Social Media, HR and CIA Drug Trafficking

There’s a conspiracy theory out there that the CIA has been involved in drug trafficking since the 1960s.

Starting with America’s involvement in Southeast Asia (remember that old war?) through our current conflict in Afghanistan, people on the internet believe that the CIA moved drugs across the globe to impact political outcomes while simultaneously working to distribute crack cocaine in African American neighborhoods in Southern California and providing big pharmaceutical companies cover to hook middle-class Americans on painkillers.

So that’s a lot, right?

Those highly coordinated efforts by the CIA helped to install politicians, boosted the military industrial complex, and made billions of dollars for fat-cat corporatists whose for-profit prisons disproportionately imprisoned African American and Latino members of our society.

Seems crazy, does it?

That’s how I feel about social media.

I don’t think the CIA created social media to continue its historic and covert oppression of American citizens, but I don’t not think it.

Over the past decade, I’ve watched social media spread through our society like Nicaraguan cocaine in the 1980s. What was once exclusive and independent is now mainstream and interdependent. Through a highly sophisticated and coordinated dissemination of mobile devices, we’re all on our favorite social media channels trying to feed the addiction we have for ourselves.

That’s some seriously impressive CIA-level work.

Social media makes a lot of things worse, especially HR.

You know how there’s one really drunk or high person at a party who thinks she’s interesting but is really just a moron? That’s HR on social media. Anybody who tells you that Snapchat is the future of recruiting is high — and she also happens to be wrong. That’s the same lady who said LinkedIn was the future of recruiting. And before that, the fax machine.

While it might be true that today’s job seeker wants to learn more about your company on Snapchat, it’s also true that today’s job seeker might prefer to be paid in a brick of cocaine.

Just because you want something doesn’t mean you get it. Even El Chapo finally understands that.

So am I a social media conspiracy theorist?

I don’t think Twitter and Facebook are tools of the CIA, but I don’t not think it.

Power concentrated is power abused, as crazy-lady Carly Fiorina tells us. Hegemonic power loves people who are dumb, slow, and addicted to drugs and narcissism. That’s true when it comes to CIA drug trafficking or the executive leadership team of Snapchat.

So even if you’re not fully on board with my social media conspiracy theories, I hope you can check yourself before you wreck yourself. Social media changes our brains like heroin. Part-time browsing on Instagram and Pinterest probably won’t kill you. Reading posts on LinkedIn and Medium won’t harm the world. (Well, TBD.)

But nothing good comes from overindulgence and addiction, whether it’s an illegal substance or Snapchat.