How Do You Control Reality?

Dan: How do you do it? How do you manage to control our reality? How do you discredit all those people who keep posting that our world is more or less the way you've been telling me just now? Polls show that less than 1% of the NATO population believe any of the conspiracy theories and this is just one of many?

MQ: Since the early thirties, our internet security is tight, there are no more terrible computer viruses, cyber attacks, infrastructure take-downs; just a few harmless pranks to keep people believing in the need for centralized security. So we control what gets posted on our internet, and, more important, we control who gets views. You can post whatever you want, actually, you just can't see why you're getting no traffic.

Dan: So there is no difference between us and the Sinafs after all.

MQ: Oh no! There's a world of difference. Of course, we don't know much about..

Dan: That's what you say. I don't really believe anything any more.

MQ: The Sino-African Alliance is totally centrally controlled. There are no separate corporations in the sense we have. We don't even see much evidence of ultra-rich people there. The people there have no idea what is going in the world at all. We have a free capitalist system with all the cut-throat competition you see every day. It's just that the security services take full charge of our internet. There are many people who've been trusted with a lot of knowledge and defected, they just don't get much hearing. Companies are free, but if they violate our security, nobody will do business with them. No company is an island, to succeed you have to be part of the ecosystem.

Dan: But people don't only talk to each other on our internet.

MQ: You'd be surprised. If someone really close to you were to tell you that they had a conversation like this one with one of the dumb androids that saturate our society, you might believe them. But only if they were really close. But the world has changed. Today, people are only that close to a very small number of other people. No serious leak can get critical mass. You, in particular, have been selected for many good reasons, but the fact that you are not part of a large non-virtual network is critical. There are very few people in positions of trust selected from traditional ethnicity with large family groupings. Anyway, our population control drives have made sure there are fewer and fewer of those.

Photo by Tobias Bjerknes on Unsplash