Said Merriam-Webster, “In this age of misinformation—of “fake news,” conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls, and deepfakes—gaslighting has emerged as a word for our time.

“…gaslighting is “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.” 2022 saw a 1740% increase in lookups for gaslighting, with high interest throughout the year…Its origins are colorful: the term comes from the title of a 1938 play and the movie based on that play, the plot of which involves a man attempting to make his wife believe that she is going insane. His mysterious activities in the attic cause the house’s gas lights to dim, but he insists to his wife that the lights are not dimming and that she can’t trust her own perceptions.”

In the earlier days of tech and home computing, Apple was the underdog and Microsoft the Evil Empire, and note those were the days of MSFT with founder Bill Gates at the helm. Google took over the ‘evil’ designation, with Apple fanboys still blindly committed to their tech god. Now it seems that Apple Is Tracking You Even When Its Own Privacy Settings Say It’s Not, New Research Says, Gizmodo reported.

Gaslighting.

So, if you thought you’d found a company you could trust, time to think different.

 

Where Do You Want to Go Today? was the slogan when Microsoft launched search engine Internet Explorer way back when, although it might more appropriately have been ‘where do you think you want to go today?,’ but given Google’s somewhat less than non-biased algorithm, fair enough. And considering that, like their friends in Big Tech, Microsoft tracks users ad nauseam, we might consider updating it to, ‘Where Do You Want to Go Today – We’re Right There with You Every Step of the Way.’

 

DuckDuck Stop

Speaking of gaslighting, said Business Today, “DuckDuckGo has been big about privacy, that’s exactly how it has pushed its browser’s agenda ahead in comparison to Google’s Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and others. And things were going pretty decent for the company till a recent revelation by security researcher Zack Edwards. Edwards revealed…that DuckDuckGo’s mobile browser allows some Microsoft sites to bypass its tracker block. So, while the browser was blocking trackers from Facebook and Google, an exception was being made for Microsoft. Edwards also found that DuckDuckGo allows data to be sent to LinkedIn and Bing, both domains owned by Microsoft.”

No one ever said Microsoft had ceased being an evil empire. It’s just that they took something of a back seat when Google became eviler (sic). As for DDG being about your privacy, gaslighting.

 

Thursday Night Massacre? Really?

Twitter recently booted nine journalists from the platform. “Thursday Night Massacre” is what Wikipedia originally called it, since the journalists were expelled for seven days, mind you, without warning and reportedly, by some publications, for being critical of owner Musk in their coverage. “They posted my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service,” Musk tweeted in response to the incident after noting that the “same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else.” But the Wikipedia article’s stance was that the incident undermined Musk’s commitment to free speech, while others referred to the move as being ‘unprecedented’ that reporters would be deplatformed, despite the fact that that particular practice had been a longstanding one at Twitter, who expelled reporters who did not echo various ‘accepted’ talking points.

Gaslighting.

 

Holiday present for the so-called conspiracy theorist on our list here, and we did check it twice:  Musk’s Neuralink faces federal probe, employee backlash over animal tests, Reuters reported. The company has killed about 1,500 animals, including more than 280 sheep, pigs and monkeys, since testing began in 2018. Yet VAERS data released (in 2021) by the CDC showed a total of 438,441 reports of adverse events from all age groups following COVID vaccines, including 9,048 deaths and 41,015 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020 and July 2, 2021. There was no coverage of this information in the mainstream media – nor is there a federal probe in sight. For the record, we’re not an anti-vaxxer, and VAERS -Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System – is part of HHS. We’re merely reporting a hmmm on the word of the year.

 

Of course, examples go on and on and FTX/Sam Bankman-Fried is certainly worth a mention, having bilked investors out of billions while using FTX as his personal piggie bank – something we warn founders of all the time: that investor dollars are an investment in your company, not your personal piggy bank and at long last there’s a term for that- SBF, who also used his previously-founded company, Alameda, to help gaslight investors. Given her sudden extravagant lifestyle post-funding at the expense of the investor dollars put into Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes is yet another gaslighting case in point.

 

As Merriam-Webster said, this is the age of misinformation— and it’s no wonder that gaslighting has emerged as the word for our time. It’s the also known as the illusion of truth effect – “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth,” said Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Our suggestion? Do your research and always ask questions (starting with who benefits? Or what’s the agenda?).

Should you choose to at least start looking into the gaslighting that’s been going on – at least in tech -, since it is the holidays, there’s no place like Holmes. Onward and forward – and happy holidays!