From last week’s post, Abbynormal (with 5 votes) won the writing prompt:
“Taking his cue from L. Ron, Grahams sets about turning BN in to a powerful world controlling cult.”
Here’s your 500 words:
It was, Grahams mused, a surprisingly ingenious idea. If a penny-a-word sci-fi hack could do it, why couldn’t a skilled perl programmer do just the same thing? All it would take would be the right opportunity.
That’s when it happened–a website that he’d been a part of for a long time suddenly changed, to the shock and dismay of all its members. People were suddenly expatriated, banned from their home on the web for the most trivial of offences. Like a bolt out of the blue, Grahams, sipping his glass of single-malt Bannahubain, realized that his opportunity had come. In a feverish night of coding, he cooked up the basics of what would become the start of a new religion, guaranteed to bring him unimaginable profit and influence.
Cannily realizing that one’s own beliefs are unique to one’s own self, and that the best way to reinforce those beliefs is to argue them, Grahams built a framework where his parishioners would not only feel that the beliefs he was carefully inculcating into them were their own but would argue endlessly about them. These newly disenfranchised users, then, would form the core of his new religion–they had already been pre-screened, in a way, as being the most tenacious, argumentative, and cabalish people available.
At first, the new “Bannination” was innocent-looking enough: a place of refuge, a place to get away from the harsh moderation of that unspeakable place from whence they flocked. The rules were deliberately vague and permissive, to encourage an air of camaraderie and of belonging; a sort of nebulous feeling of ‘participation’ in the formation of what was seen as merely another news aggregation site.
Then, carefully orchestrated attacks came: posts were made, apparently from people still associated with the previous site, calculated to induce a feeling of paranoia and to tighten the bonds between the unwitting parishioners. Metrics were introduced in order to at once quash any dissenting views while further generating paranoia about who the real dissenters were. Grahams masterfully played off two pre-existing groups, cementing both into the milieu of Bannination as equal and opposing forces, grouped along already existing divisions–divisions that, ultimately, strengthened the Bannination group as a whole. Each division fed off the other’s attention: the “liberals” felt constantly under attack by the conservatives, and responded in kind; the “neocons” felt constantly threatened by the liberals, and kept the feedback cycle going.
Each eventually was encouraged to believe that the other side was engaged in a shadowy conspiracy against the other–for in this way, outside threats became unnecessary; the necessary tension required to inspire loyalty and paranoia was generated purely from within. This was a masterstroke for Grahams’ plots, as once a sufficiently large population was inducted into his cult, there would be no need to eternally seek out new threats to the status quo.
With the introduction of MasterBannination, a scheme to appropriate funds from the parishioners under the guise of offering improved features–features like reply detection, which were carefully crafted to further the paranoia and the emotional investment in the cult–Grahams’ plots proceed apace. Slowly but surely, the whole world will become Banninated.
Tags: bn fanfiction
