Stockholm Syndrome (n.) – Feelings of trust or affection felt in many cases of kidnapping or hostage-taking by a victim toward a captor.
Perhaps you’ve heard about “Social Intelligence.” Perhaps not. Perhaps it sounds like a harmless geek concept like “The Singularity.” Or some scam sold by a marketer with a Twitter profile that reads “Web 2.0 Enthusiast! Online Marketing Consultant Specializing in ‘Social Intelligence.’”
What does it do? It keeps records of everyone’s social media postings for seven years. Seven years after they’ve been deleted. Why? To sell to corporations doing background checks on prospective employees.
Orwellian? Far beyond that. Diabolical fits better. Who but a coven of mutants – of subhuman, bottom-feeding parasites – would create a product that ruins the careers of college kids before they start?
Sorry, Percival, you’re qualified, and it appears quite talented. But our gumshoes at Social Intelligence have found this Facebook shot of you standing next to a man smoking a joint at a Furthur show during your sophomore year at Colgate. This disqualifies you. Zero tolerance. I’m sure you understand.
If this product catches on, and it all but assuredly will, one of two things are going to happen. In the first instance, nobody’s ever going to be hirable again. As in our political systems, corporations using social media background checks will be all but entirely staffed with milquetoast, vanilla robots. Armies of Mitt Romneys, corporate suites of congenital ciphers and bobble-headed Yes Men. All remnant fumes of creativity and innovation left in the stagnant McIndustries of this country will be snuffed out. Asia, probably a BRIC nation, or perhaps even Old Europe – any place adult enough to realize most of us (and usually the most talented of us) are closet libertines – will soak up all the talent. We’ll be left with corporate hierarchies entirely composed of Men in Grey Flannel Suits. And untold numbers of closeted freaks who were smart enough to stay off Facebook.
In the second instance, so much dirty laundry is going to be on display that screeners are going to have to set standards so low the only evidence disqualifying a prospective hire will be a Facebook post proclaiming his lifelong allegiance to NAMBLA or the American Nazi Party (“Interests: Crystal Meth (I don’t fuck around, yo),” “Favorite Book: The Satanic Bible“). It’s entirely possible, if not likely, that when we merge the admissions of our real lives, where we’re honest in a fashion we’d never be at the office, with our career personas, we’ll be faced with having to admit aloud that Every Man is Two People.
Of course, everyone knows life is 50% acting – that we spend untold hours of every week behaving in an artificial way around people we’d never otherwise associate with, to accrue money. But as much as we admit that to ourselves, as much as we all know it’s a baseline reality, we rarely talk about it. And we never discuss it at work, for this obvious reason: To so breach that “fourth wall” admits a duplicity at the center of society’s operational mechanisms.*
And allowing the admission one acts through half of his waking hours raises the question, “Why do I put on the facade?” The response necessarily following that is, “I don’t know,” which then leads to this:
“I’m dropping the false front. I’m going to speak my mind. I’m going to question the next directive that doesn’t make sense. I’m going to admit my politics. I’m going to express myself, even if it’s at odds with my community, or my employer’s ‘brand.’”
Obviously, that result – having that discussion openly – is not the one the corporations swallowing our society want. And that’s where the evil brilliance of something like Social Intelligence emerges. That type of monitoring service allows corporations, and the governmental authorities who feed them our money, to control not only who gets hired, but through fear cause the population at large to eschew criticisms of all economically and politically powerful structures. The mere knowledge something like Social Intelligence exists will both cause people to think twice before writing something that doesn’t fit the Accepted Narratives, and keep people who’d question the Accepted Narratives away from the levers of power. And away from audiences who’d hear them.
What are the Accepted Narratives? We all know those very well. That you should spend. That you should extend yourself… That you should buy all the stuff the corporations sell. Get yourself in debt to the banks. Buy the American Dream… the expensive car, the expensive house, the granite kitchen you see on HGTV. Get addicted to stuff, get larded up with debt you’ll pay the banks from cradle to grave. Never sit back and think, even for a moment, “Isn’t life’s only real currency freedom? Time? Wouldn’t I be happier owing less? Wouldn’t I be better off aiming to be free, rather than leveraged into a gilded prison?”
Author’s Note: And when you’re done reading that, read a rebuttal to it, “Orwell via Huxley (Counterpoint),” by ConstitutionalDaily’s Editor, BL1Y:
The good thing about liquor is it doesn’t give you the paranoid fantasies that come with smoking pot.*
…Not that it’s at all relevant to Phila Lawyer’s piece on Social Intelligence. Let me start by saying that I do agree social media is going to change both the way we behave and the way we view other people. I just don’t think those changes are going to be particularly dramatic or have any society-restructuring effects. Here’s a few things that will impede the Huxwellian Information Nightmare:
2. People Will Remain Lazy
Just as many of us are too lazy to adequately hide our dirty laundry from potential employers who go snooping on the internet, employers are also people, and will likewise be too lazy to make full use of all
the information out there.
Consider how few law firms bother to ask for an official transcript either when making summer hiring decisions, or when taking on new employees full time. What are the odds that if you made up a fake reference on a job application that anyone would ever notice? Would they even notice if you and your reference have the same phone number?
Some employers will be very thorough, but probably only in the same proportion as the employees who are thorough about keeping their Google footprint squeaky clean, which is to say not that many. As the amount of information grows, the signal to noise ratio gets worse. Data mining becomes more time consuming and less productive.