Introduction to Growth Hacking and Campaigning for Truth in a Web of Lies
Growth Hacking and Campaigning for Truth in a Web of Lies
How did we get here? How did we get into this fragmented polarised and segmented reality we now live in?
Whilst propaganda has been around for a century or more and politicians are up there with lawyers, telemarketers, and estate agents when it comes to spinning a lie; we now live in a world where “alternative facts” are a thing. Where people are encouraged to believe their own truth. We can put some of the blame on Donald Trump and Boris Johnson when we look at western politics but there are multiple other factors that play into this other than the jarring disregard for the truth that comes out of the mouths of celebrity politicians come conmen.
Some have said that “we get the politicians we deserve” and there is a lot in those few words that beg further investigation but underlying it is the narrative that we get the politicians that society is asking for. But more and more it becomes apparent that there is a 50/50 split in society with equally impassioned supporters on both sides of the political line.
The issue of seeking and promoting truth in a web of lies is bigger than two right-wing politicians and their supporting and opposing parties. It is bigger than just the west, it is global. We saw this play out in the 2020 pandemic. Misinformation, disinformation, fake news, alternative facts, censorship, and thought leaders in sense-making all came to the fore.
If you believe the media, an “if” that was always a question of political leaning and business interests, the entire world from 2016 onwards and through the pandemic has been at each other’s throats. Fights over mass wearing on airplanes, in supermarkets, and on the streets became as prevalent as videos of police officers attacking and forcibly arresting African Americans during the Black Lives Matter uprising. If you believe the media, and in this, I include social media, then you could fear to walk into your local shop to pick up a bottle of milk encase you got attacked by an anti-lockdown, anti-vaccination, anti-masking wearing mob.
From 5g conspiracies to Bill Gates COVID, to some, became a smokescreen for the Illuminati to stick chips in our arms to track our every move and worse. Notwithstanding that most people posting, sharing, and promoting these narratives online were using smartphones that gave more data, more information, and more traceability on movements to whoever was there to take it, and there a lot queued up to do just that but more on that later, seemed to completely go over their heads. It would be easy to dismiss these conspiracy theorists as nutjobs, unintelligent or uneducated but when you look a little deeper, despite the media narrative a lot of these people are far from the ignorant low IQ’ed people chosen for soundbites outside a Trump rally.
Add into this censorship from social media platforms of anything that rallies against the governmental narratives whilst their billionaire owners take joyrides in outer space or delve deep into the metaverse and AI, and the behaviour of the 1% including their massing of extreme wealth during the pandemic whilst the gap between them and the rest of us widens only serves to play into the conspiracy narratives.
If all of this wasn’t enough then we have the interference of foreign state false actors, hackers, and political technologists from Russia and China. As well as hackers for profit, for protest or just for fun. Social media trolls, bots, and fake accounts disrupt and challenge conversations that could otherwise be worthwhile whilst marketing segmentation and the curation of information that appeal to our preferences extenuate confirmation biases on the opinions we all hold placing us into bubbles and echo chambers that suppress our worldview.
Whilst this book/newsletter is not looking to establish what “truth” is, as that is a subject for an entire book itself by someone more learned than me, it aims to equip you with the tools you need to get “your truth” out there. Whether an activist, campaigner, or just a small business owner looking to get your message across or just someone looking to filter out the noise to get a clear sense of what is going on, I hope this book will provide you with a set of tools to help you campaign for truth in a world-wide-web of lies.
This is a live book writing project. Copyright is protected. It is a first rough draft so I would love to hear any feedback from readers. When the book is launched all that are signed up for this substack project will be sent a free Kindle copy of the book as a thank you for subscribing.
This project is part of the SleeplessDystopian.com writing projects.
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this book/newsletter will be written live and published first here on my substack
Written by Sam from SleeplessDystopian.com where we aim to do exactly that - Campaign for truth and sensemaking in a web of lies.