A thought experiment.

Let us, the netizens of Facebook in India, perform a thought experiment. Let us move back in time and space and leaving our identity of being young Indians of the 2010s and become young Americans of 1960s.

We’d find ourselves an outraged lot living in a world of socio-political and cultural turmoil. The international scene is in the midst of raging global wars and fissile tensions, the domestic political arena is in this huge churning that finds the polity split along generational lines. The governments so far have not delivered the goods and there is a cry for change all around. There is a demand for a revolution and we the urban educated youth hailing from middle to affluent backgrounds find ourselves at the frontline of that revolution.

But obviously this revolutionary work often puts us at severe odds with news media. They scoff at us and don’t allow us the space we deserve. So we are hitting back with independent magazines and newspapers. To tide over the tiny readership of our individual papers, we have gathered in groups of the like-minded. In these groups we come together as equals and all voices are deemed (almost) equal. We feel so comfortable in these raucous gatherings that these have in fact helped us go beyond politics alone and an entire subculture of entertainment and socialising with its variants of music, satire, art and so on has spawned from our movement for change.

Our idea of what our revolution really entails is very vague and as a result our political goalposts keep shifting and our cultural choices are equally unclear. The only continuing thread in politics is the line “we’ve had enough with the old ways – we need change”. And the corresponding cultural one is we need freedom from established norms and yardsticks and we will reshape cultural practices to suit us.

On the cultural front, we are always looking for newer ways to subvert the normative and seek greater freedom. It is at this juncture that someone introduces us to this thing called the Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, LSD or Acid for short. And Jesus bloody Christ, it gives our cultural chaos such a high (unintended, but that pun had to happen) that we soar right to seventh heaven.

It is nothing like anything anyone has known before. We are convinced that if there is a path to our revolution, it is this. Soon enough, for many of us, Acid is the revolution.

An after thought.

Years add on and on the August 8, 1977, the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research constituted under the United States Senate presents a report that brings out in clear writing that the mass use of acid was done by the Central Intelligence Agency as a massive experiment in mind control. A program they called project MKULTRA.

Rogue government agencies tried whitewashing history and through express orders, destroyed innumerable files related to the project. Only a fraction survived for the Committee to review. Yet the findings based on those uncovered the staggering extent of the experiment. Beyond all norms of ethical behaviour and all parallel in history, this was in fact the largest known mass experiment on mind control done on unsuspecting everyday citizens who (by and large) never broke any law. The scale of this (essentially medical) experimentation on unwilling subjects is second only to ones done during the horrors of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

The State realised there was no way to completely quell the burning desire for freedom and a better world among the young. If they stopped one form of socio-cultural or political expression, we’d latch on to another. So instead of outlawing our game, they beat us at it.

So in the end we realised that LSD was far from being the path to the revolution. It was nothing but a chemical that triggers certain parts of the brain, inducing it to release those certain chemicals that were otherwise released when we were doing our exhilarating political-intellectual work. Only LSD did it much better, and we got our high without actually having to go through the trouble of doing real political work and having to take on the onerous responsibility of being the change or taking on the might of potentially lethal big bad powers that be.

Back to the future.

Ok so that was one nice historical LSD related trip (again, pun unintended but these things just keep falling in place).

Now, it is the 2nd week of July 2014. Israeli armies are pounding Palestine with tonnes of bombs every day. Ukraine is shelling its eastern borders and thrashing dissent in the south. Iraq and Syria are getting overrun by America and the ISIS. The people’s uprising in Egypt demanding democracy and freedom has been hijacked by the military and USA is looking for newer arenas of war. We in India have had a big political convolution over the past few years.

Over the past decade (or a little under it) we have been enraged at how things have been run in this country. We want change. We want a revolution.

Big mainstream/paid media has scoffed us and we know they have served none but their paymasters.

We took to the Internet to have our say.

We started writing individual blogs on sites like Blogspot and we ranted and raged and vented. But the site statistics were not a pretty sight so we chucked that and instead began gathering in small collectives called Orkut, MySpace and so on. Here we shared ideas and formed groups with friends and the like-minded. We talked politics – loads of it – but on the side we socialised, cracked jokes, sought friends (and mates) in strangers, and so on.

But then one fine day someone came along with this thing called Facebook. It was so “awesome” and it “rocked” so much that our political activism and socio-digital lives just went through the roof.

In fact, with the power Facebook promised us, our dreams of revolution (all variants of it) seemed not only possible but inevitable. We loved it so much that an entire subculture of pages, videos, music and memes grew around it and in no time millions of people were doing it.

