Control, Surveillance, & Feudalism in the digital age
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Based on a phenomenal book by Jakob Linaa Jenson: “ The medieval Internet”
https://books.google.com/url?client=ca-google-gppd&format=googleprint&num=0&id=01xtzQEACAAJ&q=https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/_/_%3Fean%3D9781839094132&usg=AFQjCNFfVMUuvVasbzyny83HOe-woq9rGQ
Transcript:
https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/54618977
Speaker 0 (0s): March day is just another man manic Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, what's going on, everybody. Welcome to the middle of October. Today is Monday episode. I hope you've got a great weekend. I hope you are enjoying yourself. I hope your family's healthy. I hope you're healthy. I hope you've got a smile on your face. You've got some to look forward to. Maybe even in this podcast, maybe you've been looking forward to this podcast all weekend that will bring a smile to my face.
Wanted to continue today with the next series of power politics and poverty in the digital age. It's fascinating. I know a lot of you have seen the documentary, the social dilemma, and it talks a lot about some of the issues we're having with the internet, the way its changing our society, the way its changing and organizing new laws around itself.
I found it fascinating and it had dovetailed nicely with a lot of different books. I've been reading most of which I have done reviews on or spoke about in the podcast. Let me tell you a little bit about some of those. And then I'm going to dive into the series, which is going to get into the metal internet and how we're kind of sliding backwards in a lot of areas. The first few first few books I read were Marshall.
McLuhan's the global village, the medium in his message, his ideas on the printing press and how linear print has given way to linear thinking. I want a lot of ways, although it was a phenomenal invention, it narrowed our view of the world. I'm going to link in the show notes to an experiment that I did with a penny. And I can tell you a little bit about the penny experiment here.
So take a penny, you set it on the table and you look down on it from an overhead point of view and you'll see a circle with some, you know, some etching on it, depending on how good your eyes are. You might see some letters in some numbers, but you will see a lot of detail and even some depth. You know, if you slowly squat down until your eyes are level with the table and you look at that penny, it will actually turn into a straight line if you get dead, even with it.
And that is a good experiment to explain and visualize what linear print has done to our point of view. It's a really cool experiment. You can check out with a link in the show notes where you can try out with yourself. It's a highly recommended. It's really cool. The next set of books I was reading is by a Russian mathematician called Anatoli Flamingo. When you can follow along that series and the podcast it's called history of science or a fiction, I don't, I can't speak to the validity of the book.
However, it's fascinating to read the amount of detail and the inconsistencies in which a history has been recorded. It brings up the George Orwell quote that he who controls the future. Control's the past,
Speaker 1 (3m 56s): Right?
Speaker 0 (3m 59s): And in order to control the past, you must control the present. Also it helps me understand that when people talk about truth, if you talk about truth or someone claims something to be true, you should ask yourself, is that true enough? Cause nothing's really ever true. Right, it's more of a opinion. So those are two books that kind of led me here. And as I dive down a little deeper, I wanted to share with you some new insights I got from this book.
I'm currently reading called the medieval internet by Jacob Lena
Speaker 1 (4m 37s): Jensen.
Speaker 0 (4m 41s): The first is I'm going to repeat a couple of passages and then I will try to dive in and do a little breakdown and tell you my thoughts on it. Here's the first passage that I was reading is a paradox that the internet, the ultimate symbol of modernity transparency and enlightenment facilitates logics of enclosures, censorship and social control on the internet is used in the service of democracy and freedom movements around the world. But it is also used by dictatorships to clamp down on activists and opposition.
It has used to preach the gospel of freedom and to liberate the suppressed and alienated at the same time, sworn enemies of modernity and education like ISIS, Al Qaeda and Boko Haram. They use it to advocate their viewpoints and achieve their goals, new medium technologies, liberate and educate, but they are also used to narrow our horizons, create information, bubbles and willfully are not make us more ignorant and less aware of worlds unfamiliar to our own.
