Chapter 256: Chapter 255.

Chapter 255. Enlisting Angela’s Aid. (4/6)

When I fell into an abrupt silence, Angela who’d listened attentively plugged an earbud in one ear as she fiddled with her phone. From my peripheral vision, I realized she was watching videos. Curious, my eyes wandered down to the screen.

Initially, I thought nothing of it. I’d thought it was a YouTube video or something, but my eyes shrank when I recognized she actually had an app open. What the hell? This app? Isn’t it that one? Why so soon? No… wait. That’s not right, there was a predecessor to it. I never actually saw what it looked like since I never used it, but it was rebranded.

“Hey, the app you have open, what’s it called?” It was best to verify that it was what I thought it was and the timeline hadn’t distorted to the point it came into existence faster than it should have.

“Huh? You don’t know what app this is? It’s gotten pretty popular in the last year or two.”

“Oh… is that so?”

“Yeah.”

“How many users are there?”

“Hmm, I’m not sure. Let me check.” She minimized the app and did a search for the number of users for the app online.

When I saw her key the app name into the search bar, I confirmed things hadn’t gone astray.

“It looks like it has about sixty million users.”

“I see…”

Well… this was troubling. I’d forgotten about how awful things became during this time period as a result of this cursed app's existence. More specifically, its future misuse to spread propaganda and misinformation while covertly manipulating the opinions of the masses. Though I never used the app myself, that didn’t mean I never read up about a few things related to it. I vaguely recalled some of the numbers from those days.

I silently opened up a spreadsheet on my phone and started jotting down the key numbers I recalled to come up with what the current evaluation of the company would look like.

June last year it only had ten million users, May this year it would hit over seventy million, by the end of June, it would have ninety million. By the end of this year, it would reach one hundred thirty million users. May of next year, two hundred million. The evaluation in May next year would be set at five hundred million dollars. The following September it would be acquired for between eight hundred million to one billion dollars. 

About five years from now, the evaluation ballooned to fifty billion dollars. It was a mind-boggling amount. It would have over two billion downloads and about seven hundred million users. The growth was exponential. 

I turned the data into two charts and plotted a few trend lines.

When I saw the results, my eyes shot open wide. I was genuinely disgusted by the curve I saw. However, if I ignored the right side of the chart that was way too optimistic, the valuation of the app stood at about 300 to 400 million at present. That was equivalent to the net worth of some of the biggest celebrities. It was something still considered within reach.

If that was the case… was it possible for Angela to acquire it or at least become a majority holder of the company? If it was possible… it might be a way to avoid the merger of the two behemoths which resulted in this outrageous unhealthy and explosive growth in September next year.

September this year was the deadline to make a move though. To minimize the deviation in the timeline, it was necessary to rebrand the app before it could be snatched up. Angela was the perfect candidate for this endeavor. She’d chosen to pursue an education in computer science, she had a large following, a good amount of influence, was big on social media, and she had more money than she knew what to do with. If there was anyone who could potentially put a dent into this complicated problem, rather than an assassin, it was her.

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I did a bit of research into the company on my phone to see if such a plan would be viable. However, I was met with an immediate roadblock right off the bat. I’d always known this app had its foothold in the west so I assumed they were a western company as well. Sadly, that was not the case.

This company was based in the same country as the one that acquired it. Meaning… my plan was likely impossible. There was nothing that could be done. They had an office in the west, however, that location was more like a bobblehead. It was there for show.

I’d never put the pieces of the puzzle together before, but the timing of events was all too perfect. September after the election, this platform would launch. They would appear as if they were a copycat when in reality they weren’t. Exactly one year later, the two companies would merge and form the greatest propaganda weapon to spread misinformation and exacerbate unrest within western countries.

They had their own isolated version of this app for their country. 

Why was that?

From what I knew, there were differences in the sorts of features provided by the two versions of the app. The reason could be partially attributed to this. With a few simple taps in their version, you could easily purchase products featured in videos, you could book a hotel after watching a video shot there, you could take virtual tours of stores and restaurants, get coupons you could use in them, and even post geo-tagged video reviews.

However, this definitely wasn’t the only reason.

Censorship laws in their country. That was the most significant reason.

With how censored the app was in their country, it was much easier to instill a sense of nationalism within their country. They could control what their people thought and easily keep track of any troublesome individuals. They were able to do so because privacy didn’t exist for citizens. Every action they took was heavily monitored and scrutinized. It was a country ruled by authoritarianism and fear.

Many citizens were scared to stick out. To have different views. It was very unlike western countries that valued freedom and liberty.

This was what I felt the true reason the two apps had been kept separate was. They didn’t want their own citizens to interact with the outside world and be corrupted the same way they planned to corrupt citizens of other countries. One was a weapon, a Trojan horse, a ticking time bomb, while the other was a shield, a bomb shelter. 

A tick-tock sound is often associated with a bomb. While a vibrating sound could be heard from above when inside a bomb shelter after the bomb goes off.

If I thought of the names of those apps as meaning this, it was rather poetic.

Honestly, it was pretty clever. But nevertheless, it amounted to nothing more than a conspiracy theory that I had no way to prove. Saying such a thing aloud would simply brand me as a rambling lunatic.

I’d be mocked and looked at disdainfully by others around me for thinking too deeply into it. That would be the end result. I couldn’t change anything. It was too late to do so. If I’d gone even further back in time I could have created the app myself preemptively, but it was too late to do that.

But even if I had gone further back, I wouldn’t have had the means to spread word of this app and popularize it. Could one child compare to the might of an entire country's government with all the resources they had at their disposal to make that app blow up as quickly as it did? They had the means and ability to mobilize a billion people. Thus, the answer to that idiotic question was a resounding no.

Doing so required manpower and a very large capital investment. Just look at me, I’d just barely gotten by in life after my mother’s death. When would I have ever had the leisure to even care or worry about matters that concerned the future of the world back then? I had to worry whether I’d even survive from one day to the next.

In the end, the more people you had in this online world where information could travel across the globe in seconds, the stronger you were. The side with the loudest voice would win, not the voice of reason. 

Majority rules.

There were benefits to majority rules, but there was also a great drawback that came with it. It could be taken advantage of. The system could be gamed so long as you united and controlled the majority under one banner. If the wrong person came to control this majority, it would be a disaster.

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