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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jürgen Hubert" data-source="post: 3612149" data-attributes="member: 7177">I had some additional thoughts on how strange the setting can become:<a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2169162/fr/flyout" target="_blank">This</a> is probably a good example of a precursor to TS-era memetic campaigns, though of course the latter will be more sophisticated.In this campaign, "key people" who have shown to be politically engaged by donating money to political drives were called and encouraged to go and watch a certain movie - because it is expected that if they like the movie, they would be far likely to tell other people about it and thus "spread the word", thus making the movie more popularOf course, in the TS era such simple calls would probably be caught and screened by one's infomorphs. But still, identifying the "key spreaders of memes" (i.e., those whose opinions are respected and listened to by other people) and convincing them of something will be a major industry. I can imagine the following three-layered approach:- Identifying such key people. This can be done through sophistic algorithms which analyze social networks, and there are likely to be a vast number of companies who do that.- Getting "hooks" into such people to make then vulnerable to outside suggestions. There are numerous ways to do that, but my favorite would be SAIs (sapient artificial intelligences) who do nothing but trying to "befriend" such people under false online personas. They exchange emails, chat messages and fake photos, and in general do anything that makes online friendships flourish. And thus they have a much easier time convincing them of doing something than if these people had merely received calls from random strangers.Sure, this won't be worth the effort with many people - but some people are so influental that they can shift the opinions of many thousands of people. And such people will have to beware of such "fake friends"...- Finally, there are the people who actually want to spread particular meme, and just pay the companies that do the previous stage for it. Those companies in turn analyze which involuntary members of their "network" would be best to spread a particular meme - and set their SAIs to work. This will allow the company ordering the campaign to maintain plausible deniability.This adds just another layer of paranoia to the setting. Do your online friends really value you for yourself - or just for your ability to spread memes?</blockquote>

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