…are just as dangerous to the survival of your character as lions, and tigers and bears might be to the continuation of your physical form with all of your limbs in place. Sure, a lion may take a bite out of your thigh, a tiger might gnaw on your femur, a bear might take a swipe at you with its sledgehammer paw, but the smilers, nodders and flatterers work in a more sinister way –no blood loss, but much more soul loss.

They might not necessarily be manifested into a real person with a fake smile, but describe the way a life is constructed in the era when everything can be bought, sold and customized – your attention and interests as well. Your add universe is not the same as mine, chances that we hear and see even remotely the same news and posts are unlikely. The marketing machine figured it out long ago and in the new media, electric speeds and the .www became perfect new tools to serve you exactly what you want to hear to make you more compliant, more ready to engage and/or buy. Here and there they will serve you something that go so much against you beliefs that you feel the visceral need to react and become a couch revolutionary, but this tactic is to be used carefully and only in desperate need for engagement, and with sufficient time spans in between so you can’t see the pattern.

The world is being custom made for you… and me, and your nana and little Tommy down the street. And you’ll be fine with this, with seeing only what you want to and just siphoning away the undesirable information… It was very crude at the beginning but as the cycle repeats itself it becomes a bit more sophisticated and a little better targeted as your world gets just a tiny bit smaller and narrower each time. And you’ll still be comfortable and prefer it because you like to be proven right and don’t like to be opposed and challenged because it drains energy. We’ll enjoy our new digital skin that creates a perfect glove like environment because it requires nothing of us but to stay the same and pay a little less genuine attention.

The smilers and flatterers are quite happy to make you happy because they are not real and you’re just a means to be manipulated. You already know you’re prone to settling in comfort zones in real life as well, and you have no issue with it being extended digitally. In time you’ll become too lazy to search anything outside this custom made environment, because why would you? Why would you willingly want to potentially be proven wrong, why would you want to introduce opposing information and cause a dissonance in yourself, why would you rock the boat that’s gliding into the CGI sunset? If it feels real it’s good enough. Well, no it isn’t. The chances that you’re the first human in history that’s always right are nonexistent and being served proof that you are will become toxic for the soul. Would you rather like something free and beautiful that might give you some trouble here and there or something housebroken and docile that does things not because it wants to but because it’s been trained to do so.

If you really want to see better, be more, understand as much as you can and get as close to the truth as you possibly can you need to listen to all sides of the story and draw your own conclusions out of their synthesis and comparisons of proofs and facts. If you only keep hearing the one sided stories you in time start forgetting that none of the objects or situations are so completely flat and 2D (well unless these D’s stand for “delusion” and “disregard”). Don’t get boxed in by comfort. Explore!