Welcome to the marketplace of secrets

In our time, political propaganda and conspiracy theories are kissing cousins. One opens the gates and the other drags you in. The way they do this is not very imaginative and so it is possible to squitn and see how the process works.

Below is a full transcript of the episode.

Hi, and welcome to another video on this channel.

My name is Vimoh and here we talk about atheism, Indian culture, popular misinformation, that sort of stuff. And I want to talk today, not about any specific creator or any specific bit of misinformation, but about something slightly meta.

If you, if you zoom out and you look at this entire circus, what becomes apparent, a larger trend or a rather a larger pattern of behavior that becomes apparent when you zoom out and look at this. And we're going to call it the marketplace of secrets. Like, sounds very Harry Potter-ish, no? It's a market where you go and you find secrets everywhere being sold.

My question has to do with the fact that the people who are selling you these secrets, where are they getting those secrets from? Imagine you're scrolling down your YouTube feed and you find a number of YouTube videos. One video says, secret meeting between political leaders that you need to know about right now. And you click on it and find out that there was actually no secret meeting. Somebody is just giving their opinion. And the reason you clicked on the thumbnail is because you thought there was something in this video that you could not find elsewhere. It turns out there is nothing in the video.

The person who made the video and made the thumbnail knows that you are looking on YouTube for things that you cannot find elsewhere. And if they can appear to be the person who can give you those things, then they have your attention.

You keep scrolling and you find someone saying, secrets of ancient Indian history that are being hidden from you according to some conspiracy by liberals. Now, in addition to finding information that you could not find elsewhere, you are actually being provided information. You are actually being offered information that someone does not want you to see. Someone is actively suppressing so that you may not find out about it.

You are, by the way, in the dark about many things. You don't know many things and the reason you don't know them is because you really don't care about it. There are facts all over the world that you never looked into and that's all right because the world is quite large and you are one person and you have a set of interests and it is not your job to go look and find everything. So you are only going to look at things that are of interest to you. Right.

So then you keep scrolling down your YouTube feed and you find another thumbnail. This one says secrets of ancient Indian history, culture, something, something that are being hidden from you by people that you don't like. Now it's become even more personal. Now, A, it's secret information that you don't know. B, it has been hidden from you and specifically hidden from you by the people who you don't like. Now, in addition to lack of knowledge, there is also anger. How dare these people keep this valuable information from me?

The people who are keeping this information from me must be my enemies. In fact, I already think they're my enemies. This just reinforces it. And now when you click on this video and you watch something, you may still be disappointed with the content, but something else has happened. Something else has been triggered in your head. The bias, which you already had against certain people has been reinforced. And this reinforcement works on a subconscious level. You're not always aware of it. It's not as if you would have stopped disliking those people if you had not seen this video, but watching this video reinforced that and made you trust this person more because sure, maybe their video doesn't contain much good content, but at least they're on your side. They are working to help you. Sure, they got some facts wrong and they got some information wrong and they lied about some things, but they want what is good for you because they agree with you with regard to who your enemy is.

Now, let me point out something else. Think about this from the point of view of the people who create these videos. What do they know about you? They know that you are a large chunk of the population, as in your religious background, your cultural background, your political biases make you a prime candidate for a certain kind of content. They want to give this content to you. But they also need to make sure that you will be interested in the content that they're giving you. So they create a box and they put stuff in this box.

What is this box? This box, if you want to put a label on this box, this box will be labeled things you don't know or things they don't want you to know or things that are being kept secret from you. Thi