Tag: Computer Facilitated Telepathy

Tik-Tok Is A National Security Threat


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It happened again. Today I was looking at Tik-Tok and was pushed an extremely and I mean EXTREMELY specific video on my For You Page. Here’s what happened: I went to the doctor yesterday and he asked me around my alcohol consumption.

After some joking around, I admitted I drink a lot.

Ok, flash forward 24 hours and what am video am I pushed on my For You Page? A video a man having that specific conversation with his doctor. Like the literal same conversation.

Let’s go through how this is possible.

There’s the case that somehow, in aggregate, that Tik-Tok knows via my likes and time watched that people like me drink a lot and have that type of conversation with our doctors…so I got the video. That’s a fair enough explanation other than it happened 24 hours after I had that specific conversation with my own doctor.

The Future is Now.

Another argument could be made that through a combination of knowing about people like me aggregate and my phone’s location that they knew to push me that video because they knew that not only do I drink a lot, but within the last 24 hours I had been to a doctor. (This one actually seems to make sense.)

Then, there’s the more kooky explanations — at a minimum Tik-Tok is listening to me via my phone. I’m beginning to think a lot Big Tech companies do this already and Tik-Tok is just the most conspicuous.

Of course, I continue to have a lingering suspicion that Tik-Tok is much more direct than any of the above — it is somehow reading my mind.

But, lulz, that couldn’t possibly be happening, right? Right?

Tik-Tok & The Tale Of The Female Phenotypes


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I really don’t want to believe the technology exists to read our minds via our cellphones. That’s just a bridge too far for me at this point. I will admit that I vacillate conspicuously and wildly on this blog between suggesting that is possible and dismissing it.

But here’s the latest eerie example of SOMETHING going on.

I can think of two examples off the top of my head where Tik-Tok pushed me a video of a woman with a certain phenotype that is identical to the late Annie Shapiro. The women look so much like they could be her sisters.

This does not, in itself, prove anything. It could just be that relative to their “algorithms” people like me who watch the videos I watch like women who look exactly like a dead woman who changed my life while I was in Seoul. I mean, it’s not like they would have the means or interest to do that, right? That’s just crazy talk.

A Scifi Explanation For ‘Havana Syndrome’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Here’s a free scifi concept for you, Hollywood. The reason why diplomats around the world are having their minds fried by some unknown device is there’s some industrial strength “digital telepathy” going on.

The point of being targeted is a digital mindreading device is draining their minds so intensively that they suffer intense side-effects.

Money please!

The Curious Case Of Tik-Tok Pinning Down My ‘Type’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Oh, Jesus, this shit with Tik-Tok gets weirder and weirder. Now, Tik-Tok knows me so well to the point that it’s not only pushing me content from a woman who looks identical to a dead woman I think about a lot, it now is pushing me videos of women I definitely would date.

Now, I’m totally willing to accept that they have me figured out because of their mysterious, all powerful “algorithms.”

And, yet, they know my exact type of woman so well, to a subtle granular level, that it’s very, very spooky.

It definitely would innovative if Tik-Tok branched out into being a dating service since it was, like, fucking reading our fucking minds.

Wink.

Tik-Tok, The Stripper, The Soft Singularity & Me


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I only keep harping on this because of how often it happens and how it jiggles my sense of reality. I don’t like the idea that I’m seeing something surreal that is real and yet everyone else is too busy watching Tik-Tok videos to give my fears much bother.

But Tik-Tok AGAIN pushed me something pretty eerie.

This time, it was a video of a woman who looked identical to a stripper I talked to recently. We had a lovely talk for about an hour and two things are true: I thought about her really intensely and we both use Tik-Tok and had our phones on us.

So, if you absolutely don’t believe there is any chance Tik-Tok can read our minds, then, yes, you could say that Tik-Tok used the location information from both our phones to figure out what to push me. But the implications of even that are pretty staggering — that definitely sounds pretty soft Singularity to me. That a company like Tik-Tok has it within its means to take location data to push me a video of a woman who looks just like the woman I was sitting for a while recently is pretty mind boggling.

What’s more, just within the last 48 hours, I’ve been pushed ANOTHER video of a woman who looks identical to my romanticized memory of the late Annie Shapiro. That’s pretty deep. I don’t have any pictures of her anywhere for even me to access — I just have the imagine of her stored in my mind.

