It's the modern day way. Perhaps the online filter bubbles over the past... Long while... Have finally shown their long term real world impacts.
There has literally never been a good time in America for either group.
In reality, the cost of video production dropped to near-zero (smartphones, TikTok, YouTube). However, he was right about the outcome. The "entry barrier" isn't the cost of the camera, it's the cost of the algorithmic optimization and the "strategies to draw attention" in an information glut. The rich didn't win because video is expensive; they won because virality is gameable with resources. Credits where due, he indeed called out this potential for "international manipulation of domestic politics" well before the major scandals of the 2016 era.
In other words, the present day is just business as usual.
I am against this growing notion that the internet is creating a unique situation where the average person is more oppressed than ever. It enables both good and bad things, and yes we really need to pay attention to the bad things. But it’s still a tool that can be used for engagement in the democratic process, for speech, for small scale commerce, and for communication.
This needs to be stated because those who oppose the good aspects of the internet are fully prepared to hijack anti-internet sentiment in the name of protecting the public. “Locking down” the internet will do nothing to improve the situation of ordinary people. Quite the opposite in fact.
If you’re opposed to the difficult and often irrational voices of the public, you’re in fact opposed to democracy.
This is a good early example of the “populism is bad for democracy” genre of Ivy League handwringing, with titles like “The People Vs. Democracy”. It’s almost amusing to see how uncomfortable the ruling class is with peer-to-peer discourse unmediated by Fact Checkers, Debunkers, and other Adults In The Room.
People are often obnoxious, irrational, absurd, and they may even flat out lie. Shocking! Advocating for this mess to be kept from view is advocating for further obscuring the reality of the situation.
I grew up in a time when the TV only presented a polished, curated, “civilized” view of the world. It’s why most Americans didn’t know anything about US interventions in Latin America, about the effects of offshoring and trade liberalization, and about the false justifications for the Iraq War. (Yet even in the late 20th century, conspiracy talk was rampant—it’s not a new phenomenon nor was it created by the internet.)
Before we had the internet, many things were done with my tax dollars that I had zero insight into. These days, even though I can’t do anything about it, at least I’m aware of the parade of horrors around the world. In some cases I can even make informed decisions based on that information.
I’d rather have fellow voters making decisions based on an abundance of information, some of which is bad, than a carefully crafted set of information that’s designed to steer voters toward a limited set of outcomes.
This is how you get atrocities and coverups, strategic losses that don’t result in corrective action, and endless graft. Eventually this leads to major military losses. Some degree of wartime censorship is inevitable to conceal information from the enemy, but anything beyond that creates serious problems in a democracy.
Ideally you should trust your government. In a healthy democracy the government can create a barrier to entry for the media and then be hands off only intervening when necessary. This isnt a bad thing at all in my opinion.
I prefer this to having 0 barrier to enter the media and allowing anyone to give their opinion.
There is no such thing as a nation consistently working towards common goals, except in a totalitarian system. At best you can get a few years of alignment in wartime, but even then you often need to brutally repress dissent to maintain that alignment. In peacetime, different people have divergent goals, and unless you are on a civilizational upswing (like the US in the mid-20th century or contemporary China) then discontented voters will multiply, and they need to have a real say in the direction of the country. Thinking you can gaslight people into consistently voting against their interests without consequences is hubris.
This whole “managed democracy” business that Europe is moving towards will end in fire.
wussboy•1mo ago