Last update 17APRIL22 #65
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| One for the Only Connect fans |
This blog reviews the damage done to global society by the systematic abuse of social media and the internet, presently too much in the hands of plutocrats, conscience-free sociopaths and woefully uninformed politicians. It was offered initially as a series of topic lead chapters, but is evolving into a set of some 15 core topics that will be progressively edited, honed, adpated and re-dated.
The underpinning tech of Blogger is not entirely predictable as the document size inrcreases, but this is overall a better way to organise content than most - especially Facebook which appears to be in terminal decline as an information sharing and publishing platform.
The internet has also greatly facilitated the process of whistle blowing – namely making public that which an employer or government doesn’t want made public knowledge. Whistle blowers at social media companies are exposing the secretive processes by which their employers – too often sociopath geeks, encouraged by greedy bankers, have inherited the earth, while the regulators and politicians slept. Facebook employees have been trying to warn the world of the malvolence at the heart of the operation - so who can the rest of us believe?
One especially pertinent video was posted before the 2020 US presidential elections that reported political interference that was specifically endorsed by Facebook policy. As usual, nothing happened, and it was declared “fake news” by Facebook management and largely overlooked by other mainstream media who appear to be unduly deferential to Facebook and its vast advertising budget and influence.
It seems that a UK metrolectual/millennial clique effectively controls the UK media agenda via Twitter and the BBC, Channel4 and the advertising industry. This clique has become preoccupied with promoting its agenda using classic cultural Marxist tactics of righteous abuse, and limiting the vocabulary available to create a restricted "newspeak"– and pushes the idea that the UK's traditional press is mostly a conspiracy in the hands of right wing reactionaries, promoting an anti-EU, anti-immigrant, pro “rich bastard” agenda. Key bogeymen include Rupert Murdoch (News Corp: The Sun, Times, Talk Radio, News UK TV) the Daily Mail Group, the Daily Express, and the Telegraph. According to the clique, there is no such thing as a “moderate or liberal conservative” point of view. In Metrolectual land, the only recognised states of politics are hard right and righteous enlightened liberal left.
Controlling the social agenda is a long game, and those trying to steer it are well aware that traditional media is being overtaken by online information consumption, where the traditional audience is aging (and let’s be frank, dying off) and being replaced by tech-savvy and impressionable kids with the attention span of gnats – for whom a Pavlovian relationship with their phone is now the source of everything that informs and supports their modern lifestyle – which is increasingly driven by endorphins triggered by social media approvals.
“Endorphins are chemicals produced by the body to relieve stress and pain. They work similarly to a class of drugs called opioids. Opioids relieve pain and can produce a feeling of euphoria. They are sometimes prescribed for short-term use after surgery or for pain-relief.”
Remember that Karl Marx once observed that religion was
the opium of the people? Time has moved on, and the crutch upon which milennial lifestyles rely for support is now a mobile phone. Instead of the distilled wisdom of thousands of years of evolved morality, learning and heritage delivered on thinly sliced dead trees, 21st century life is about triggering an audience of hundreds of millions with a photo of a celebrity bust enhancement - in milliseconds.
A crucial part of this transformation has been to establish the idea of “fact checkers” as resources that will attest to the veracity of statements published online, so that purveyors of deliberately misleading propaganda can be called out and exposed; but the dilemma of fact checking is ironically exposed when you want the origin of the phrase:
A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes
… if you don't want to settle for Mark Twain or Churchill, then Quote Investigator wibbles on for pages without reaching a conclusion, long after the enquirer has got bored and fallen asleep.
A view currently gaining popularity is the observation that
“Once upon a time, banana-republic revolutionaries used to shoot the president and storm the TV station – but these days the subversives take over the fact checkers and deplatform the president…”
Too many politicians asked to comment on media bias avoid the subject and look away. They know it has divided opinion worldwide and the issue is too hot to handle when Facebook (and its invasive spyware) is being used to collude with government policy.
When the internet was first conceived, the idea was to spread the rapidly accumulating benefits of affordable networked information and interaction across the planet, and put it in the hands of the “little people” to help them compete and reach new markets with challeging ideas and innovative products.
This blog is based on content written by a number of pioneers of the online age who set out with the best intentions, and who have been observing and participating since before the first web page was served. We feel in part responsible for allowing control of what has become an attention economy to inadvertently pass to Mark Zuckenberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter - aided and abetted by Apple, Amazon, Google, TikTok and variety of others – especially bankers and financiers – who have been equally derelict in their duty to mankind - but are less personality cults and more faceless corporate money printing machines driven by stock value. For the pioneers, it’s like watching our children being brought up by feckless foster parents, and we would like to at least invite a serious rethink by those who have the power and influence to steer things back on the rails.
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Keep in mind all interference by politicians tends to have disastrous unforeseen consequences, and the internet was designed from the outset to provide what amounts to a weapons grade communication scheme that would a survive nuclear attack. It can only change as the result of popular demand and participation in the process (if at all).
