Big Brother veille sur vous

~ iamthesunking

Is there a link between Facebook and WordPress? I know that they’re not owned by the same people, but is there some sort of creepy algorithmic link, in the same way that every keystroke that we type is monitored somewhere?

I ask this because, since my last post, my Facebook feed has been full of unsavoury animal ads, of which the most alarming was: “Are your dog’s anal glands full?”

Jésus, Marie et Joseph, et le petit âne.

I am shuddering, sweating and bleeding from the eyeballs as these words fall from my once-clean hand, and I pray that it will be the only time I ever have to write this. After today, let us never speak of this again.

Worse yet, the offending ad was a VIDEO. Naturellement, I didn’t watch it all the way through, but what I did see – and what my brain visualised – was enough. Could it be that the mention of animal arses on WordPress somehow triggered Facebook to bombard me with all this?

This is not the first time that we have suspected Them of spying on us. Cat Daddy once had a brief discussion with a friend about a magic wallet into which you could stuff multiple credit cards, without the wallet getting fat and bulky. The next morning, his Facebook feed was full of ads for said wallet.

On another occasion, my students were telling me about some crypto-currency that I’d never heard of, called Moondoggy or some such thing. When I Googled it whilst chatting to them, it was top of my search menu.

Students: “WHAT? It should be, like, the seventh or eighth thing, not the first! They’re listening to us!”

The most bizarre of them all was when Cat Daddy and I were watching Fargo, and we discussed one of the actors having also been in The Usual Suspects. Forty minutes in, we paused the film to get some snacks, then resumed … to find that we no longer recognised the characters or understood the plot. We wondered if Louis Catorze had spiked our popcorn with catnip … until we discovered that we were no longer watching Fargo. We were watching The Usual Suspects. And we weren’t even watching it from the start but from about – yes, you’ve guessed it – forty minutes in.

No, we did not switch films when we paused (and, if we had, we would have started it from the beginning, like normal people). No, we do not have a smart remote control prompted by voice commands, nor do we have Alexa.

Even more peculiar was that I’d made a mistake, and in fact the actor whom we were discussing was NOT in The Usual Suspects. Which disproves the theory that either we or They had somehow summoned a menu of All Films Starring Steve Buscemi, and selected one to start playing randomly from the middle.

Not even my tech-savvy students could explain this one. However, one of them, who has a chat noir and therefore knows exactly what they’re like, said, “Miss, erm … was your cat around at the time?”

“At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful.”

I don’t recall seeing Catorze but, of course, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. I would definitely remember, however, if he’d sat on the remote and switched films with his arse.

OH GOD, WE ARE BACK TO ANIMAL ARSES AGAIN.

On that note, here is Freya, whose fluffy hindquarters started off this whole thing:

“You mock my arse? You can kiss my arse!”

It wouldn’t surprise me if Freya were the mastermind behind all this.

Meanwhile, I am mystified by how They can be clever enough to know that I mentioned animal arses, but not clever enough to pick up on the tone and to understand that I was talking about my AVERSION to them. If it were all some marketing ploy to sell me dog anal gland cream/pills/whatever, They have failed.

However, one thing in which They HAVE succeeded is getting me to buy is more vodka – lots of it – to numb the trauma.

22 thoughts on “Big Brother veille sur vous”

  2. Yes…they are listening through your phone! Apparently you would need to remove the battery for it to stop….
    We’re forever being bombarded with stuff if it’s been talked about….
    So from now on…you’ll have to just write everything…..only Louis will ever be heard again!…..
    I wonder what they’ll make of that!

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  5. Maybe you got the – um – dog info because they HAD picked up on your aversion to cat derierres.

    On the other hand, I have googled something and later had the ads for it show up. Not after I looked it up on Amazon (which makes a weird kind of sense because I might be thinking of a purchase.) but just to see what something is or what a reference was in some article.. I do sometimes get ads in – usually French, because I read a couple of blogs that I have to translate. I just started following one that is Norwegian, so I will see if I start getting Norwegian ads.

    I DO have a chat noir but she prefers to stay outside, so she is not one ever lounging withing sight of my computer.
    No Alexa, no Amazon Echo, no smart TV no Tivo – I still even have a flip phone. Very strange.

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    1. Goodness! So they thought because I didn’t like cat rear ends, I might like dog ones? Now that I’ve written that I don’t like dog ones, what will they show me next? Goat ones? Monkey ones?

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  6. I, too, suspect that our phones are “eavesdropping”.On several occasions, friends, coworkers, family & myself have had ads for things discussed but not searched on the phone pop up. I’ve resorted to leaving the phone in another room when discussing possible purchases or health issues. I hate this because it makes me feel paranoid! Arrgh! By the way, Fargo is one of my favorite films. What do you & Cat Daddy opine?

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    1. Oh, we loved it! We liked the series, too, although not quite as much. We never finished the last season because somehow it just didn’t draw us in.

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  7. Nothing surprises me anymore. A couple of years ago my wife and I were in the car talking about state abbreviations. I told her I remember a comedian talking about the subject so I pulled out the phone and started typing in Google. I typed “Funny bit about…” and before I got any further google suggested at the top of the list “Funny bit about state abbreviations.” I know Google must have been listening. It can’t be that good.

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