Here’s another technology-trickster story; the first one is here.
Trickster was very good at entertaining people. It was a great gig: he arranged for people to entertain each other, and they gave him credit for it.
People loved to tell their friends what they were up to; Trickster arranged it. They wanted to hear what their friends were doing; Trickster passed it along. They wanted to tell their friends about fun, important, or terrible things they had discovered; Trickster made it happen.
It all worked so well because Trickster had a host of invisible entertainment elves that watched what people did, what they liked, and who their friends were. The invisible elves not only did this in Trickster’s place; they also followed people around the rest of the time, taking notes. Thanks to the invisible everywhere elves, Trickster knew so much that people were sure to be entertained when they came to his place, and they loved him for it. The more people visited Trickster, the more he knew, and the more their friends wanted to join in, which made Trickster even smarter.
Trickster did this, he said, because he wanted to help people share. Truth be told, he also wanted to help other folk find people to buy their products, and those folk made him rich. To help those folk even more, he let them to talk to the elves directly; that way, they got personalized tips about how to be especially persuasive.
It so happened that one of these folk was his nephew, Trickster Two. This clever nephew devised a game that hundreds of thousands of people played - and when they played, they invoked the elves. This army of elves told him about all the players’ friends, and he sent more elves to learn all about the friends – tens of millions of people, in all. This was all fine; Trickster allowed it.
What Trickster hadn’t allowed, but Trickster Two did anyway, was to share all this information with yet another nephew; let’s call him Trickster Too. When Trickster heard about this, he pondered. He thought long and hard, for months and months, and eventually told T-Too to forget the information. He didn’t bother to check that T-Too had done so, though; a trickster’s life is such a busy one.
This Trickster Too was an ornament to his family. His specialty was influence: doing whatever it took to make leaders look good (or look bad, if their opponents paid better). Like any good trickster, he was persuasive. He convinced an important man’s helpers that he could sway opinions in their favor by deploying swarms of influencing elves that used all the information obtained from Trickster Two’s entertainment elves. The elves would know exactly what to say to each person to persuade them to behave the right way.
When people eventually heard about this, they were outraged (particularly the ones who hated the important man he’d helped). Not surprisingly – we’re talking about tricksters, after all – the subsequent outrage was probably as overblown as the initial enthusiasm: many said that Trickster Too’s claims were hokum to begin with.
Trickster himself was suitably apologetic. (He was very good at this; he got a lot of practice.) It had been yeeears, he said, since anybody except him had been allowed to collect that kind of information; and in any case, T-Two shouldn’t have shared that information with T-Too. To show how serious he was, he banned T-Two from talking to his elves. The elders also got in on the act, belatedly. To show that they were serious (sort-of), the sheriffs forced Trickster to pay a fine, and promise to do better next time.
However, because it’s such a Good Thing, Trickster still allows some money-folk to talk to his elves. And most of us still happily allow his elves to follow us around, because they’re SOOO entertaining.
Touchpoints
Cambridge Analytica. (2020). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cambridge_Analytica&oldid=958220790
The Facebook scandal could change politics as well as the internet. (2018, March 22). The Economist. https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/03/22/the-facebook-scandal-could-change-politics-as-well-as-the-internet
Seetharaman, D., & Bindley, K. (2018, March 23). Facebook Controversy: What to know about Cambridge Analytica and your data. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-scandal-what-to-know-about-cambridge-analytica-and-your-data-1521806400
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