America’s descent into mass delusion isn’t happenstance. The demise of courageous journalism isn’t a happy accident. Its replacement with engagement-chasing infotainment and propaganda isn’t an error. It’s a global assault on reason and informed consensus, and corporations and authoritarian bullies like Donald Trump are both architects and benefactors. For decades, academics warned anybody who’d listen
The headline led me to expect a different spin on the problem, so I clicked on it already starting to assemble the response I intended to make, only to discover that the actual point of the article was the same one I was going to make.
Yes - this is not some sort of odd happenstance or unforeseen consequence of something else. It’s a very deliberately engineered strategy - part of a muti-pronged strategy by the wealthy and empowered few to protect and expand their wholly destructive privilege in the face of the entirely justified opposition of the masses the exploitation of whom fund that privilege.
Or to put it much more succinctly, the privileged few - the wealthy and powerful - are parasites, and a parasite’s survival relies in great part on keeping the host oblivious to the harm they’re doing, and modern media has been shaped to serve that exact purpose.
And yes - it’s likely terminal, if for no other reason than because too much power is held by too few people, and a significant number of those people are, by any reasonable standard, profoundly mentally ill, such that they’ll destroy the civilization on which they’re parasites before giving up any shred of their privilege.
The headline led me to expect a different spin on the problem, so I clicked on it already starting to assemble the response I intended to make, only to discover that the actual point of the article was the same one I was going to make.
Yes - this is not some sort of odd happenstance or unforeseen consequence of something else. It’s a very deliberately engineered strategy - part of a muti-pronged strategy by the wealthy and empowered few to protect and expand their wholly destructive privilege in the face of the entirely justified opposition of the masses the exploitation of whom fund that privilege.
Or to put it much more succinctly, the privileged few - the wealthy and powerful - are parasites, and a parasite’s survival relies in great part on keeping the host oblivious to the harm they’re doing, and modern media has been shaped to serve that exact purpose.
And yes - it’s likely terminal, if for no other reason than because too much power is held by too few people, and a significant number of those people are, by any reasonable standard, profoundly mentally ill, such that they’ll destroy the civilization on which they’re parasites before giving up any shred of their privilege.