At the end of a lunch meeting today, I mentioned UT Professor Dr. Pennebaker and his textual analysis work. Within an hour and a half of that conversation, Facebook puts this “Suggested Post” in my mobile fb feed:
Lecture: James W. Pennebaker, “Expressive Writing and Health”
Public · Hosted by Humanities Institute at The University of Texas at Austin
I’ve not been performing recent searches for the unique name of Pennebaker so I don’t think this is a case of algorithms predicting things to put in my path but… perhaps so.
– SMiles
FLASHBACK: My first experience of this phone / advertising / synthetic synchronicity phenomenon, circa Thanksgiving 2011:
…so riddle me this … GPS data mining / colocating for cross-platform advertising? …
This day before turkeyday I was at a relative’s house. They had just gotten new hardwood floors. We talked about it a lot. I was there less than 24 hours. Next morning I am leaving and begin the drive to other relatives house. I am listening to Pandora in the car on my phone and an advert I’ve never heard before comes on.
It was for the same kind of hardwood flooring! And NO I’d not searched for the info on my phone or otherwise.
Re: Evidence that your phone is spying on you
. . . and another circa 2014 and shared again circa 2017:
“Is this real or simulated?”
“True” Internet synchronicity is harder and harder to discern because of the beast-system information trawling surveillance state.
… and …
Diana – just to be clear, I was referencing a “synthetic synchronicity” moment I experienced back in December 2014 …
“Here’s to Jacques Vallee’s Melchizedek Moment in Messengers of Deception and my moment-a-go realization of the beast-system’s technological adaptation / adoption of the synchromystic associative cosmic bulletin board conspiracy gnosis of the UFO’s coincidence matrix … @BIBENDUM BIBENDUM BIBENDUM”
… and …
“I was trying to encapsulate my sense that our new internet marketing mechanisms have duplicated the synchronicity engineering that Vallee suggests might be part of the mechanisms of the cosmos allowing interaction / cocreation between mind and everything else. Yesterday morning I had commented on my friend Mack White’s posting of several Michelin Man / Bibendum images and then later that night on a random webpage I visited the cookie-detecting / facebook enabled targeted advert on the sidebar was my new avatar: an advert for Michelin tires featuring Bibendum himself making a “thumbs-up” gesture. It really felt like a significant synch for me at that moment – DESPITE my knowing full well the likely advertising mechanisms operating behind the scenes to make it happen. So basically a modern technological mechanism that approximates the possibly innate nature of Universe as described by Jacques Vallee as the cosmic bulletin board / associative universe that “reads” our “intentions” or desires to be connected to certain things / information.”
. . . and another example circa 2015:
This has been increasingly happening to me …
So last night I spoke of spray foam insulation to my wife within earshot of our phones. And this is what I see in my FuckBook news stream this morning…
SMiles Lewis 
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