We have arrived at a point in time and society where the main driving force of the “global economy” – the nebulous concept which ultimately determines if we get fed and survive – is shifting from domination by the USA, Europe and the West, towards domination by China, India and Far East.
Is the domination benign? Are we generally working openly towards the greater good of mankind – or a malignant pursuit of narrow self-interest?
We have arrived at a position where UK and US democratic societies (especially) have been divided down the middle – and are now dangerously vulnerable to manipulative propaganda that one “side” of this divide calls “the truth”, and the other side calls “fake news”. This is a big deal, but before we can get into the details it is necessary to establish the starting points for assumptions and propositions that we will be developing.
So where and how did this disruptive period of global destiny start?
There was a point no so long ago after the Clinton presidency (from 1993 to 2001) that politicians declared a “golden age” of stability and prosperity that would continue indefinitely. I cannot include all the references here and the reader must be prepared to google their way to a level of enlightenment that satisfies their individual thirst.
The internet really got going during the Clinton Presidency, after Vice President Al Gore coined the phrase “Information Superhighway” – at which point the benefits and advantages seemed endless and wholly good for mankind. As the economy grew off the back of the new efficiencies and opportunities of technology Politicians were encouraged to look away while the pioneering internet engineers took advantage of the lack of political interference and oversight to accelerate development.
In reality, everywhere the internet has reached is at a considerable risk, since all efforts to filter, censor and control the content that reaches the users have mostly failed. And the use of the internet to spy on populations and countries has exceeded the worst fears of the pioneers.
They present result is either a free for all with an attempt to apply local law to rein in the extremes using antiquated legal procedures, or a central censorship with the government controlling what users are allowed to see by using a firewall at the point at which the worldwide internet joins local country networks. George Orwell’s 1984 vision of Big Brother became reality in countries like China and Saudi Arabia.
But elsewhere, such is the influence of social media services
like Facebook and Twitter, various big brother propaganda alert messages are
being inserted regarding pandemic issues, and climate change in “partnership”
with the local country governments, apparently in return for the social media
platforms being given a form of immunity from data protection and other laws
that might cramp their style and ability to hollow out traditional publishing
industries in order to feed their stock value..
One conclusion is that the UK government has allowed the authority
of the once globally present and trusted BBC to be so reduced in purpose and technical
capability, that it feels obliged to work with foreign corporations to communicate
crucial information the British people.
How did this happen?
Simple: that capability of the technology developed exponentially according to Moore’s Law and that means that much larger quantities of data can be transferred more rapidly than anyone had thought possible when the early modems ran at 300 bits second.
“Careful what you wish for” doesn’t begin to cover it.
This explosion in technology has overtaken governments and politicians and put the geeks in total charge of the attention economy in countries where they are allowed to operate. China has other ideas, and was not so careless.
One unexpected consequence is that when a hacker finds its way into a home computer on a 100Mbit link, it can scan and empty the contents before the user realises they’ve been breached. The increase in processing power and its shrinkage into mobile devices has enabled speech and image processing and recognition way beyond the expectations of the pioneers of those technologies. Sophisticated tools of spyware are now attached to entire population like tracking tags.
The Clinton/Gore Golden Age of prosperity at the start of the internet had spread across a broad front, but it came off the rails in 2008 when the toxic mortgage crisis almost brought down the Western banking as the result of failed Mortgage-backed securities. The momentum already driving the internet and tech economy was only slightly impacted, most of the damage was done to the traditional economy as banks crashed and manual clerical labour was replaced by networked computer power. Prosperity resumed but instead of vote-buying consumer finance packages, the economy was focused on the endless expansion of tech to drive efficiency and fuel the rise of the billionaires and their trillion-dollar corporations. But this was also the start of the hollowing out of the traditional middle classes as organic growth start-ups without the benefit of lumps of venture capital became a lot more challenging. Every business was now also locked onto a treadmill of constant growth, evolution, education and development. 20 years of experience no longer meant one year of learning, played out twenty times; it means twenty years of constant learning
The export of manufacturing from the USA and Europe to China and the Far East was a crucial part of the efficiency mantra, since the golden age had enabled Western governments to pour resources into vote chasing social and environmental politics and policies while piling up red-tape burdens on manufacturing and start-ups. Meanwhile, China and India cleared the way for their manufacturing entrepreneurs.
The great political divide
Meantime, we seem to be divided down the middle between the silent majority of grumpier older folks who remember life before the internet information tsunami - and now have no idea who and what to believe (in media shorthand this means conservatives (small c) - the right - Trumpsters/Tories) and the liberal left, made up of younger people and academics plus the purveyors of public information once broadly referred to as "the media" that has abandoned its once precious reputation for sober objectivity and opted for subjective triggering - fearing that its audience is no longer interested in being part of a rational and informed debate but seeking to have their mounting prejudices confirmed in an echo chamber.
