed up by any scientific study I’ve been made aware of.