I believe this is an extremely timely and well laid out example of conditions, drama, amygdala and cerebral rooted emotions and psychological states which created a culture that was vulnerable to what I believe was rudimentary “bio-hacking”. That is not to discount the fascination I have with Jung and the unconscious mind and the concept of subliminal or common unconscious influence. Quite the opposite. The influence of Hitler to coalesce a message that in turn was amplified, spread, adopted, promoted and passionately followed I think akin to what sometimes gets called the natural tendency of humans to do an “echo chamber”. If something happens quickly and at large scale our current term is “going viral”. Joseph Goebbels would have loved Twitter.

We live in an age of “Big Data” and associated analytics. A lot of money and our best minds have gone into constantly curating information based on each individual’s interest and bias. The algorithms are built to auto-target an individual to gain the most attention and prompt the highest reaction to buy something whether it be a product, service, ideology, subscription, belief or political candidate. It is a technological additive that adds gasoline to the fire of natural tendencies to “echo-chamber” and form groups with escalating spiral of self-reinforcement.

The time has run out for us to put off the need to admit the dangers of “bio-hacking” and bring to daylight this shadow self. Whether it is grandma on Facebook or a teenager walking with all attention on the smartphone that has their rapt attention (the list could go on endlessly) we have reached a new age of technological propaganda. If we don’t muster a “time-out” and prioritize our higher individual higher rational morals we will be the unwitting casualty of whatever the outcome of massed subliminal responses.