How digital panhandlers fashion reality, fabricate truth, and monetize manufactured authenticity.
I’m one of the earliest enjoyers of the internet and its corresponding tools and technologies—in the late 90s. My proto email account was Hotmail. When today’s millennials were roaming in diapers, I was composing my emails on slow bandwidth: you could finish a cup of coffee between clicking on send button and getting email delivery confirmation.
Despite being a veteran of the chaotic world, the latest trend of shamelessness on the web is something I was not mentally prepared for. It came as a cultural shock to me in the early 2020s, and I am still processing how people could be so scheming and unabashed.
Wherever you go, no matter which digital platform you frequent, e-beggars with fresh creativity(dubious in nature) are flashing banners with emotive performances to distract your attention from the core work for which you are visiting the digital site. This is Algorithmic Manipulation which is unacceptable if you value time and the cost of your attention.
Crying mothers, babies with broken limbs, old aged senior citizens with deadly disease and young girls with terminal illness are flashing their performance to snatch money from your digital currency wallet. I’m not saying all of them are fake but majority of them are. This is to generate Viral Sympathy to hoard wealth from global sources.
I vividly remember an incident of 2005 when I was working in an MNC. One normal day, my floor manager invited me to conference room as if my client was waiting for me. When I reached there, I found my other colleagues were sitting in solemn body posture and two well-dressed corporate executives were delivering sermons on helping poor and needy(Empathy Economy). It took me a few minutes to realize that the executives were best friends of the greedy manager(who must have asked for a certain percentage of commission out of the donated money, thanks to his track record in the office) and he had invited them to our office to beg on behalf of needy and poor who were in dire conditions. I was boiling with anger as had to attend some important work at my workstation and I was told to rush in the torture chamber of reality fabrication. Some of our colleagues donated handsomely and when I was asked, I flashed my angry eyes to the beggars in branded corporate clothes. When I went out for lunch for the day, I saw the same ultramodern beggars coming out of an expensive restaurant where the cost of snack was equal to the three meals of a day, elsewhere.
In the early 2000s, I experienced the ancient version of this cyber-begging. In my inboxes of Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail, perfectly written pleading emails were spamming with digital knowhow and catchy subject lines. Few of my friends had been caught in the perfectly woven trap from the streets of Nigeria, Uganda and Philippines.
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Now what’s shocking is, everyday people with decent educational, and socio-economic background are asking for donation to fund their digital activities and nomadic lifestyle at exotic locations. This brazenness has crossed all the limits of civilizational decency and it must be stopped before we all get trapped into the quagmire of digital panhandling of the purest kind.
We all help those who are in crisis. We know by heart who is authentic in his or her approach for help as we are trained by shared culture to detect inauthenticity, instantly. But now a days, manipulations are so subtle, programmed with the last detail and carefully designed to trap the innocent and naïve among us that it’s difficult to evade their deception.
On manufacturing such authenticity to deceive us from different walks of life, I have written a short eBook, titled: Manufacturing Authenticity: Fashioning Reality and Fabricating Truth. It would take about 90 minutes of your time to finish it. You will discover the depth of such manipulations across the entire spectrum of life.
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Authored By #ZarionZory
💐🙏🌹 Read more of my work at https://zarionzory.substack.com
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