The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence that can flip elections and manipulate everything we say, think and doOver the past century, more than a few great writers have expressed concern about humanity's future. In
The Iron Heel(1908), the American writer Jack London pictured a world in which a handful of wealthy corporate titans - the 'oligarchs' - kept the masses at bay with a brutal combination of rewards and punishments. Much of humanity lived in virtual slavery, while the fortunate ones were bought off with decent wages that allowed them to live comfortably - but without any real control over their lives.
In
We (1924), the brilliant Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, anticipating the excesses of the emerging Soviet Union, envisioned a world in which people were kept in check through pervasive monitoring. The walls of their homes were made of clear glass, so everything they did could be observed. They were allowed to lower their shades an hour a day to have sex, but both the rendezvous time and the lover had to be registered first with the state.
In
Brave New World (1932), the British author Aldous Huxley pictured a near-perfect society in which unhappiness and aggression had been engineered out of humanity through a combination of genetic engineering and psychological conditioning. And in the much darker novel
1984 (1949), Huxley's compatriot George Orwell described a society in which thought itself was controlled; in Orwell's world, children were taught to use a simplified form of English called Newspeak in order to assure that they could never express ideas that were dangerous to society.
These are all fictional tales, to be sure, and in each the leaders who held the power used conspicuous forms of control that at least a few people actively resisted and occasionally overcame. But in the non-fiction bestseller
The Hidden Persuaders (1957) - recently released in a 50th-anniversary edition - the American journalist Vance Packard described a 'strange and rather exotic' type of influence that was rapidly emerging in the United States and that was, in a way, more threatening than the fictional types of control pictured in the novels. According to Packard, US corporate executives and politicians were beginning to use subtle and, in many cases,
completely undetectable methods to change people's thinking, emotions and behaviour based on insights from psychiatry and the social sciences.
Comment: We already know why Hillary Clinton will probably win the next election (a proven track record of doing the Empire's bidding), now we know how. But this is assuming, of course, that there will even be a another election considering where things are going.