Consent

Since we have five Sunday’s this month, I am kicking off with fiction, and this week’s book was sent to me by the daughter of the author, which was very exciting for me, to know that someone values my opinion enough to ask what I think of their work, making this weeks book Consent, by Ari H. Mendelson.

This book is right in line with horror, not in the Monster Hunter International type of obvious, with vampires and werewolves, but in the “yes, I can 100% believe this is possible and what the hell do we do about it?” kind of horror.

Before even getting into the book itself, Mendelson introduces us to the concept of Consent, which, as he points out, is bandied about a lot in the media in terms of informed consent, sexual consent, age of consent, but what is consent? He provides us the dictionary definition of consent as “ one person voluntarily agrees to the proposal or desires of another.” But he takes it a step further, pointing out that, and this is a direct quote from the book “For consent to be genuine, it must be given by a person who has a “clear appreciation and understanding of the facts, implications, and future consequences of the proposed action.”

This, while not a part of the book, is why so many are screaming about informed consent in conjunction with the vaccines that were rushed through the FDA. We don’t know and won’t know for many years, all the side effects of this rushed medication, so how can We the People have been informed of anything to give our consent? Yet an awful lot of American’s gave their consent to the jab, without knowing the long-term implications, based entirely on media, and more importantly, social media, manipulation. That concept, the social media and media manipulation of data, IS the overarching background of this book.

Mendelson then goes on to address persuasion and what exactly it means to persuade Again, a direct quote “As persuasion becomes more effective, the persuader can convince others to do, think, say, or buy ever more of what he wants us to do, think, say, or buy. The will of the persuader counts for more and more. Our own will counts for less and less.”  Persuasion is kissing cousins with manipulation. According to one Quora post, the difference is approach…persuasion implies the speaker has enough respect to approach you directly and try and change your mind. Manipulation does not imply such respect.

It’s the difference between open debate, like between political candidates in an open forum, and the darker edge of social media, where in the people behind the algorithm decide what is good for us to hear, and so buries a story that runs counter to The Message. And when that burying is done at the behest of the political class, that’s manipulation.

And before you know it, you are part of a larger cult of “like-minded thinkers.”  Note, this can happen across the political spectrum, and congress in general has been working on figuring out how to manipulate we the people for decades. This is why all the attack ads are shown every campaign season. Hope doesn’t sell anything. But fear sells. So, they sell the fear of what the other guy will do, while downplaying their own candidates’ evils. And generations of voting for the lesser evil have led Americans to a terrifying level of apathy where our elected officials are concerned.

So, with all of that as the author’s intro and my own thoughts on it, what is this book actually about?

It starts with a tech giant, Jerry Neville, who heads a social media conglomeration. He’s a genius, but also a tech nerd. Only unlike the tech nerds in the real world, i.e., the Mark Zuckerberg’s, Bill Gates’, and Elon Musk’s, who managed to find wives owing to having some actual character and personality of their own. Neville is so uncertain of his own ability to attract a woman on his own merit, that he has written a dating algorithm that allows him to manipulate the woman of his dreams into falling for him. And he’s pushed into ensuring it actually works the way he believes it will by his Chinese backers, who want to use his program to ensure 100% compliance with the Government Will among the Chinese people.

Mendelson succinctly lays out the problem China is having in achieving its 100% compliance, namely that there are always those who can see past the manipulation, and eventually snap out of the trance of government control. And those they must send to re-education camps, but usually not before they have managed to infect others with their doubts. The perennial problem of dictators: How to erase all doubt?  China wants to do away with the re-education camps not because they are inherently bad, but because they don’t think they should have to re-educate anyone. People should just see that the government is the best and want to do their part.

And in opposition to this plan are several reporters, the main one of which, Johnathan Hall, doesn’t even realize what pot he’s stepped in. They’re just trying actually do what reporters SHOULD do, which is investigate the story and present the facts as they find them. And where book one of what I believe is a two-part series leaves off is with Hall being under arrest, although we are not yet told what for. I almost get the sense, from book one here, that if Neville had left Hall alone, what’s about to come would never have happened, because Hall would have had no reason to go looking for it. But I could be wrong, I haven’t read book two yet, so I’m not even sure that Neville’s going down. Other than he’s obviously the bad guy here, and in fiction at least, the good guys still win.

While Mendelson has obviously changed the names in the book of the organizations involved to avoid litigious dirtbags in the real world, I can see exactly which news stories he’s pulling from as he weaves his narrative. Or at least, I think I do, some of which only hit the periphery of my radar, but many of which I recognized as Project Veritas…or it was before James O’Keefe was ousted and formed O’Keefe Media Group. I’m keen to see which news stories he’s actually citing, which he promises to do in the final book of the series, along with other books that inspired the story.  

I quite liked this book and I’m eager to read book two, although I can’t squish into my review schedule until next year at this point. It was fast paced, I think I read it in about three days, and it was entirely ominous because it was so believable. With the release of the Twitter files last year, we know how much the social media algorithms have been tailored to sell a specific story, and it’s entirely believable that they could be manipulated to elicit the sort of response China is looking for in this book, and which Neville achieves with his love interest.

But he foreshadowed several points in regard to the main love interest, in the book it’s actress Meghan Peters: 1. Would Peters have ever been attracted to Neville without his algorithmic persuasion? 2. She has a brief interaction with Hall at a convention. 3. The fatal flaw in Neville’s programming is that you have to be online for it to work. And I mean online like ALL THE TIME…not just like we joke about kids these days and their social media addiction, but like Mom’s Eye Phone from Futurama online all the time.

And none of that foreshadowing panned out in book one, which means you have to read book two to see how it ends. If I didn’t know book two is already written and available, I’d be scared Mendelson was doing a George RR Martin, just leaving us on a cliff hanger for the better part of a decade…even after the TV series has actually ended, Martin STILL hasn’t written the final installment of a A Song of Ice and Fire. But not to worry, since there are only two books, I’m sure all questions are answered in book two, which is called Due Process.

I very much liked how he doesn’t bog down in minutiae, telling the story over several years, but always telling you in the chapter heading exactly when in the timeline these events take place, so there’s no guessing involved on when in the story it is. And the spacing makes more sense than having all of this happen over a really short span of time, given that software needs time to develop, and so do relationships…even ones that occur as a direct result of manipulation. Moreover, the horror is long lasting, when it’s over several years. Especially for Peters, given that she was manipulated into a relationship she might not have otherwise had an interest in.

The biggest foreshadowing dread I have going into book two though is Hall’s friend Kevin, who worked very hard and is on the brink of enjoying the fruits of hard labor, and I have a feeling Neville is about to do something genuinely awful to derail that. I’m almost dreading finding out if I’m right.

So, as you know, when I review fiction, I get very circumspect, since I don’t want to give away so much of the story that you don’t feel you need to read the book yourself. So I’m going to end my review here by saying I very much enjoyed my trip through Mendelson’s world, and I will be getting book two to see how it all ends.

This book was originally reviewed on YouTube on October 1, 2023, but is now available on Rumble and PodBean.