In many ways this blog is the opposite of an echo chamber. An anechoic chamber, with my thoughts forming a series of angular baffles that deaden any feedback. But what if I always got feedback, and that feedback was overwhelmingly positive? What if I had the biggest echo chamber in the world? What would that do to me?
I would believe that everything I said was great, because my echo chamber would tell me that everything I said was great. Then, it would dawn on me that everything I thought was also great. It had to be, because everything I said started out as something I thought.
More than that, if everything I thought was great, then it followed that the thoughts of the few people who disagreed with me were completely wrong. They were the stupid thoughts of stupid people. I would tell them that and my echo chamber would back me up. They wouldn't stand a chance, but how could they? They weren't smart enough to buy something as vastly powerful as my echo chamber.
At some point I would decide that the optimal body shape is 'mid-century refrigerator'.
I wouldn't use my echo chamber to body shame people. That would be a crass abuse of a force multiplier that could be used to call my detractors paedophiles instead.
As fun as that would be, it's only a fraction of what I could achieve with the world's largest echo chamber. At full strength I could use it to persuade people that it's a very good and sensible idea to let me step over the democratic process like it’s litter in the street. I could be at the levers of government power, and if people didn't want me there they should have said so. Not that anyone would have heard them over the reverberation of things I wanted to hear from my echo chamber.
If that didn't work out I could call the president a paedo and try my hand at strongarming the laws of physics instead. I would decide that orbital data centres are the future and my echo chamber would tell me how terribly clever I am for proposing something which does not currently have a viable solution. I would be a visionary rather than a science fiction writer! I would not tell my echo chamber that the real appeal of space data centres is that space is largely unregulated. Shhh!
Critics of the late Steve Jobs used to accuse him of having a reality distortion field. The projected force of his self-belief was so strong it was as though he defied the evidence of the world around him. Well, that didn't work out so well in the end because he's dead now, but my echo chamber would be his reality distortion field made real. I could use it to project my thoughts into the world so powerfully that people would choose to believe them over the more traditional objective reality. I would tell people that the world they experience every day is actually dangerous and corrupt, even though it's safer than it's ever been. What japes! The irony is that the corruption is actually coming from me. Tee hee! I said that the irony is that, I mean this is very funny, but I'm the one corrupting their reality. Never mind, everyone in my echo chamber will love that joke.
Would I use the world's largest echo chamber to make the world a better place? Most certainly, so long as you understand that I am the world, and by better I mean wealthier. If that makes you uncomfortable, be sure that you are in the minority. Everyone agrees with me because I am always right. As a matter of fact people don't just agree with me, they despise you. I know this because I told them to.
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