Introducing Spacebook: Facebook's New Programme for Interdimensional Travel

Alright, it’s actually just our algorithm. But stick with us. This will be a trip.

Clickbait is something our platform specialises in, so we’re sorry, but we couldn’t help ourselves. We don’t really have a space programme. 

Keep reading though, because we’ve got something even better.

Firstly, let me explain our business model. At Facebook, these days, we view ourselves less as a social media company and more of a mining company. And here, we mine the most valuable, sustainable resource on the planet: consumer data.

‘Consumer data’ is any information we collect about the people who use our services. It includes (but is certainly not limited to) their date of birth, relationship status, everything they view on-site and how long they view it for, their entire history of private messages, their private spoken conversations, the majority of their browser history even when they’re not on Facebook, all of their photos, videos… You get the picture.

Gold, oil and diamonds have got nothing on data. Think of data as the ‘fuel’ for our ‘space programme’; far more exciting than any mineral you can dig out of dirt.

Take a simple data category, like shopping history. Eight years ago, the American supermarket chain, Target, used a predictive algorithm on customers’ purchase history alone to detect many things, including if their customers were pregnant. This was so effective that Target knew one woman was pregnant before even her father did. 

Now, take that concept and think about how far it must’ve advanced in eight entire years, on the largest data-mining platform on Earth. We’ve got a lot more categories to play with, and a lot of investors who want access.

That’s where our ‘space programme’ comes in.

See, we make our money by selling this data to investors like yourself, and then promoting your products to those we deem most likely to be susceptible to them. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling: Coca-Cola, a ‘traditional Swiss-style electric cheese melter’, a T-shirt with random private information from the customer already printed on it, or a new house; we’ll use our algorithms to find plenty of customers who are feeling emotional enough to not think twice about buying it.

“That’s all well and good,” you might be saying, “but it’s not quite interdimensional travel is it?”

So here it comes: our algorithms have the potential to physically transport consumers to alternate realities. That’s where the real money is. Not Coke, not T-shirts. At Facebook, we sell planets.

One of our most popular planets to visit is planet QAnon. I’ll use that to explain how this all works.

QAnon is a pro-Trump conspiracy theory movement. It imagines Donald Trump as a heroic figure, fighting off hordes of paedophiles in government and in Hollywood. It presents the world as a detective story, in which the mysterious ‘Q’, supposedly a high-level government insider, exposes small, cryptic insights into the horrific, satanist lifestyles of your favourite celebrities at regular intervals. Q’s biggest revelation to date is that some government officials like to talk about pizza in their emails, which he used as ‘evidence’ of the existence of an elite paedophile ring.

And if pizza and paedophilia don’t sound remotely related to you, if you’re wondering what on earth I’m talking about, then you’re one of the lucky few people who hasn’t yet been targeted with this absurd propaganda. Watch out for it, though. Some of the videos are masterworks of persuasive editing.

For those who believe the QAnon theory, life is a game. They’re part of a community who seek what’s ‘really going on’ in the private lives of celebrities and politicians, like detectives in a world-wide Agatha Christie novel. It’s a whole different planet. An alternate reality.

How do they get to this alternate planet? Simple neuroscience.

Our brain doesn’t learn information by creating new neurons. We don’t make brand-new cells for brand-new information. Instead, the human brain learns by strengthening connections between different parts of the brain that are already there. For example, a baby will learn that warmth is reassuring, because a baby’s main source of warmth is its mother. Every time the baby feels reassured, the part of the brain that processes ‘assuredness’ will activate. And every time the baby is warm, the part of the brain that processes warmth will activate. That means that every time it is picked up by its mother, both parts activate at the same time, which strengthens the connections between the two points. 

This is such a powerful link that it influences us throughout our entire lives. Studies have found that we tend to view strangers more favourably if we’re holding a warm cup of coffee when we meet them than if we’re holding a cold glass of water.

Are you still with me, or did that get a bit too neurosciencey?

The main point is this: facts don’t matter. What matters, when you’re looking to persuade, is repetition. If you bombard someone with QAnon propaganda, all day, every day, for weeks, the connection in their brains between ‘pizza’ and ‘paedophiles’ will be far stronger than the connection between ‘truth’ and ‘verifiable sources’.

So, there’s the toolkit. We can give you access to an algorithm that spams specific groups of people with enough content to physically alter their brains, transporting them to any alternate reality you want them to believe in.

You could be a political lobbying group, you could be racist (QAnon certainly are), you could be a flat-earther. You could be anyone, and you could believe anything. We honestly don’t care. If you get enough people to stop scrolling and pay attention to your content, we might not even charge you: our algorithm promotes all engaging content for free. In fact, ideally, you are a racist. That kind of divisive opinion is unbelievably engaging: it comforts other racists, and enrages those with a moral conscience. Win-win for us, and for you.

We’ve swayed the Brexit vote, we’ve gotten Trump elected, we’ve spread anti-vax conspiracies, and we’re currently pushing dangerous anti-mask Covid-19 conspiracy theories around the world that’re leading people to abandon basic safety equipment in the middle of a pandemic. We’d love to hear of an advertising company with a better track record than that.

Take your brand, your politician, your ideology, beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Allow our algorithms to craft a world in which your brand is mankind’s only hope of survival, and watch as the Earth’s masses share your propaganda, indoctrinating one another, migrating en masse to the alternate dimension that you are the ruler of.

Invest in Facebook, and become the arbiter of truth.

Invest in Facebook. Become God.

(Quick legal disclaimer in case Mark ‘The Arbiter’ Zuckerberg  comes down and smites me with a libel case - this article is satire. Although most of it is true. It’s up to YOU, the Facebook user, to make your mind up [or, Zuck forbid, do some research] about what facts from this article you should choose to believe in. And in every other article you read. Ever.)