Hypothesize a machine that allows you to change people's emotions directly, one that has seen mass adoption. Sure, people opt-in to using it, but once plugged in, it works as advertised: send the right commands to it, and people's emotions shift.

You could do a lot of good with one of those! The ultimate anti-anxiety treatment, the ultimate in letting people become the cooler heads they need to be for good ideas to prevail in tense situations.

You could also hack into it with almost no effort and turn a whole city into a bad knock-off of Resident Evil; hit the neurons that rabies hits, get people tearing and biting at each other.

Should people be allowed to install it?

I think it's possible that books were a great idea and a machine like the one I described (without proper constraints to put control in the hands of the owner) would be a terrible idea. There's probably some technology along the line between these where we say "Whoa, wait. What this could achieve is grand, but the way it gets there is, uh-oh."

The more powerful a technology is, the more obligation it implies upon the people holding control over its implementation and execution to consider moral and philosophical concerns of its use.

> Hypothesize a machine that allows you to change people's emotions directly, one that has seen mass adoption.

There absolutely are such machines and we call them computers.

> Should people be allowed to install it?

Communication is the powerful 'technology' that changes people's emotions directly. The mode of communication is a side-note. Tear down FB and none of this goes away - not because something rises from FB's ashes but because communication is a central facet of humanity.

Computers and face-to-face communication aren't quite there. I'm hypothesizing a machine that hits the emotional center with no intermediary. We don't have any technology in the real world that can do that yet (good art can approximate it, and good advertising can be very manipulative, but neither squirt neurotransmitters directly into your cerebral cortex of fire electrical impulses straight into your amygdala). This would be a technology that allowed you to set people's emotional states explicitly and willfully, without any intermediary of, for example, the personal experiences they're bringing to the table.

That is a much more interesting question than I originally thought!

You can plug into a happy room surrounded by your family and friends and it will be as though you are all together instead of thousands of miles apart. You can spend time with the children you miss, the grandchildren you hardly know, and it all comes for free.

You know that there will be commercials, of course, but that doesn't worry you too much. So what if every so often a handsome man comes in and tells you how delicious Coca Cola is? You've been around commercials before, you don't expect this time it will be much different.

But there are darker agencies at work. They suss out facts about your life, your joys, your fears, and they prey on them.

If you are a left-leaning person in a blue state they fill you with horror stories of religious fanatics who are determined to create a theocracy.

If you are a right-leaning person in a red state, they tell you of radicals who want to take away everything you've worked for and destroy everything you believe in.

It fits so neatly into what you already suspect that you never question it. Each new story becomes more and more outrageous, but you are a boiling frog at this point, you'll believe anything about 'the other side' no matter how outlandish.

So now you are a tool, a soldier, a person who can be manipulated in any way to support any cause as long as you believe that you are standing up to 'them'.

If it's not a PKD story, it should have been.

Should it be 'allowed'? I'll have to think on it.

There should be standards, even if they aren't defined by law. "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was republished by Henry Ford as part of a series of anti-semitic articles. The decision to publish them was immoral and is evidence of Ford's racism. I'm sure employers at the Economist would be angry if it started to run articles that would be a better fit for the National Enquirer.

Facebook is kind of different, it argues that it's a platform not a publisher. They do have some ground to argue for looser guidelines. But their business model targeting engagement incentivises them to promote divisive and false information. I'd be much more comfortable with Facebook if they didn't promote extreme and dangerous content. What those standards should be is a thorny issue, but better moderation would be an improvement.

> There should be standards, even if they aren't defined by law

I don't necessarily disagree and I'm sure there were plenty of reputable publishers who wouldn't touch the protocols.

But should the agency who did published it have been hauled up before a congressional investigating committee?

I wouldn't expect much from a congressional hearing. Especially since it would start out extremely political. But Facebook should be questioned over things like how they handle things like health conspiracy theories and blatantly fake political conspiracies.