It's relatively new the internet. I mean, at least for most people. And I think everybody remembers the golden age of what, at least for me, when I began to learn about the internet, they had a America online and I'm sure most of you remember had that dial up, like pretty would have to do. You've got mail. You know what? It's like super long to get on the internet, but there was this sense of freedom. There was this sense of you have the ability to go and do whatever it is you wanted to do.
And it was like a public school, a public sphere, like a, a town square where you could go say whatever you wanted to, they didn't have to be any consequences. And as it grew and matured, it's, it's become, obviously monetization has changed the rules and the landscape and human behavior has also changed it quite a bit in for me, you know, I've, I've become increasingly more skeptical towards the internet and its consequences.
The digital technologies that they, they were meant to enhance social life, social skills and mutual corporate cooperation. It seems they have come to set us apart from each other. Like we might be together physically, but were not together mentally or separated by the geography on our screens and its kind of reel, but it's not real. It's a, there was a great quote that said social media is like playing bingo.
You're all alone together. And that's exactly what it is.
Speaker 2 (7m 41s): Right? Right.
Speaker 0 (7m 43s): I'm often fascinated by the idea of the internet. There seems like its in some ways it seems as though the newness, the idea's coming upon us from the internet are new. There's this brand new idea of capitalism. It's a brand new idea of democracy. It's a brand new idea that has the ability to change is forever. However, you must be like Socrates and ask the question, is that true?
Is it really true? Probably not. There's some people that say there's nothing new under the sun that you can't have a new idea, but you can only change the position of the words to God damn it. That's not right. You can't have a new idea, but you can rearrange ideas to come up with a different method. Does that make sense?
I hope so.
Speaker 2 (8m 49s): Right.
Speaker 0 (8m 49s): Let me tell you what I mean by, by the internet. Maybe not being so new and what this book describes is that the medieval perspective, understanding contemporary, digital, social media savvy society through metaphors and concepts from medieval society is a useful prison for investigating the social and political challenges facing us 20 years into the 21st century.
The main argument is that apparently distinct social phenomena related to the spread of new media and related and a product of logics that dominated medieval society. Not at least those of Control Surveillance and Feudalism so let me first touch on the topic of Control. It seems to me that what we're seeing now is, is a Neal Feudalism.
And by that, I mean the Control in which society is governed is fundamentally changing from governments to corporations. And there's always been an element of fascism throughout history. In fact, I believe that every government is a fascist government just to a different degree. Some were more, some are less. And that if you look at the giant multinational corporations today, you could make the argument that the GDP of Google, the GDP of Apple, that GDP,
Speaker 3 (10m 34s): Of course
Speaker 0 (10m 36s): Facebook, if there were such a thing would be bigger than the GDP of a lot of different countries. You know, the employees have a corporation are a lot like the citizens of a nation, especially some of the new, you know, like the big tech industries, they have more power and they have more authority than a lot of governments. They definitely have more money in what you're seeing now, I think is a eight, a hostile takeover of countries by corporations.
Some of the evidence that is it, remember the ti the TPP and there's all these free trade agreements. They have all of these crazy rules written in to them that government's are not allowed to disrupt the business of certain companies. If that's not a fascist takeover of the world, then you know, I, I don't, I don't know what is and that's growing and you can see that buy, you know, if you look at the United States of America, how many times has the precedent called the heads of the big FA the fangs to the Y to the white house or to Congress to testify and, and nothing ever comes out of it?
Additionally, I, I believe that big tech has a, probably all the dirt on all the politicians Right they know what their doing and they can look at all their stuff. And so not only that, but where does the money come from? Right big tech has big lobbies has big pockets and pays big daddy to make rules that siphon more money from people, right?
Speaker 1 (12m 22s): I guess that's right.