However the liberal left seems more confident having grown up with the information tsunami and do not appeared to be fazed in the way that older folks seeking to make sense are unwilling to accept that concepts they understood – such that the police tend to be on the side of law and order – are now out-moded and need to be replaced. Although the precise nature of replacement has yet to be determined…
The impatience, impetuosity and self-righteousness of youth combined with a willingness to impose a fashionable point of view without asking permission, is a problem for many.
There is a legendary Youtube posting with KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov on the subject of information overload, wherein he describes almost exactly what happened when the Soviet Union set in train a long term strategy to confuse and demoralise the US by causing the people to question reality and working on the fault lines in US society – “most of it is done to Americans by Americans thanks to lack of moral standards. Truth becomes irrelevant.”
See this https://youtu.be/Heuwd_7vEJo and ponder. This particular video is hosted by a youtuber who calls himself An0maly (real name Albert J. Faleski) and self-describes as “Good energy. Truth-seeker. Change yourself to change the world! Hip-hop Artist. News Analyst. Human being. Stay blessed.”
He tends to annoy the left-wing dominated “fact checking world” since he is a supporter of Trump with an annoyingly rational and thoughtful approach when the anti-Trump world hopes to be able to unearth all manner of unhinged weirdness. Try as they may, Albert cannot be readily caught out. Penthouse Australia has posted this extremely interesting interview covering An0maly’s journey from supporting the messiah of the US political left – Bernie Sanders – to its very nemesis, Donald J Trump.
At the heart of the information debate is the “media” (social and traditional) - a means by which information is usually conveyed – and so a definition of media is essential… in our current context …
“media is the means by which an eager seller is introduced to a potential buyer. It is the job of the medium to gather an audience by publishing interesting content to attract and hold attention – which, given the vast spread of human interest, can be literally anything from the price of cocoa to the size of a celebrity bust enhancement, and then try to motivate the buyer to purchase the goods offered by the advertisers and sponsors, and so be assured of their repeat business.”
Which takes us neatly up to the idea of Attention Economy – a proposition that recognises attention has value, since the start of any human activity begins with the need to attract and retain the attention of the participants in that activity. Whereas in pre-internet world this attention was sought by “propositioning the punters” with notions like “buy one get one free” – the post internet world requires the process to involve devices derived from its intrusive world of espionage and propaganda where the advertiser has your demographic and psychological profile and can program its proposition to get right into your weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
An agitated person is in a better starting place to be influenced than one who is content and comfortable. Unsurprisingly, the popular media generally sets out to put its audience off balance, and out its comfort zone and ready to be influenced… The British Daily Express newspaper is notorious for publishing stories about “Most severe winter forecast ever …” without any basis in fact, but because they know after years of experience, it grabs attention and sells papers.
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Let the name calling commence!
Those on the right of the Great Divide who express concerns at the problems of society that go beyond polite observation but enter into the debate are termed “reactionary”, likewise on the left, the term for promoting views designed to get attention above the noise level, is “passionate”.
Those on the right who are willing to express a view are generally those who have been shaped by life's experiences – and they may see themselves set against a generally unworldly and inexperienced left; and on the left (other side) the pushback of the right when seeking to retrain the status quo and slow down the pace of change is perceived as prejudice against anything new that they don't understand.
And between these two opposing forces, there is a constant manipulation of information for profit and/or influence that means that many people do not know who or what to believe.
The mainstream broadcast and online media seems unable to bring itself to describe a “moderate conservative” or “liberal conservative” but insists that anyone pushing against the media’s inherent “metrolectual” left leaning bias has to be “right wing” or “extreme right wing”, whereas the left are never less than “liberal democrats”. It is left the reactionary right to call the “raving lefties”, when no other shorthand sobriquet will fit the bill.
In the UK, the bellwether of the mainstream broadcast media has been the BBC for 100 years but it does not have to address the realities involved in earning a living – it is fed from a compulsory tax imposed on its audience. In the old world, commentary was provided by critics and commentators - and now social media has introduced a new breed known as “influencers” – mainly drawn from the ranks of those who have embraced the past 20 years of new technology that has swept in a flood of information that has overwhelmed all in its path.
The purists may argue that “an argument is the use of aggressive opposition to weed out weak logic, keeping the strongest ideas possible. The philosophy behind using arguments for problem-solving is that attacking the weak parts of an idea will leave the best solutions." Such arguments are a luxury in these terse and irritable times, where both parties generally start from a position suspecting the problem stems from simple but determined ignorance on the part of “the other side”.
Unhelpfully, the world is being divided by ignorance, hypocrisy and denial. The expression “elephant in the room” is widely understood to mean “a large and contentious issue that everyone is acutely aware of, but nobody wants to talk about for fear of starting an aggressive discussion between opposing viewpoints” - with no guarantee that rational logic - or even demonstrable truth - will prevail.
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