Anyway, I've been thinking for a spell now about swarming. There's some crazy sh*t along those lines going on out there (in here). The first time I was ever exposed to the concept of swarming was when I was spending too much time on 9/11 "conspiracy" sites, wondering with them how three towers could come down in near free-fall time on the same day, including WTC-7, which hadn't been hit by a plane. I'm over it now, pretty much, and the only thing I can really remember now about WTC-7 was its smoking gun status for an 'inside job,' and Rudy Giuliani yelling, "Pull it," which is roughly what he was about to say to Tatar in the bedroom of that new Borat movie. But Rudy's former tower was permanently freefallen without his little blue pills. So, he spent a while looking for his keys -- down there, where most people never lose them.
I dunno. But, I came across a site, at that time, called The Hidden Evil. It scared the bejeezus out of me -- a kind of reverse exorcism, where the Priest pukes at you. (I miss Jesus. And the Golden Rule.) I scrolled down the table of contents, merrily taking note of some entries, like Smear Campaign, Framings, Surveillance, etc., but my eyes stopped almost against my will, like a Ouija board pointer, at the entry Blocking, Swarming & Space Invasion. The Blocking begins, "In parking lots, on foot, on the road, in stores & restaurants." Didn't get past that. Haven't gone out much since. TMI, you know? The Space Invasion had to do with aliens and the space between your ears -- the final frontier, n'est-ce pas?
But the swarming held resonance. I'd seen it before -- ants, and in the schoolyard, bullies and their act-a-likes and wannabee hangerson chasing down a terrified well-fed kid for his Twinkies. And I had a flashback of that time I was in for observation and got swarmed, which provided me with a unique interpretation of the Dylan lyric "the time the doorknob broke" and made me angry at his attitude. Ouch.
Time wounds all heels, as they say, and eventually I got over the trauma of The Hidden Evil. But, then back in March 2012 I was terrified again by swarming. Swarming like nothing I'd ever heard of before. US filmmaker Jason Russell released a Kony 2012, a pseudo-documentary, on YouTube (you know, Google) that almost at the speed of light supposedly went viral to the tune of 83 million viewers, most of them outraged children from America. Some irony here: Kony, head of the Army of God that had terrorized Uganda for years, had as his biggest single sin his recruitment of an army of child soldiers. Most of the 83 million YouTube (Google) virus followers were children themselves -- and they were being recruited to "go after" Kony, online, like a little force of cyber soldiers, by a Baptist organization. Two Armies of God, facing off.
So they went after Kony in Uganda, eventually shaking Congress down to its chilblains until they finally passed legislation that allowed American boots to drop on Ugandan soil. Problem is, Kony hadn't been seen in Uganda for two years at the time of the campaign. Oh well, not long after those boots hit ground, the Kony hunt was off. Nobody cared again. And no American children can be found who recall chasing their Uganda Piggy down. Millions of dollars were collected by the Invisible Children campaign, and, amazingly, their campaign continues, and they continue to collect donations online, with the help of USAID (CIA soft), despite his total disappearance and the recent "reports" that he has died of Covid-19.
More recently, and growing in potential terror, we've learned from Cambridge Analytica, a political data-mining company that illegally "scraped" the profiles of millions of Facebook users to game their data to manipulate changes in voting in the 2016 presidential election. In "The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine," a Medium article about the social implications of technology, by Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath, they describe how that data was used:
By leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots, Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks, a company called Cambridge Analytica has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion.
Swarms. There's that word again. Are you thinking locusts, too? This "automated emotional manipulation" was further terrifyingly detailed in the recent Netflix film, The Social Dilemma. Who needs swarms of Russians?
Then more recently still. As Jeremy Corbyn was getting his hat handed to him in the 2019 election that may have ruined the Labor party in Britain, swarming came to the fore. Jeremy and his Corbynistas (similarly to the Sandernistas) were nailed, time and time again swarms of media who despise his "antiquated" Socialist policies; and though Cambridge Analytica (CA) has admitted to being deeply involved in the Brexit vote, it's unclear to what degree they tried to manipulate people about Corbyn. In any case, the Press swarmed Corbyn and accompanying one piece included a frightening graphic of dots representing Corbyn's social connections. Check it out below:
In the above graphic, all of Corbyn's "connections" are purportedly shown. Zoom in to see how comprehensive it is, remembering that behind the dots you see are other connections. You can get this kind of data image from many database graphic-analyzing tools. But most likely you'd hire a company like CA or, in America, like Recorded Future. What's accidently scary about such graphs is that they show YOU in a potential swarm against another, attack streams, and the target a 3D theatre -- but also, gulp, what you'd be up against if you were the target of a swarm. One panics: I remember a childhood stupidity where I meanly put my shoe over a yellow jacket hole in the ground, when it suddenly occurred to me I'd have to get off the hole -- and when I did: ZOWIE. Ouch!
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