Speaker 0 (12m 25s): Part of the Control issue. Another part of the control issue is here's an interesting one that I thought a society structure and government are linked at the core to the organization of space and vice versa. The definition and regulation of space is seen as govern mentality, a tool for controlling and governing society, defining certain spaces by assigning them, certain properties, regulating there, use and exchange, controlling access to them and organizing how the space is categorized, labeled and distributed correlates to in image of societal roles and hierarchies, by navigating and assimilating the heuristics for such spacial structures, individuals reproduce power structures, obvious examples of regulatory, spatial tools are offenses Gates and city walls, but we should also think of town squares, fares, rail forests, paved streets, and walkways, the boundaries of the States and the pastures for grazing animals as manifest examples of the exercise of power through space space became even more important in Mandara nutty.
As the state centralized commons were eliminated and strong distinctions between public and private space were inscribed in law as one of the foundation's for liberal democracy.
Speaker 1 (13m 53s): You see
Speaker 0 (13m 54s): In these passages that you can begin to see the author pointing out similarities between the medieval world and the world in which we see ourselves moving to that
Speaker 1 (14m 8s): When you are,
Speaker 0 (14m 8s): We think of the medieval world, think about a castle outlined by parcels of land. Then you go out a little bit further and then you have the no man's land where there are some trade routes. There are some Rhodes, but that infrastructure is not really that great. You know, you're protected inside the castle walls. However, once you leave that area, once you leave that territory, it's fair game for anybody, you could make the argument that there's things like that now, like INGOs non-government organizations or SEOs special economic zones, the, the world to me, if you do a little bit of, you can see that the world has already being divided up into different territories.
And a lot of those territory's are owned by corporations. Think about Ireland. Why do so many companies move to Ireland? Well, they have a very favorable law's for businesses to incorporate there. That's a, that's a type of special economic zone where you can be an American company incorporate in Ireland and not pay any taxes to America. Yet as an American corporation, when you get in trouble, you can still run to the American white house or a Congress and get on your knees and beg for military health to kill people in other countries.
So you can continue to suck out their resources and you only people that, I mean, there's a lot of people that lose there, but the corporations don't lose and the government doesn't lose the people going to fight the war, loos, they die. And then the citizens of both of those countries lose because the citizens of one area you have to pay for it. And then the citizens in the other country, you're gonna feel the repercussions of people dying their so that's a, a form of Control, you know what?
It's almost like sending the King's army to go conquer stuff. It was another similarity there. All right, lets try to tie down a little bit of Surveillance here. Excuse me. Everyone is seeing all the cameras and China and social credit scores and the, the Astrical on the amount of cameras. They're just everywhere. And I challenged you. If you go to a modern building today, if you go to CU like a college campus to see cameras everywhere, if you live in a big city, you can look up and probably see I'm on streetlights cities.
And medieval society lived extremely close together houses where small and cramped and they were placed close to each other. People live and confined close knit communities were, everybody saw each other and it was difficult or impossible to deviate from norms of expected behavior, contrary to the modern Panoptix con defined by Michael Foucault, which is central observer with it. Central observer, medieval cities and villages were a kind of art, not the con.
I say that, right? I'm not to con based on intense mutual Surveillance what does that sound like? That sounds to me like the urbanization, the pack and stack apartments, the pack and stack condos. Everybody moving into potential smart cities where you can have the internet of everything with 5g. You can have your microwave talked to your washer and dryer. You can have your smartphone talk to TV in all of those things can also listen to you.
They can tell when you're turning your power on with your smart meters, they could restrict your power. If your using too much, they can find you for using electricity at the wrong time of the day Hey you don't use them during peak hours. You know, there's on a limb on a side note, I got something in the mail a while back that talked about how much I'm using as far as a trustee versus my neighbors. And it's funny because it's, it's all, it was kind of all b******t.
It's an attempt to socially engineer you into using less everybody who got one. It was, it was similar in that everyone who got one, they said that the neighbor was using less than them. Think about that as a form of social, Control the popular understanding of Surveillance and visibility in our society share a basic principles with, for those of medieval times, the exercise of power is different in as much as the dynastic legitimation of the governing class is different, but within the corporate dominated spheres of the life world and the state's concession of power to these spheres, the fundamental building blocks remain the same medieval exercise of power address reproduction either of human beings or of existing order.
