Is It Me? Or Is It Memorex?
A wake-up call for senior volunteers … and everyone else
Op-Ed: Karen Lee
Remember that TV ad of yore? The one with Ella Fitzgerald hitting a high note that broke a glass? Except it wasn’t Ella live; it was Ella via Memorex recording tapes. Let me buy a pack of tapes while I still can! The supply is running out!
Well, we’ve been in an ‘Ella moment’ ever since the disinformation purveyors realized they could shape public opinion via posts on that new thingy: Social Media.
When innuendo and outright lies weren’t disseminating fast enough, they figured out they could boost the spread with bogus sites that reposted each other. Geometric progression at the speed of electron!
It took a while, and some painfully relinquished assumptions, but we end-users figured out that ‘Just because it’s on the Internet … or Fox Noise … doesn’t make it so.’
So, disinformation designers upped the ante, paraphrasing Goebbels’ on frequent lying.
- If people read the same thing often enough, they’ll begin to think it’s the ‘true truth.’
- If people google/snope and discover it’s crap, claim the factcheckers are liars.
- If you confuse people often enough, they’ll stop trusting everything.
- If a good leader’s human foibles are exposed, you can call BS on anything they say !
- If the daily news doesn’t give enough to work with, add in A.I. versions. But, avoid perfect sunsets in the background. It’s a dead giveaway!
- If all else fails, go ahead and hack into a few ‘secure’ chat sites, set the algorithms to drop in some gobbledygook letters, and help people question their tether to reality.
- If the goal is complete take-over, then throw so much garbage that people give up on truth, mutual aid, and responsible citizenship.
And here we are. Earlier this week, I spent half an hour sorting out whether that ‘Anne’ who posted something in a DA chat group was or was not my daughter Anne. My daughter is not abroad, is not in our database, would not be a member of the group. But I had been chatting with her just a few minutes before, via a different group in the same app, and here she was. Queries flew back and forth.
As it turned out, it was not ‘my’ Anne. Of course.
But the whole question came on the heels of two glitches in Meta apps: one in a Facebook post, the other in Messenger chat. In both cases, some odd, unintelligible text had inserted itself into my message. It was the kind of thing that would only be explained by my falling face down on my keyboard.
Where had the bizarre text come from? A ‘bot hack’ leapt to mind. My Messenger correspondent is a MAGA and gods know what sites he also surfs. Other friends confirm ‘problems with Facebook lately.’ And who am I to deny a good case for paranoia?
Googling further, we learn that there are techies out there who have the ability to hack, edit, and confuse to a degree we’ve never had to deal with before. Forewarned is barely forearmed.
A lot of us seniors volunteer, because we have experience, tech know-how, and time, now that we’re retired. But we all, also, begin to note changes in our physical stamina, attention span, and stiffening fingers.
And we can be nudged into self-doubt: Is it me? Memorex? Or senile dementia?
While writing this, it occurred to me that when we ask if it’s us or early-onset dementia, we’re still collected enough to know there’s a difference.
So, now, can we let that one go and get on the work of defeating creeping totalitarianism?
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