Puppet masters are at work online
As Donald Trump continues his effort to seize the law and order position in the wake of continuing violence on America’s streets (“Make America Safe Again”), the whole mood of the country is reminding me more and more of 1968. Prophecies of anarchy were the news back then, as the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King triggered violence in the streets. But the riots in Los Angeles and elsewhere were just a part of the overall scenario, which included Vietnam – with its Tet Offensive and My Lai massacre and campus protests. The sitting president, LBJ, decided not to run. Chicago police overreacted to demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Internationally, there was “Bloody Monday” in Paris, demonstrators were slaughtered in Mexico City, and the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia.
The end result was the election of Richard Nixon who ran on the position of ending the chaos by restoring law and order. Of course, he then went on to resign his presidency for maintaining a slush fund through which he financed illegal operations against his political enemies. So much for law and order.
Today feels very familiar to me and apparently others who lived through 1968. It’s an election year, and the news is filled with nastiness with each candidate proclaiming the other to be crooked or moronic. Violence in the streets has everybody panicked. Police are killing blacks. Police are being killed. Muslims are under attack. Terror is winning the war for the minds of free people, and mostly, there’s a sense that a rigged political and financial system is public enemy number one. “What’s the use?” is the overarching dark cloud that governs the hearts of Americans today.
The American dream, it turns out, is not wealth, but the appearance of wealth that can be obtained through debt. Television shows us that possessions equal happiness and that we can have them before we pay for them. Hard work and dedication means allegiance to the rigged system, for “the rich man writes the book of laws that the poor man must defend.”
But 2016 isn’t 1968, and while the similarities may be striking, there’s something at work today that wasn’t even imaginable back then. I’m talking about The Great Horizontal and the disruption of culture by the advent of the digital network. Culture’s bottom – you and me – are connected and can communicate without going through one of the information filters of top-to-bottom communications. This makes the situation in real life both worse and better, but regardless, it’s here to stay. Of course, the day could come when “the authorities” decide it’s just too dangerous for them, and they’ll move to disconnect us in the name of our own safety. They will somehow shift the blame to “incitement,” which is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s favorite weapon against those who would dare to lift a finger against his expansionist efforts. If it can happen there, it can happen here.
You see, people have always known the system was rigged, but postmodernism and its practices allows people now to better understand the hows of the rigged system, and they’re angry over it. We’re all angry about it – some of it is pretty absurd – and we’re demanding change. Most importantly, we have the power today to do something about it long after the noise of 2016 is over. When I wrote “The Evolving User Paradigm,” I was looking through this lens. The network will never stand still and not just because technology keeps evolving. We’re evolving with it, as more and more people learn how to use it.
Freud’s theories, which ultimately led to the manipulation of the people through the industries of public relations and professional journalism, are at the bottom of much of our angst, and this can only be overcome through knowledge. The problem is that those who benefit from this knowledge are the last people to ever teach us, which is why fact-checking is such an important industry for tomorrow. I used to ask why Snopes became the authority on this until I began to realize that media companies want nothing to do with the business of separating fact from fiction. Driven by the human need to climb the cultural ladder, journalists today rub elbows with those they cover and, whether consciously or not, participate with those who have much to lose by disturbing the status quo. This is why I continue to proclaim that straightening the crooked path is the duty of everyone who participates in bottom to bottom communications.
Instead, we’re using the bottom to bottom path to pass along the rantings of those who still exploit the emotions of everyday people to meet their special interests. The production of outrageous Facebook and Twitter memes that are purely propaganda are a throwback to the methods of Edward Bernays and those who learned from him how to manage public opinion with whatever tool they could find. We’re taking messages from the top and passing them along the bottom, so nothing has really changed just yet, although the evolving user paradigm suggests hope for the future. Only the people can stop this, but it’s going to take the knowledge of being duped by special interests, including religion, which is a very, very big task.
To my friends who regularly place outrageous, false, and nasty memes in front of me, regardless of political position, please think about what you’re doing. You are being used, no matter how strongly you feel, for it is those feelings that are being tapped to manipulate you and everyone in your path. You’re angry, and we all get that, but you are also very much a part of a very old problem.
BONUS LINK: Tom Brokaw’s 1968 (YouTube)
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