The medieval goal of power was to uphold a stable society in God's eyes with those appointed by God to do governing the stable society was not conceived in terms of growth, but under the image of the wheel of Fortuna were eventually all riches in one era will be paid for by a downturn in the next modern capitalist society. Only in the hand is obsessed with growth and development. The exercise of power addresses production from the bio politics that prioritizes securing a stable workforce to create a system of power supporting the logics of capitalism.
Modern societies are meant to evolve hints. The Silicon Valley obsession with disruption. I want to pause there just for a second. Disruption makes a lot of people wealthy and also makes a lot of people in poverty. And won't it be the ultimate irony or is even possible for disruption to be disrupted?
Speaker 4 (20m 27s): Is it something to think about
Speaker 0 (20m 31s): That has also the point in a recent work on Surveillance capital by a Sasha Zuboff, it's a great book by the way. And it really gets into the, I think she's actually in that documentary, the, the social dilemma, but she really gets into, you know, all services that we think are free. Our really just ways of stealing all our information and our data and then commodifying it and selling it.
Speaker 1 (20m 57s): Yep.
Speaker 0 (20m 59s): She makes it a claim that the surveillance capitalism in the platform economy is still basically about production. I will add, however, that logics of digital society are also about distribution. The battle of platform companies is fought over the right to control and distribute information services and products. Those who win the battle have a mass, not only wealth, but power with all that implies with all that implies economically and politically the case of the great firewall in China tells us that in the future, those who distribute and control the inflammation are those in power, which returns us through a different rhetoric and a parent ideals back to the medieval paradigm.
Further the rise of the internet facilitates a mutual Surveillance a closeness, even a confinement that resembles that of medieval towns and villages. Ironically modern technologies might bring us back to social logic. Similar to an age we have been taught was brutal and backwards. Some of the economic and political logic characteristics of medieval society can also be identified today, the way consumers sacrifice privacy for convenience and let corporations exploit their data, expose them to targeted marketing, or make them dependent on certain subscriptions plans and other kinds of economic dependency.
It reminds me of the way feudal Lords committed and controlled their peasants and servants.
Speaker 1 (22m 47s): You know, I have it
Speaker 0 (22m 48s): Done quite a bit of marketing on Facebook and some other platforms, nowhere near as much marketing as someone who's a professional or just in that field. However, I can speak to you about target demographics. Think for a moment about that word, target demographics. If I want to sell a pair of basketball shoes, which demographic am I targeting if I want to sell a high end handbag, which demographic am I targeting?
You see this idea of targeting demographic,
Speaker 1 (23m 27s): Right?
Speaker 0 (23m 28s): I think leads to further splintering of society in order to have a target demographic, you must break down the differences in people, so you can fine tune how to appeal to that group. And when you money and time, and you have scientific experiments trying to figure out what is it about this small subset over here, that's different than everybody else,
Speaker 4 (23m 58s): Right?
Speaker 0 (23m 58s): You can find out some really interesting things. And some of those interesting things might not be that good. Some of those interesting things may be ideas and issues that are incredibly exciting,
Speaker 4 (24m 15s): Right?
Speaker 0 (24m 17s): Some of those things you find out may fall into the wrong hands or be used in a way that is not meant to be particularly helpful to society
Speaker 4 (24m 29s): The law of unintended consequences.
Speaker 0 (24m 33s): So we have tied together a little bit of Surveillance and Control, and we've talked a little bit about how corporations are slowly taking over the form of government that was done by politicians. I want to dig into a little bit more
Speaker 4 (24m 54s): Of why a big tech
Speaker 0 (24m 59s): And those particular corporations or doing the things that we're doing,
Speaker 4 (25m 2s): Right?
