INTERNAL USE ONLY.
Coincidence used to mean something. You run into your prom date fifteen years after graduation, and that same day you hear the song you danced to. Your friend mentions a type of soup you've never heard of; an hour later you find that soup on sale at your local grocery. Your cat is licking himself more than usual, and within minutes of noticing this you see an article about feline anxiety in a magazine. Twenty years ago, these moments felt like magic.
Now, ads and suggested posts and "people you may know" follow us everywhere, prompted by offhand comments and idle searches. Our home pages are full of personalized content, tailored to appeal to us, based on whatever appealed to us five minutes ago. There is very little room left to true coincidence.
Still, not everyone is aware of the mechanisms at work. It is these people who can be primed to see meaningful synchronicities where the true intentionality is hidden.
We wanted artists for the Obscure program, and we wanted them to be unaware they were being headhunted. This required a good amount of research up front, followed by a precisely targeted ad campaign directed at the close friends and family members of a specific group of burnt out, moderately successful artists. The kind of people whose loved ones would encourage them to take a break, but who cannot afford the kind of getaway available to those who have really "made it."
The next step after procuring our primary subjects was to procure our secondary and tertiary subjects. Each of our secondary subjects was to meet the following three criteria:
- be a fan of one of our primary subjects
- have a last name alphabetically close to that of the artist they follow
- have a number of close friends and/or family members who also have alphabetically close last names
At first glance, these criteria may seem difficult to fulfill. But bear in mind that each of the thirteen artists we acquired as subjects has thousands of fans, and there are only twenty-six letters of the alphabet. This means that there are likely hundreds of fans for each artist who fit the second criterium. It is likely that of these hundreds of fans, many of them are close to at least one or two family members with the same surname. Further, given that schools and universities often group students alphabetically for things like class placement and housing, and that any number of other common life circumstances arrange people by surname, those fans having friends who would also qualify as tertiary subjects is quite likely.
The remaining questions one might ask are:
1. How do we get all of this data on who's a fan, and who that fan's friends and family are?
2. How do we convince those secondary and tertiary subjects to register?
3. Why?
For #1 and #2, see above. Everyone leaves their digital footprints, fingerprints, and piles of DNA everywhere they go. It is easy to find our targets, and easy to send them advertisements geared towards their specific preferences, tastes, finances and schedule. The woman who buys bulk herbs and Oracle decks gets a very different ad copy from the MBA student who reads The Economist.
The price is different for everyone, too. It's always a good deal, as good as it can be without being suspiciously cheap. That number is different for everyone depending on not only their income and family background, but their levels of skepticism, optimism, and naivete. Those with extremely limited means were given information about scholarships, for the more Pollyannaish among them, or about payment plans for the more skeptical.
Why are we doing this? Because we want answers to questions, enough to ignore conventional ethics and forego hopes for legitimate scientific publication. The need to know is paramount.