Not that some of us did not use it to organise political work on the ground, but for the vast majority, Facebook became political ground. I mean all we had to do was create a profile, fake or otherwise, follow a politician, film star or some other talking head and let loose our sharp unforgiving words. We could unleash the most direct of criticisms and the most unabashed of propaganda with little more than a click.

The best part was how we could do our politics without disturbing our domestic routines one bit. All we had to do was say something sharp or humorous or at times insulting enough, and share this, or like that, and gratification and a sense of achievement filled our hearts in moments. Revolutionary political activism with minimum activity. A win-win if ever there was one.

History repeats itself.

A week back, news broke out across the world about the mind control program carried out by Facebook.

Facebook’s inhouse scientist (mad or otherwise), Adam D. I. Kramer, who reportedly heads a division called Core Data Science Team in the company, along with two others Jamie E. Guillory and Jeffrey T. Hancock who research on communication and tobacco research (addiction probably), have carried out a study called the “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks”.

In this study, they did this experiment of selectively populating the newsfeed of their victims with only depressing news. As per the results declared, the victims were receptive to negative emotions and, feeling depressed by the news on their feed, they too posted sad updates.

In short, Facebook executed a pilot project on mind control of its victims. And it did this psychological test (essentially a medical test) without the express consent of the test subjects.

Those who care to know would know how studies are confirming that Facebook is an addiction and it isn’t taking any revolution anywhere or at best is doing too little for that (see here).

As per this study the stimulation of Facebook and other social media sites mimic that of well known drugs like alcohol, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, meth, and ketamine. And just like addicts seek repeated doses of the stimulant, we check statuses and likes/shares with ever-increasing frequency. In fact, the addiction can potentially be so grave that in the absence of stimulation it induces withdrawal symptoms ranging from anxiety to high irritability.

Moral of the story.

There is talk that Facebook has done and published this thought control experiment as a marketing gimmick.

Well, for one, the Facebook IPO wasn’t a rocket which share traders jumped on to. Moreover, the initial rush to advertise through Facebook’s targeted ads is rumoured to be fizzling out since i) this form of advertising is very blind and all controls remain with Facebook ii) advertisers aren’t seeing returns on investment.

So yes, this could very well be Facebook’s way of telling advertiser and investors – look who’s boss when it comes to convincing people to make a choice.

But that does nothing to reduce some serious concerns about what this experiment shows us about such websites.

For example what keeps corporations like Facebook from staying within the limits of only selling us books, lingerie and Candy Crush and not inducing larger and far reaching socio-political changes in exchange of money? Is Facebook helping us build our political agenda or are we building Facebook’s? See the Cuban Twitter Scandal for example.

Secondly it underscores the fact that this network is not really social and therefore open in the sense common parlance projects it to be. Rather, the network is social only inasmuch as members of society generating unpaid content it. Beyond that, the network and its contents are essentially owned by a small group of private individuals who trade on that data.

We, the ones who sign up for accounts, are not users of Facebook or their customers. We (and the lives we post online) are the products this group trades in. We are only the product end of the network – control and use of resources remains completely unknown to us.

In the words of Mark Zuckerberg himself, we the users of Facebook are “just dumb fucks who trust him with our private information”(see here).

As a corollary of the second point we need to know how this limited private ownership of nearly endless and very specific data makes the owners very powerful and they can (and are) playing God with the lives of those on it, ignoring well established legal and ethical codes.

The psychological test for example (as any other medical clinical test), should come under the well known Declaration of Helsinki. The Declaration is a set of codes to follow when performing medical tests on humans and forms the basis of legislations on clinical trials in almost all democracies across the planet. The Facebook test stands in total violation of that code for not taking express consent of its subjects.

This was Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s idea of an apology on being asked about Emotional Contagion. “This was part of ongoing research companies do to test different products, and that was what it was; it was poorly communicated, and for that communication we apologize. We never meant to upset you.”  Predictably, this “apology” wasn’t received well by numerous commentators.In fact as per this report in Forbes, this wasn’t the first time Facebook did such an experiment.

In conclusion, even if we remain skeptical or choose to disbelieve the power Facebook wields over our emotions, the biggest lesson of this experiment is the need to decentralise information and its flow. In the information age, power equals to information and the control over it. The Facebook scandal once again reminds us of what too much power in too few hands means.

The author can be contacted at siddharthyaroy@gmail.com