Speaker 0 (25m 5s): Here's another passage from the book and it's, it's about big tech, its about what their mission is about the phenomenon of at the, the big data ideology. If you will, the ultimate postmodern phenomenon on the internet itself, necessitates categorization and systemic approaches, information and data have to be uniquely identifiable and categorized in order for the system to process and understand this fundamental framing principle is one of the basic features in machine learning, going to show the enormous importance of exact categorization before algorithms can handle data.
Data need to be ordered and to be categorized. But by categorizing data, the world is organized and perceived and a certain way with a privileged view, even before it is assimilated, there is no algorithm that can avoid reflecting the inherent power structure in the way data are categorized know God's eye algorithm, classifications are not value neutral or unbiased, but as a result of deliberate choices in a controversial and much cited wired article, Chris Anderson 2008, claimed that with the abundance of big data, it is only a matter of time to find methods, to let the data speak for themselves, automating categorization, calculation, and subsequently decision making.
No more need for human. In the words of Anderson, that will mean the end of theory, big data evangelists like Anderson are committed to the claim that the big data approach is neutral value for free and rational in itself. The idea is that quantification can basically mirror everything, reducing all quantities to their calculable substrate human decision making then would be simply to derive the correct result from the automatic calculation.
The assumption of the big data priesthood is that as some things can be calculated so too, all things can be calculated and that the entire world can be reduced to numbers. In short tech companies are trying to move us from a world of classification to a world of calculation. The consequences are not only limited to the information we see and that frames our horizon and action's, it also applies to the way we understand ourselves by being registered in databases, both public and private that are linked to the algorithmic operations.
We are objectified as such. This is not only about a certain bias, but also about the framing of our life world by using non-transparent algorithms to register, monitor and watch individuals with no democratic control on its use or extent tech companies have been given a strong implicit exercise of power over individuals, the social control and mutual Surveillance of the medieval village, which depended on proximity and hierarchy. I have been automated and anonymized.
So you can see that there's a lot of similarities there between mid evil society, medieval public spheres, and today's public spheres. You can get an idea of Feudalism versus digital Feudalism. You can get an idea of their Surveillance, the Control and how perhaps distribution is becoming much more important than productivity.
A way to underscore that particular point in my opinion is to look at how many people are producing content on the internet,
Speaker 4 (29m 4s): Right?
Speaker 0 (29m 7s): Millions, maybe billions, I don't know, but there are a lot of content creators, so many content creators.
Speaker 4 (29m 15s): Is that okay
Speaker 0 (29m 18s): If you want your things to be seen on the internet, you have to pay people to market it, be it on Facebook, be it on YouTube or any of these new, smaller platforms that are kinda coming up, be it rock fan, or are these new Twitch or, you know, whatever the new one is, they are trying to change it. Some what, however, it's going to be very difficult to do that in my opinion, and how you are seeing it used to be that the Holy grail of profit was productivity.
It seems to me now that there's so much productivity, that the Holy grail of profit is going to be a distribution. And that is one of the changes we see ourselves in right now. So as we're talking about the public square, but I think we could talk a little bit more about that,
Speaker 4 (30m 12s): Right?
Speaker 0 (30m 12s): There was a gentleman by the name of Haberman the German fellow in that in 1962, he wrote a book called the structural transformation of the public sphere in Haberman is ideal model. The public's fear is the fundamental link between citizens and the political system and political discussions are based on the rule based deliberative process, taking place within the public sphere Haberman and his followers have realize that the public sphere as a model or an, the terms of max Weber, an ideal type of democracy fundamental in the theory of Haberman, he and his followers, his, the implicit construction of so-called discourse.
Ethics are the rules for communication in ideal democratic processes. Deliberation in a broad sense is fundamental. Hence the name of the theoretical position, deliberative democracy in order to, in order for deliberation to take place, the debate needs to be open to all concerned persons. One has to listen to all arguments and finally participants must consider the public good rather than their own interests here.
Reciprocity taking the others into account is of central importance. In the ideal public sphere, particular interest are excluded from the debate. Rather the common good has to be considered at the end of the deliberation, much contributes to it. The deliberation is successful. I'm sorry, contributes to it. If the deliberation is successful, think about our public discourse.
