The Chameleon: Author’s Journey
Revised Preface: March 2023
Media manipulation is a topic that is tough to explore for many reasons. Free speech and responsibility are a couple. Scholars like Noam Chomsky have written extensively on the issue academically. Still, until recently, few authors undertook it as fiction. In the past, works like The Matrix, 1984, V for Vendetta, and Blade Runner touched on it, but only as part of broader social commentary.
Manipulation, through media or otherwise, means influencing the beliefs, emotions, or behavior of others for one’s benefit. The question is whether one’s actions can be linked to an external influence. Does manipulation work? Many of us believe so, but supporting data is difficult, if possible, to obtain. As the author of this book, I took a position on the notion, but I made some assumptions in doing so.
Does advertising lead to brand awareness, preferences, and purchase decisions? Does habitual video game play lead to anxiety or behavioral disorders? Does provocative political rhetoric polarize society? Does listening to hip-hop music lead to destructive behavior? Ultimately, there may be too many factors in one’s life to link their actions to specific influences. And, if we could, where would the responsibility lie: the content creator or the audience? These questions are related to free speech and don’t end there.
Media platforms are how we communicate and create culture; they’re so woven into our social fabric that many aren’t aware of how or when our views are influenced. To examine media manipulation thoroughly, we must cross disciplines like anthropology, psychology, sociology, and neuroscience. Implied in The Chameleon: Plot to Weaponize Bias is my belief that none of us are born with convictions. We learn them. And we do so through the media tech available at the time, embedded within our social structures. As we develop, so do our views. Until we determine that our truths are coded into our DNA, I will argue that they are communicated to us and are laden with assumptions.
Throughout history, access to a medium that could reach a broad audience was highly coveted and regulated by peers, owners, industries, or governments. This all changed with the Internet. Today, anyone with appeal and skill can influence millions and needn’t be educated or ethical. Regardless of their motivation, they only need to win their audience’s attention or trust.
From a social perspective, our shared beliefs empower our communities. They ground us with traditions and purpose, giving us a sense of identity and worth. Independently, we use media to celebrate the human experience, reflecting our culture and projecting our hopes. Unfortunately, our communities don’t agree on everything. Most of us can be proud of and herald our culture. But media manipulators have different agendas and often prey on unsophisticated audiences. Deliberately or unknowingly, they thrive by exploiting our cultural differences, like ethnicity, political views, customs, religion, or otherwise. They often leverage provocative rhetoric, misinformation, and disinformation to play on our insecurities, prejudices, and intolerance. In effect, they weaponize bias.
I was initially inspired to write The Chameleon around 2008 to document the profound change in the human experience due to new media platforms. By luck, I had grown up “before” digital media. As I witnessed the Internet mature, I saw that the pre-digital era would soon fade. My idea for The Chameleon was to personify the story of humanity crossing the digital divide, a before-and-after tale.
Years later, while outlining my book, I saw how some people used new media in ways that I felt were manipulative, with potentially dangerous social consequences. Having earned a degree from The University of Texas at Austin College of Communication, I recognized that what they were doing was nothing new. But the scale–the reach–at which they could do it was unprecedented. For better or worse, everyone had access to new platforms, regardless of education, ethics, or motives. And they were using it to publish or share “their truth,” irrespective of slant or validity. My questions about free speech grew louder. When do one’s beliefs about politics, religion, or otherwise become offensive or insulting? Does responsibility lie with the content creator or the audience?
Over time, I witnessed the opinionated voices on both sides grow more vitriolic, with both new media and established platforms. I assume the latter was a business decision to keep audiences from leaving for new options. What followed was an increasingly fractured society. If there was a kind of slow conditioning, a normalization of intolerance at play, I had no way to confirm it. Without the data to prove it, all I had was a correlation. For my book, I saw that adding the notion of prejudice would be challenging. Still, I felt it necessary to document our social transformation realistically. And I recognized that provocative media didn’t just create conflict for my story; it’s created conflict for humanity throughout time. Thus, the full title of my book became The Chameleon: Plot to Weaponize Bias. But adding this element made for a darker tone than I had intended.