So, we could go through a rather elaborate — but no less rattling — sequence of events where by Tik-Tok isn’t reading my mind, or we cut the shit and say: Tik-Tok is reading our minds.

But I still don’t have any proof. Claiming that Big Tech has the ability to read our minds sounds like something a crank would believe. So, for the time being, I just have to assume all these “spooky” things I’m being pushed by Tik-Tok have some other explanation than the one I think is the answer.

A Former Blab User’s Observations For Tik-Tok


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The video conferencing service Blab may one day be looked back upon as the Amiga of such things. It was way ahead of its time and it definitely gave a sense of the community building potential of video conferencing when combined with discovery.

On paper, at least, Blab was a multi-functional platform that could have been used for everything from a “video Reddit” to online dating to a robust podcasting platform, to you name it.

But the very thing that made it so great — it’s very cool discovery feature — was ultimately its downfall (in a sense.) Once hateful trolls got a hang of the service — and were willing to be on camera — that was the end of Blab at least from the community standpoint.

I use Tik-Tok a lot these days and occasionally — when I’m not worried the service is, like, fucking reading my mind — I wonder if they could somehow crib the best bits of Blab and give Facebook a run for its money.

The answer is I don’t know.

The reason is, Tik-Tok is a handful as it is. Throwing in four way video conferencing with discovery would face the exact same problems that Blab had. So, on paper, yes, adding Blab features to Tik-Tok would probably take it to the next level and make it potentially a Facebook killer.

But, in reality, you would have to be a lot and I mean A LOT smarter than me to figure out how to cherry pick Blab’s best bits without it slamming into the bonkers troll problem that Blab experienced. So, in the abstract, yes, it would be great for Tik-Tok to bring the Blab experience to the masses but it would be seriously playing with fire on a practical level.

So, I don’t know. I do think there is a way that Tik-Tok could grow as huge as Facebook under the right conditions — Facebook is a utility that is hated by a huge swath of if its user based. Whenever we move from Web 3.0 to Web 4.0 everything will be “disrupted” again and new titans will arise. It may be that we skip the video and VR phases altogether and go directly to MindCaps.

Or something.

Anyway, I miss old Blab. We hardly knew yuh.

Is Tik-Tok Reading Our Minds?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m going to keep writing these posts until someone, somewhere takes notice and decides to look into it for me — I’m so frustrated at this point I’ll even take a malignant ding-dong like Tucker Carlson doing it for me.

So, there I was just a moment ago, using Tik-Tok when I was pushed a video about a woman who asked a Tinder match what time he was born. This stopped me cold — I’ve been thinking about that specific thing for some time now because of the novel I’m working on.

I’ve been thinking about that literal thing — the idea that if you were into astrology you would ask someone what time of day they were born.

Now, before you think that Tik-Tok is monitoring my novel writing some way and that’s how it knew that I was interested in such things — I haven’t gotten to that part of the novel yet. I’ve just been thinking about it. I’ve not written anything anywhere — or even spoken about it to anyone. The only person who knows that I’m interested in that particular part of astrology is ME.

I have no proof — none — that Tik-Tok can read our minds. But I do know the technology to do so was patented by Facebook some time ago and, apparently, Facebook is on something of a quest to figure out how to do just that.

The point is — I really need someone at Vox, or Wired or, hell, even New York Magazine to explain to me what I’m seeing on such a personal, specific basis. What other option is there? Sure, you could say Tik-Tok’s algorithms are now so advanced, so powerful, that they have me specifically figured out. But how would such an algorithm be able to seemingly root around in my mind and push me a video about a specific concept that I’ve been thinking about a lot — but haven’t done anything at all outwardly to indicate this is happening?

How? How? How?

Another Spooky Tik-Tok Experience


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Yesterday, I was listening to “Born in The USA” by Bruce Springsteen on Spotify and for a moment, I weighed the significance of the song in American politics over the years.

Well, guess what — just now I was using Tik-Tok and, lo and behold I was pushed a video that posed that very same question: “Is Born In The USA a patriotic song?”

Spooky.

