The Writing on the Wall — Suitable for FramingQUOTE(Daniel Brandt @ Wed 17th February 2010, 10:43am)
QUOTE(Herschelkrustofsky @ Wed 17th February 2010, 9:05am)
It is clear that Google made WP into a force to be reckoned with, instead of an expensive blog for Jimbo. But why? It is clearly a Soapbox for Propaganda (see WP:NOT:NOT!) but it's a rather sloppy and amateurish one. They could have backed some sort of state-of-the-art propaganda project. I'd like to get Daniel's take on this.
Well, since you asked …
Get rid of professional journalism, and turn it all into crowd-sourced, lowest common denominator gibberish. Emphasize sports, entertainment, and popular culture. Jack up the rankings on Wikipedia, which passes for an "encyclopedia," and bury independent thought and historical perspective under a forest of one-liner tweets and snippets, spam, advertising, and blog comments. Dumb down the population. The distinction between social ethics and the lessons of history, on the one hand, and contemporary propaganda on the other, becomes obscured. The rich will now have an easier time getting richer. The poor will get poorer, but that's okay because the poor will be too stupid to notice.
This is where it's headed. Whether it's fully conscious, or just tacitly driven by monopoly capitalism, doesn't really matter. The end result is approximately the same. The role of total digital surveillance is not now a crucial part of this trend, but will become more important as the new culture becomes more pervasive. At that point this surveillance will anticipate any potholes on the highway to hell, and steer around them so that they don't impede "progress."