what if the powerful can use “information abundance” to find new ways of stifling you, flipping the ideals of freedom of speech to crush dissent, while always leaving enough anonymity to be able to claim deniability?
1968 book “War and Peace in the Global Village” education for all people is the best defense we have against this new style of information warfare and public discourse distortion. Canadian Professor Marshall McLuhan’s book can educate people to be self-aware of their own reactions to medium and media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_Peace_in_the_Global_Village
Mock For Mock “us vs. them” Mob Mentality, street gangs of the digital information superhighways.
1: “We like to think of ourselves as immune from influence or our cognitive biases, because we want to feel like we are in control, but industries like alcohol, tobacco, fast food, and gaming all know we are creatures that are subject to cognitive and emotional vulnerabilities. And tech has caught on to this with its research into “user experience,” “gamification,” “growth hacking,” and “engagement” by activating ludic loops and reinforcement schedules in the same way slot machines do. So far, this gamification has been contained to social media and digital platforms, but what will happen as we further integrate our lives with networked information architectures designed to exploit evolutionary flaws in our cognition? Do we really want to live in a “gamified” environment that engineers our obsessions and plays with our lives as if we are inside its game?” ― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
2: “In the way that scepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
3: “and above all, confusing. To which the only response is to say, “oh dear.” What this film is going to suggest is that that defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control. And to understand how this is happening, you have to look to Russia, to a man called Vladislav Surkov, who is a hero of our time.”
4: response to this “tax and spend” is “No we don’t, nah nah na-nah nah: invest". This is political debate in a democracy. No it’s not. It’s the simulation of politics. Ross Perot is not leading a movement. It is a simulation of a movement, follow me?
5: “The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with 20th-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd.” - Peter Pomerantsev, November 2014. Surkov - Hidden Author of Putinism