My 2012 Ghosts of The Year.

So Goes The Year 2012 in the Age of Manipulation.

Subjectively first, there was the Golden Age, where nobody had the internet and there were no news anchors.  That was why it was referred to as the Golden Age. But for every Golden Age there is the Shit Age, changed to the more popular Dark Ages, because everybody minded their own business and all blogs were written in mud.
As the centuries continued the pendulum swung back the other way;  along came the Age of Discovery (where the seeds of Wikipedia were sown into the social fabric) and the Age of Reason and Enlightenment (who couldn't agree on naming rights so were forced to create separate business cards).  And for the last fifty years with a brief detour into the fatalistic Atomic Age, found to be too nerdy and science-based in focus groups, we have lived in the Information Age, thanks to the finally discovered internet. Yet the Internet Age has a twin sister, the Disinformation Age and together they breeded their own incestuous bastard child, our own King Joffrey (GoT represent) aka The Age of Manipulation. And he's a prick.

If we were to spend some time to think about this, which most likely we won't as 2013 will bring in it's own set of problems and distractions to help us forget that 2012 was a pretty crappy year for civilization as we know it as a whole.  Hopefully in the years to come social historians will look back on 2012 as the year when the Age of Manipulation peaked. From the US election to the Mayan apocalypse to Facebook's IPO to the continually mass media ignored OWS-themed protests, this was the year that we were all manipulated into believing in something that we knew was inherently false, yet we chose to listen to it and comment on it and make stupid jokes about it and perpetuate these myths.

It was hard for anybody with average intelligence to not feel like they were drowning in Orwellian Ministry of Truth propaganda. The usual two-bit coverage of wars in cultures we can't even begin to understand with arguments that it would all be better if only Russia and China had no say in the United Nations. Yet somehow, in all these discussions there is no talk of who is supplying who their weapons. This isn't a war on culture this is Starbucks vs Tim Horton's, the military weapons edition.
It has become harder and harder for one to not be manipulated to some extent in anything but 2012 ... wow ... what a crap year. From it's beginnings in arguments about if North America should care about either Syrian civil war, Greece's bankruptcy or the legion of film critics that attacked the American embassy in Libya to it's end with yet another American massacre and lots of Americans up in arms over crazy pacifists equating gun culture with gun violence.    

Here are my Three Ghosts of Manipulation for 2012; three people that created news events that reflected where we were as a society until we got bored and somebody told us to pay attention to something else. They made headlines in the past tense, present tense and will most likely do so in the future.  And by reading this, yes i am manipulating you to consider the big events/stories/people in 2012 that manipulated your emotions as these three did mine. Feel free to justify your own picks in the comments.    

Ghost of Manipulation Past;  Amanda Todd.  

This is my no means meant as a disrespect. This is meant to show how manipulation can come and go so effectively in today's society of the less-than-15-minute news cycle. Amanda Todd, 15 year old Vancouver girl who committed suicide, is one of dozens of teen suicides that happen in Canada every year, one of hundreds of young teens that are exploited on the internet, and one of thousands of kids that get bullied every year by their peers.

She finally got our attention post-partum, when her cry for help was discovered on Youtube. Basic black and white index cards detailing her life that had led her to the suicidal thoughts which she eventually succumbed to.  We all fretted and frowned, wondered how kids could do this to each other.  Politicians called for 'action plans' to combat bullying in schools and then...that was it.  Perhaps because Vice.com ran these articles, it revealed an even uglier truth behind just simple school bullying; an anonymous creepy internet group that thrived and bragged about the manipulating of young teen girls. Anonymous outed one of these cyber bullies who claimed innocence, despite the evidence. Apparently the RCMP said he was not a 'person of interest' because you know, suicide. And that was the last I've heard of Amanda Todd because of this guy;

The Ghost of Manipulation Present;  Scooter Braun

He's the one on the left beside that grinning mannequin thing.

I admit, i never even heard of this guy until the start of December when i read about him here, but trust me unless you are living in a concrete bunker underground or possibly some crappy suburb of Rwanda, you all have been exposed to what he has brought forth, not unlike other star-shitters before him; Simon Cowell, Maurice Starr, Quincy Jones. But this guy manages the teen girl fan orgy that are the Beliebers, the Zooey Dechanel-lite Carly Rae Jepsen and the pony-riding Psy singing Gangham Style.  Who as most have heard is Youtube's current all-time hit leader at over 1 billion views.  So technically nearly 1 in 8 people have seen that video. Or over 4 billion minutes has been wasted watching a grown Korean man prance around in ill-fitting tuxedos or to put it another way, nearly 8000 years of wasted human potential, watching this. And that's just as of the end of 2012.

Scooter Braun has created the biggest 3 stars in music entertainment of 2012 through good ol'fashioned social media manipulation. Legend is that they were all discovered via Youtube, although it is said Braun produced the 'basement videos' where Beiber was 'discovered'. Or all those 'Call Me Maybe' parodies that we are to believe happened 'organically'. It was a marketing strategy that worked and Scooter was the giant light bulb that distracted most of North America from itself. And he forces other grown ups to call him Scooter. 

There is nothing of substance to these people, yet they had grown newscasters feigning interest in these people's momentary stardom to keep our minds off of our personal out-of-control debt to living ratios and bigger societal ills. If past experience is any indication, we know where these kids and asians sensation are going; nowhere but down until it's time to have that twenty year reunion tour to try and fill up the royalty coffers once again.  

Not one of the aforementioned have done anything of value to society, other than manipulate society to forget about Amanda Todd, those mass shootin- hey, he looks like he's riding a horse in a tuxedo! friggin' hilarious!! 

The Ghost of Manipulation Future;  Nate Silver

Man, this could be me circa 30 yrs old but for my time at smoking weed.

2012 was all about US politics and what the Obama had or had not done to get the US to pay up for those Bush years.  What most of the ignorant general public missed but you can bet the parties didn't was this guy;  NateSilver.

While still leading the way in the world-wide recession, the US put all other interests on hold for nearly a year while the two leading parties spent hundreds of millions of public relation dollars in an effort to either reclaim or retain the presidency. There was no such truth as an unbiased media, especially when the only two trusted news sources were Fox News and The Daily Show, for their obvious biases. The two candidates traveled throughout the country, delivered speeches, bought ad space (again in the hundreds of millions), and talked about peripheral issues that really had no bearing on why the country and world appeared to be going to hell in a shit-basket. The republican candidate Romney apparently ran on a platform with no plan, and he still garnered 47% of the vote - nearly 1/2 of all American voters were backing a guy that had no plan, they just liked what he represented.  The whole OWS movement never happened in the political sphere. This came as a great surprise to the thousands of Americans who had been arrested and tear gassed in the name of American capitalism.

But this Nate Silver guy. He was everywhere after the election. Because he picked the winner of all 50 states using, now get this, math and graphs and stuff. It was just as relevant and boring as the movie Moneyball, where this same 'math stuff' was introduced to Brad Pitt and the Oakland A's, thereby changing the way fantasy baseball teams were picked forever. Nate Silver created a system where he correctly guessed the outcome of the election before voting day. Before the election was even held.

In the next election, both political parties will be spending vast amounts of money on statisticians emulating Silver's theories for their respective political war rooms. Then they will explain their findings to the public relations teams on which states they should be spending money. The future of the world's greatest superpower will rest on media battles in Battleground States; manipulating Ohio rednecks and Southern Carolina tobacco-munchers. What Nate Silver has done is create a near perfect formula that points out what states needed to better manipulated to win in a pure democracy.  Silver proved that math can win elections. And the world's powerful 1% just got a little more geekier to the infinite power.