$30 Billion Deal, page-738

What would be the point of talking about anything technical. Most people don't understand it and don't care to try to. 80% of readers won't read anything with more than 2 sentences. 65% won't read more than the title and the name of the author, and as always 99.99% of all statistics are made up. Obviously most people won't haven't even read this far.

In the old days people read something and often tried to understand it. They could pick the key themes in the content and decide if those seemed to be based on sound logic or otherwise. They could determine if the evidence presented in the content supported the conclusions or not. You remember, at big school it was called "comprehension" and "analysis".

Not anymore. In this busy, polarised world, people are presented with endless content, much of which is well outside their understanding, or at least its well outside the time and effort which they are willing to invest into digesting it. Despite this many people feel the need to be seen by their many social media friends to be actively supporting their "team". Having and expressing an opinion is their digital right and by god they are going to exercise it.

Social media companies being the renowned champions protecting the moral high ground have come to the rescue. They have found a way to make it easy for you to back your team, protect your entrenched position and exercise your digital rights to express yourself without the onerous requirement of either reading or understand the content which you are judging, opps, I mean responding to. Its called the "like" button.

The like button allows somebody without so much as the foggiest understanding of an issue, conversation or debate to support their "team" without the risk of embarrassing themselves with an ill-conceived, illogical or baseless response which may be easily picked apart by some other anonymous poster who actually knows something about the subject. The like button allows you to support the heros on your team who are willing to do the hard yards by typing disparaging comments about the author of actual content, speculating about their ulterior motives, articulating contrived conspiracy theories, or responding with largely irrelevant comments to deflect away from the original content and into a discussion that is more favorable for your team, etc.

The thing about the "like" button is knowing when to use it. Social media has made that easier also. They highlight the single most important piece of information that you need to know in order to determine when to fire this weapon of mass division. This information is the "author". By looking at the author name (term used loosely given that all names on social media are made up for anonymity), you can quickly judge the content of any article/post as either right or wrong, where right = "good for me" and wrong = "bad for me". Put simply experienced social media users categorize other users as either as a true patriot = "on my team", or an evil conspirator, non-holder or somebody who is not towing the party line and asking difficult questions or exposing dirty laundry = "not on my team".

By determining if a post is by somebody on your team and thereby identifying the post as obviously "good, high quality stuff" you can quickly deploy defensive "like" buttons to support your team and demoralize the enemy who may be thinking of exposing documents or asking impertinent questions which may encourage the general population to question the legitimacy of the party line which your team has been swamping them with for hours, weeks or months. Remember that in all good dictatorships, dissenting voices need to be silenced and the general population should only hear one message, the one you want them to hear. You don't want them thinking for themselves, or heaven forbid, reading the actual content, and they are more "like"ly to read content which has been endorsed with hundreds like likes.

So when you say "The general populace has been so dumbed down they don’t want to talk about anything technical", be careful. The thought police will be onto you for just mentioning the idea. The party identifies thought criminals with dangerous ideas like that and shuts them down. They will swamp the discussion with easy to read one line propaganda messages to save the general population from thinking for themselves and you will be banished to the "not on my team" category by the party.

The above said, after spending years studying how viruses trick the immune system into ignoring something that it should automatically see as a threat, thus allowing the virus to propagate in the body, I have discovered that the very same techniques can be applied to getting factual documents passed the censorship regime of the ruling party. Just like a spike protein, adding any of the following keywords to the visible outer shell of a document, ie the title, can cause the document to be mis-categorised by the t-cells (tosser cells) who are pre-programmed not to attack anything containing these words:

"cure"
"billion dollars"
"rocket"
"moon"
"toot toot"
"takeover"
"$1 party"
"fast track"
"evil non-holder"
"imminent"
"MM said"
"manipulators"
"burning shorts"
or the always popular "Thursday announcement" !

Most of these keywords will protect you in discussion on most company threads but some are are a proprietary developments designed specifically to work here. Like all good drugs please don't overuse these or we risk immunity as the community mutates.

For those that are reading this last line and didn't cheat by skipping to the end, congrats, you are in the exclusive top 5% of the carefully curated statistics. Don't worry, as long as you don't comment nobody will know.