It's one thing to drink the kool-aid. You may not be able to help that. It's another thing to start spreading it for profit.
Aside: The "kool-aid" available on social media, which captures hearts and minds in unbalanced narratives of all sorts, is all about the idea that other people are the problem, when in fact the kool-aid itself is one of various natural processes whose "taming" will point the path to better outcomes downstream.
The book by this title from Sinan Aral suggests that social media might adapt their LIKE BUTTON to a set of six buttons to indicate the responder's impression that the post is liked by:
This may seem like a benign (even superfluous) augmentation, but it's designed to shift awareness away from organism centricity to the wider range of social subsystem correlations that we'd like to nurture. Moreover, it will provide data on the shifts in focus that a given post elicits in that post's audience.
Thus for example posts that elicit a focus on politics when the topic is some natural process (like a pandemic) that we need to bring technical knowledge to bear on will automatically show up as a professional topic with few professional likes. Likewise when experts (say in astronomy) make assertions about elements of culture with which they have limited experience.The COVID-19 choices given to us by nature (not people) have always been simple: Wear masks together or shut down your economy if you don't want way more than 2 folks in the US to die every 3 minutes.
Our organism-centric thinking instead imagines the problem is other people, e.g. (i) wanting to tell you what to do, (ii) trying to trick you into paying more taxes, or (iii) out to get your boss, etc. This latter way of thinking is an evolved trait that's had survival value in the past, but does not have survival value in this case.
Don't confuse the symptom (like a giant pus-filled pimple) with the disease. The cure for the latter likely involves constructive adaptation to the new speed at which ideas can be replicated across the globe electronically.
This depends on the audience. An audience equipped to work toward a healthy future might be better served with balanced narratives, allowing them to make decisions based on their own interests. Such narratives are likely to focus on demographic information and on incoming data (often statistical) about processes afoot.
If you instead want to decide for (e.g. to simply manipulate) an audience, your narrative should be one-sided and focus on personalities or organism-centric anecdote i.e. on paleolithic triggers like fear, "bad-guys", and xenophobia. In this electronic information age, the gullibility of audiences to these strategies has proven itself again and again, from the invention of radio in the early 20th century through to today's internet of social media.
Leadership concepts evolved in modest-sized groups and communities, but modern communications extends them to larger communities where leadership becomes a media figment rather than a relationship.
The mismatch is especially apparent in election years, because figment promotion eclipses the statistical process challenges that are hitting our communities where it hurts.
Hence discussion of mindfulness, measurement, and mitigation of the latter might be worth a bit more attention, even if there is a windfall in money for cartoons.
Data on whole communities is something that can provide a heads up on trends in community health on all levels. Alas, our visceral reactions are more attuned to anecdote than to "data about many".
Electronic media (starting with radio, then TV and now the internet) are therefore able to trigger visceral reaction to anecdote, while the "data about many" (which signals real developments in the bottom line) is ignored. The result is a plethora of unbalanced narratives with strong feelings on all sides, which are often uninformed to the real trends and issues tht we'd all like to manage.
