What is Openbook?
Openbook is Anonymous' answer to Facebook.
On Facebook, all our actions are tied to our face and name.
This makes us think twice before we post something, essentially censoring ourselves.
Since we know that everything is documented and tied to
our identity, we tailor our actions to be socially acceptable to
everyone who is watching. Everyone on our "friends" list.
As time drags on, you realize you're forever tethered to everyone
from your past. The same argument with the guy from high school will play out every time you
try to discuss religion, so you eventually tire of the conversation and stop mentioning it.
Your uncle always steers the comments under your political posts toward a liberals versus conservatives
rhetoric so you can never seem to get across your point about global unity.
You become caught in a feedback loop of conversation that goes nowhere.
Social media seems to hold the promise of waking up the masses, but because everything is attached
to our old world identities, and our perception of each other, the assumptions and illusions
we have defined our relationships on are held in place by our constant presence in each other's lives.
This is how groupthink works. It's how TV has been used to keep us stuck in a collective illusion, and
it's how our own relationships to each other are being used against us through Facebook to hold that
TV reality in place.
And now that anyone can take pictures with their camera phones, and anyone can tag anyone else in any Facebook picture, the
1984 Big Brother surveillance era is finally upon us. Anyone with a Facebook account is catalogued. Their actions documented. Their interests noted.
Networks of their relationships mapped out.
Their consumer profile bought and sold on the global market to allow personally tailored
advertising campaigns to target each and every one of us.
It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt.
Your likeness might get turned into an embarassing meme.
Or you say something stupid online one drunken night,
and get dogpiled for it by all of your "friends".
One day someone posts a photo of you doing something embarassing or illegal,
and carelessly tags you in it anyways, and you begin to see
the mess we're letting ourselves get dragged into.
If you get mad at them, they get mad at you.
You can remove the tag but you know it's already documented somewhere.
And now it might be automatically tagged using facial recognition, anyways,
so it feels like privacy is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
It would seem the only escape is to get away from everyone with cameraphones,
and stop using Facebook altogether.
But you just can't seem to unplug.
You can sort of fake "delete" your account,
but you know it isn't really deleted because Facebook invites you to reactivate your account at any time.
And some people have become so used to Facebook that they'll
use it as the only form of communication, so you'll completely
lose touch with people when you leave Facebook.
And if you just start to use Facebook less and less, but don't completely delete it,
your "friends" might continue to message you,
and forget that you aren't using Facebook, and
then they'll wonder why you're ignoring them.
Pretty soon they'll decide you've snubbed them,
and your irl friendship will suffer for it.
Sometimes even people you've only just met will try to connect with you on Facebook
as if it's the new phone number, perhaps even being offended if you
refuse the information.
One way or another, you eventually find yourself feeling pressured into logging back in.
As time goes on, and the migration off of Facebook never seems to reach critical mass, people start
to psychologically adjust to the prison we're being funneled into. They'll say you're being "negative" when
you point out the problems with Facebook, and they in turn point out what they like about Facebook.
This is because, in a state of cognitive dissonance, when our actions are out of line with our thoughts and beliefs,
we seek to change either one or the other to bring our thoughts and actions into harmony once again.
So, since we have so much trouble taking action and getting off Facebook,
we eventually fool ourselves into thinking
Facebook isn't that bad. It's easier than finding or creating a decent alternative, after all.
Meanwhile, Facebook has openly admitted to running psychological experiments on unknowing users. Who knows which of us were chosen.
They randomly selected a few thousand people, and filtered their newsfeeds to filter out
either positive or negative emotional words like "happy" or "depressed".
They then observed their predicted result: that the unwitting participants would themselves post fewer positive or negative emotional words in their own status updates, depending on which category was filtered out of their own newsfeed.
The test was to see if emotional contagion could be manipulated through Facebook,
and the results were that, yes, they could.
And because we are so sensitive, and our emotions are so contagious, it could be argued that such an experiment
affected not only the participants, but everyone on Facebook, and in turn everyone in the whole world.
One of the most bizarre things about this type of manipulation is that there are
no artifacts that it is happening. There was no false information present.
They only filtered the massive stream of information you're already subscribing to.
Which makes this a great example of how our own communications are being
manipulated by middlemen for profit, while our minds and relationships suffer.
(We can assume this information was promptly turned over to their artificial intelligence
in an effort to increase their profits, no matter the cost to
our emotional well-being.)
We cannot stand idly by as our minds are experimented on by those in power.
We cannot continue to voluntarily feed all of our information to those that would seek to use it against us.
Solidarity through anonymity.
Death of the ego through loss of identity.
United as One.
Divided by Zero.
We are Anonymous.
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