#sinfulsanta

Nothing cuts the ice like a box full of filthy euphemisms and a deck of cards shaped like Santa. That was the lesson I learned last Friday.

I was a plus one at this party. It was being thrown by my friend’s gym instructor, and I’ve never been one to turn down an obscure invitation. The host was a cheerful powerhouse of a woman who had recently climbed Kilimanjaro for lols. She was extremely welcoming, and only made me do the bleep test once.

Our highly toned host obviously had a dilemma...

How do you get a bunch of people who’ve only spoken to each other in-between squat tracks to loosen up and socialise? It turns out the answer is to seal them in a room with wine and a highly suggestive card game. The effect was intense. After all, these people were used to working up a sheen and breathing heavily around one another. The randy animals.

It transpired that my mate’s parents were also members of this gym, and had been invited to the gathering. After a couple of hours, it was game time. The assembled guests were ushered into the lounge. To my friend’s horror, her mother was tasked with going first. She plucked a winking Santa from the deck and proclaimed its inscription with immaculate Scottish diction.

Suffice to say, what ensued was not the conventional depiction of how an angel arrives on top of your Christmas tree. It certainly drew on some advance bedroom manoeuvres. I’ll leave your mind to wander.

We howled with laughter, and the game proceeded in spectacularly smutty fashion. Soon enough it was my mate’s dad’s turn. He grinned at the card and launched into some unsolicited ad-libbing. His additions left us unnecessarily appraised of the advanced manoeuvres in their marital boudoir. I found this hilarious. My friend obviously curled into a writhing ball of cringe and prayed for a swift death.

Needless to say, the room full of sporty pseudo-strangers were all best friends by the end of the night.

The genius of the “Sinful Santa” game lies in human suggestibility. When primed by the right phrasing or imagery, our minds can be manipulated to fall down paths we wouldn’t normally choose. In this case, it was used with masterful effect to make us laugh, as we struggled to identify Brussel sprouts amidst the depravity of our imaginations. In other scenarios, of course, the same human tendency can be used to condition us. We can be made to believe negative stereotypes about other people, or certain subjects. The exploitation of this tendency is nothing new. But an individual or corporation’s ability to exploit it without culpability is. How many times a day do you click “accept cookies” when browsing the internet? It’s hard not to. But that data goes somewhere. And gets sold somewhere. Because it’s valuable to people you might not have considered.

As the echo chambers of social media continue to reverberate in each of our individual lives, our sense of healthy scepticism has been gently eroded. We’ve been placated by free email servers, free image sharing, and keyboards filled with GIFs. These are all great things. But in exchange we’ve given anonymous bidders unprecedented information about our private selves.

If you were to write a profile of yourself and ask someone to use it to manipulate your views, I doubt you’d come up with anything as comprehensive as can be found in your web footprint from the last ten years.

Almost without fail every site tracks your interests and behaviour. A one-off visit to a website to book a holiday won’t result in a huge Orwellian folder of leverage against you. But cross reference that holiday booking with all the other websites you visit, the location data tracked through your phone, the people you interact with, and what you put in your emails… You’ve got enough information there to make predictions about individuals’ behaviour. And when you can predict behaviour, you can intervene. You can shape it.

Our ostensibly “free-to-surf” internet comes at a price we rarely discuss. You need only look to China, or consider the election controversies in the West, to see that there are serious implications when big data is used in ways that aren’t readily understood by its subjects. Four hundred years ago Francis Bacon proclaimed that “knowledge is power.” That still rings true today. Only, these days, we’re willingly giving both away. Curious, given the struggles people faced in those intervening centuries to achieve democratic freedom.

Big data has the potential to positively transform our lives – but only if we’re clear on how it’s being used. Next time an article pops up in your “News Feed” (I wonder who at FB named it that?), take a beat to think: who is the true author of this article? Why do they want me to read it? What do they stand to gain? Then scroll down and watch cat videos. It’s what Bacon would’ve wanted.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, my tin hat needs polishing.