Now, the case can be made that this one is pretty easy — Tik-Tok simply monitored my listening to Springsteen in general and pushed that particular video for that reason. What makes this spooky is that the video itself was about the specific thing I thought about, literally.

But, as always, I’m reluctant to believe that Tik-Tok can literally read my mind. In this specific instance there is a non-kooky explanation — Tik-Tok knew in general that I was listening to Bruce on Spotify and it just so happened that the video about him was about the very subject I listened to. The nature of Born In The USA is pretty mainsteam.

It’s still pretty spooky and intrusive, no matter how Tik-Tok figured it out.

If Tucker Carlson Is So Worried About People Reading His Personal Shit — Wait Until He Hears About Tik-Tok


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

In a surreal turn of events, Tucker Carlson is now ranting about how the Biden Administration through the NSA is reading his “private emails.” Add this to how Fox News has turned on the U.S. Military in a rather abrupt fashion and it’s all very bonkers.

I think Carlson is spooked by something. A reporter somewhere is asking questions about something that makes him look bad and he’s freaking out, looking for some explanation for how they know what they know. So he’s blaming the NSA out of desperation, if nothing else. Or, the whole thing is just bad faith bullshit and he’s trying to recon something that is about to pop out in the near term.

Anyway, if Carlson is going to be all paranoid, he should at least be interesting about the idea that Tik-Tok, and Big Tech in general, may have the technology to read our fucking minds. While I don’t seriously think Big Tech can read our minds, they definitely have a spooky ability to figure me out in a very specific manner. Specific enough that I’d like bonkers Tucker Carlson to at least look into it and see what HE finds.

But, in the end, meh.

Tik-Tok’s ‘Algorithms’ Continue To Be Spooky


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Not a day goes by now that Tik-Tok doesn’t serve me content that is so narrow, so specific to me personally that it makes me sit up and take notice. Of course, I guess that’s the point. One of the most recent instances of this involved me looking at a model’s video on Instagram where she told people to follow her on Tik-Tok. I thought hard about this for a moment, then was ultimately not interested enough to write her Tik-Tok username down. I did not think anything more about it until that very model popped up in my Tik-Tok feed right on cue. I continue to have a lingering suspicions that it’s at least possible that one of three things is happening.

  1. Tik-Tok is far more intrusive than we imagine.
    If this explains how I saw that Instagram model’s Tik-Tok account after thinking really hard about her, then that’s something that, while aggravating, at least fits within the established computing paradigm. That’s something I can accept. Somehow, Tik-Tok is so intrusive that it was able to monitor my Instagram usage and noticed me pause on the Instagram model’s video telling me to follow her on Tik-Tok. All that’s probably a national security threat, but it’s still not that weird.
  2. Tik-Tok is using hard AI to figure me out.
    All this does is take the first option and supercharge it. This takes Tik-Tok’s words about the power of its “algorithms” at face value. All I’m noticing is Tik-Tok’s “algorithms” are so advanced that somehow they are able to infer from my online activity that I would like to follow that Instagram model on Tik-Tok. Again, this is severely troubling from a national security point of view, but it at least doesn’t sound nuts when you tell people about it at a bar.
  3. Tik-Tok is reading my mind in some way
    This, of course, is the most bonkers of all the options. But hear me out. What if the reason I go that model’s Tik-Tok account pushed to me so soon after seeing her Instagram post is I thought really hard about it. As such, when I thought hard for a moment about finding a pen to write down her account name, Tik-Tok’s Singularity technology, it’s “digital telepathy” picked up the concept and waited for me to use the service again so it could push me her account. This is, by far, the most dangerous of the three because that would mean the government of China, through Tik-Tok is able to monitor the minds of millions of Americans — many of them children. This also at least, in an abstract way, raises the prospect of an “inception” scenario where the Chinese government could not just monitor our minds, but implant information into them.

    Ok, that last bit was pretty insane, even for me. But it felt good to write it. Anyway, which one to I think is the right answer? It’s probably some sort of fuzzy area between 1 and 2. There’s no “soft Singularity” involved, it’s just that existing technology has reach the point where it’s really good at figuring out what’s going on in our minds via available information that we provide without thinking about it. At least, that’s what I hope is going on. If Big Tech really can read our minds, then, well, we’re kind of fucked.