How the metaverse is going to work us over

Zuckerberg in the early days

(he hasn't changed, but now he’s just very   

guarded about making comments like that) 

A Wash. Post opinion piece by an information scientist at the RAND Corporation opines:

Here’s a plausible scenario that could soon take place in the metaverse, the online virtual reality environments under rapid development by Mark Zuckerberg and other tech entrepreneurs: A political candidate is giving a speech to millions of people. While each viewer thinks they are seeing the same version of the candidate, in virtual reality they are actually each seeing a slightly different version. For each and every viewer, the candidate’s face has been subtly modified to resemble the viewer.

This is done by blending features of each viewer’s face into the candidate’s face. The viewers are unaware of any manipulation of the image. Yet they are strongly influenced by it: Each member of the audience is more favorably disposed to the candidate than they would have been without any digital manipulation.

This is not speculation. It has long been known that mimicry can be exploited as a powerful tool for influence. A series of experiments by Stanford researchers has shown that slightly changing the features of an unfamiliar political figure to resemble each voter made people rate politicians more favorably.

The experiments took pictures of study participants and real candidates in a mock-up of an election campaign. The pictures of each candidate were modified to resemble each participant. The studies found that even if 40 percent of the participant’s features were blended into the candidate’s face, the participants were entirely unaware the image had been manipulated.

In the metaverse, it’s easy to imagine this type of mimicry at a massive scale.

At the heart of all deception is emotional manipulation. Virtual reality environments, such as Facebook’s (now Meta’s) metaverse, will enable psychological and emotional manipulation of its users at a level unimaginable in today’s media.  

I have been working on problems of deception, disinformation and artificial intelligence for close to four decades, including two terms as a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). We are not even close to being able to defend users against the threats posed by this coming new medium. In virtual reality, malicious actors will be able to take the age-old dark arts of deception and influence to new heights — or depths.  

The metaverse will usher in a new age of mass customization of influence and manipulation. It will provide a powerful set of tools to manipulate us effectively and efficiently. Even more remarkable will be the ability to combine tailored individual and mass manipulation in a way that has never before been possible.  

Society did not start paying serious attention to classical social media — meaning Facebook, Twitter and the like — until things got completely out of hand. Let us not make the same mistake as social media blossoms into the metaverse.

Hm. It sounds like a lot of fun is coming our way in the Metaverse. Make no mistake, if there are better ways to deceive and manipulate us, those free speech tools will be used ruthlessly against us.

I like the way this guy thinks and writes. He sounds like me. Really, no reality modification involved. I could have written the information content of those two highlighted sentences, because they reflect my thinking and beliefs. Honestly, who else calls propaganda the dark arts or talks about defense against the dark arts?* 

* IMFO (in my firm opinion), teaching defense against the dark arts is urgently needed in American public schools. 

For better or worse, my mind is not alone. In addition to the sagacious herd here at Dissident Politics, there are at least some fellow travelers out there in the real universe. 

Don’t trust him or you will be 

fooled, used and betrayed