My research of media manipulation included consuming countless content hours that I felt were extreme: highly opinionated, judgemental, and belittling. Divisive. Whether it was deliberately biased to boost audience engagement, I couldn’t tell. During this process, I realized that the opinions and cherry-picked details used to frame this content were what the audience wanted. It was supply and demand for partisan beliefs. The business model for user-generated content was born, and there was high demand for confirmation content. For my story, my first instinct was to chronicle the rise of a demagogue. But, after realizing Pink Floyd had done something similar already with The Wall, I decided to focus on the characters behind the scenes, out of the spotlight but benefitting from the process nonetheless. Every demagogue has enablers.
Since publishing my book in May 2020, the characters, though fictional, have been tough to leave behind. I tried to depict life before and after the Internet authentically. I used the settings Austin, Munich, and Quemado, because, being intimately familiar with them, I knew I could describe them well. By chance, they were perfect backdrops for a story about cultural differences. The industry details are from my professional background; I had used digital platforms for marketing for years, but I saw the potential for someone to use them for political propaganda or even espionage. While writing the story, seeing some of my speculations come true, I began to see that the challenges with our divide might be rooted more in ideology than technology. And I began to question the resilience of Democracy with unfettered speech.
The plot details I paint into our changing media landscape are fiction but sometimes feel plausible and, in retrospect, probable. Still, if you pull back from the story elements, you’ll see a broad-stroked commentary about our collective journey. Sometimes it’s light. Sometimes dark. Mostly, it’s in between. Creatively, I didn’t want to write another fictionalized dystopian tale where protagonists and their foes are clearly defined because, in reality, they aren’t; I tried to document the possible erosion to dystopia itself, which is laden with basic questions about freedom, responsibility, ethics, motivations, and biased perspectives.
Ultimately, The Chameleon: Plot to Weaponize Bias is about humanity attempting to cross the digital divide. It isn’t what I set out to write but became what I needed to write. With increasing frequency over the years, I’ve watched modern demagogues wield new media to rise to the top of the influencer ranks. Willfully or not, they share a lack of humility, empathy, and tolerance for people they find inferior. Armed with free speech, they undermine our national unity, threatening the very Democracy that empowers them. As a veteran, I fear I’m watching the multicultural society I served to preserve slowly decay into something more partisan and forced–more dystopian–where assumptions, disinformation, misinformation, blame, and shame are preferred over sincere dialogue.
With twenty-twenty hindsight, I rewrote this forward three years after publishing my book because, frankly, I couldn’t articulate it as well at the time. Such is the case when I’m so immersed in the details of the trees I can’t see the forest. Since publishing it, so many events have normalized our fractured society that it now seems obvious the media we create and consume plays a role. Yet, we still can’t prove it. With no answers and artificial intelligence platforms threatening to transform our media landscape again, true Democracy may indeed be in jeopardy. If there is an implied duty in our culture of free speech, it is that we have a social responsibility to develop our tolerance, empathy, and media literacy. Using censorship to “validate” our personal convictions only serves to undermine Democracy from within, cancel our culture of freedom, and leave us sliding into the dystopia we fear. In this regard, The Chameleon: Plot to Weaponize Bias is a timeless cautionary tale about where we’ve been and might be heading.
“To survive, we must cross the divide.”
Gilbert Ramirez
Originally published at https://vagaryenterprises.com.
I’m Gilbert Ramirez, author of The Chameleon: Plot to Weaponize Bias, and an alumnus of The University of Texas at Austin College of Communication. I’m a philosophical technogeek, a Media Literacy freak, and a proud Veteran. I’m out to unite diverse cultures through technology.
I go by The Chameleon on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to evangelize Media Literacy topics: rhetoric, sociology, neurobiology, philosophy, psychology, and of course, media.