By Leon Sozeb.
Do you ever feel tired and stressed by the current polarized political climate? Does it ever seem like public opinion is increasingly gravitating away from the fiscally conservative and socially liberal opinions held by most reasonable people and toward the extremes of the political spectrum, into diametrically opposed camps that do nothing but talk past each other?
In 2014, I was on a company retreat at a ski resort in Nepal, and I was pondering how we could once again put reasonable voices front and center in our political discussions. I had been microdosing on DMT for the previous two months, and as I hiked up the slopes, it struck me that modern data technology empowers us to pinpoint the exact center position in any political debate. I knew I was on to something big: No longer would the truth be shrouded in a haze of subjectivity. It could be measured and quantified by a sufficiently advanced algorithm and a large enough dataset.
After this revelation, I realized that I needed to start a new department at my company, Sozeb Enterprises, dedicated to using modern data science in order to quantify and pinpoint the political center. After a year of collecting and analyzing millions of blog posts, news articles, editorials, and rants, we introduced our first offering, the ModerApp, which allows users to measure their own political views against the national average. Early reviews by the tech press were overwhelmingly positive, and the ModerApp was hailed as in important step forward in promoting political literary and civil discussion in the digital age. Many users have written to me personally to testify about how they were shocked to discover how far they had drifted away from mainstream opinion and to thank the app’s creators for providing an important wake up call. This app has helped thousands of people optimize their social networks by helping them select the viewpoints that are the most agreeable to the greatest number of people, and has provided an important check on extreme and unpopular opinions.
Now, we are ready to take the next step. We have plotted the range of possible opinions on to a graph, with 0 being the center, 1 being the most conservative opinion possible, and -1 the most liberal. We have created a patch for all the major social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, as well as for search engines such as Google. Once this patch has been installed, it will use our Political Opinion Scale to assign a rating to every story and article posted on the site in question. Naturally, stories with a perfect zero rating will skyrocket to the top of the user’s feed, and as their deviation from the center increases, their likelihood of appearing to the user decreases dramatically. Any story with a rating higher than .25 or lower than -.25 will go practically unread.
At Sozeb Enterprises, we like to dream big. We believe that our brand is the perfect antidote to the current media climate in which extreme positions reign supreme, emotions run high, and reasonable people with reasonable opinions are all too often excluded from the discussion. We believe that modern data technology allows us to engineer a solution to this design flaw in our political discourse. It’s time for moderates of all stripes to band together against extreme viewpoints on both sides. Remember, the corollary to the horseshoe theory is that the center left and the center right are closer to each other than either one is to its respective extreme. Once our media environment has been cleansed of toxic radical agendas, we can all take a breath of fresh air.
Leon Sozeb is an entrepreneur, inventor, and the founder and CEO of Sozeb Enterprises, a transportation and space exploration company that has recently branched out into providing data-driven solutions to everyday problems. Mr. Sozeb lives in Los Angeles, California, and is the owner of one of the largest collections of Japanese tentacle erotica in the world. His hobbies include skiing, dabbling in Eastern religions, and reading old science fiction novels for ideas to pitch to Silicon Valley investors. He is an avid proponent of the benefits of microdosing, and is considering a run for President.