Now Twitter's confined to a hundred characters, 140 characters. Most people just slaying ad hominem attacks at one another. Look at the debates. If you live in America, look at the presidential debates we have. If you look at today's debates versus the Lincoln Douglas debates or the two mentored the country, talking for hours, we don't have that. Now. In fact, you don't even get to choose who you're president is, right?
Its it's a false choice. You can have anything you want for dinner. Do you want a Brown carrot or an orange carrot?
Speaker 4 (32m 36s): I don't want either of those
Speaker 0 (32m 41s): Public debate today is, is sickening. Which you know, I had an idea I was thinking about wouldn't it changed the world. If, instead of having say F people go to the stadiums to watch people play basketball or football or soccer, why don't we have people go to stadiums or local town halls to see people debate, incredible issues in our community, take the best person for global warming, take the best person for, for anti global warming and do a tour,
Speaker 4 (33m 20s): Right?
Speaker 0 (33m 20s): It would fill stadiums. I think I know that there's certain towns in which you could fill, you know, performing arts centers. What about today's idea's on foreign policy. What about, on how to give subsidies to companies? What about on tax reform? We could have these debates right now in our communities and we could have two. I mean you can have a tour. I think that is the kind of public discourse that needs to happen.
The whole idea of public sphere based on rational debate and discourse, ethics, subscribes heavily to a modernist discourse on reason. Most clearly apparent in the works as a philosopher, a manual con on reflective judgment and informed reflections and codified by max Weber in his sociological works Weber differentiates between three modes of legitimate cutting social action, the charismatic, which refers all authorization to some individual, the traditional, which refers all authorization to the tradition, to which the social action is related or the rational, which refers all the authorization to reasoning concerning of legality of the rule in the right of those using such rules to issue commands.
Speaker 4 (34m 45s): Right?
Speaker 0 (34m 45s): A lot of the problem with today's debate is the education system that might go back to the industrial revolution and we decided we no longer needed philosophers. We no longer needed people of incredibly high moral character or what we needed was factory workers. And so we utilize the Prussian education system and began the Pavlovian training, have people with bells and whistles.
Another passage states' let me read it, hear, and you can kind of understand where we are today. Many later works on the public sphere have focused on its decline. Ki has identified five common complaints about the public sphere at the turn of the 21st century. It is trivialized commercialized, fragmented and realize on spectacle rather than arguments as a result, citizens become apathetic or irrationally fanatic about public issues.
Maybe there was always been a larger problem with a theory of deliberative democracy in as much as it is too strict is expectation. Expectations have the behavior of the citizens to psychologically and anthropologically dubious and its terms, both to optimist and to credulous about rule bound. Rationality, for instance, there might be a trade off between deliberation and inclusion when the public's fear is expanded to include more people.
It could be that the quality we have debate declines as more and more time is spent on deciding about the credentials and the relevance of the speaker's opinion to the subject of the hand. A tendency Haberman himself mentioned in the original work. Only the well-educated, you know, just to deliberation and discussion may be able to live up to the strict criteria of the discourse ethics. Thus the less educated might be on a priori excluded from qualitatively ideal. So democratic processes, which ironically makes it the case that the less educated will not be ruled by their own representatives.
Does contradicting the very basis of democracy. You can bet your bottom dollar, that the people in Congress have that exact mindset without a doubt, people right, are in positions of authority in Congress believe wholeheartedly that the majority of their constituents are f*****g retarded. You can hear the way they take it to people. It's so condescending. I saw a clip today.
I forgot what it was on. I'll try to find it. However, it was a journalist who were there was talking to, I think, California Senator about this new stimulus deal and what the issue is with it and why it's being held up. And this particular Senator was saying that he is for signing both stimulus bills, that he would like, he is less worried about the pork and he's less worried about all the money being funneled at the top.
Due to the fact he thinks the people on the bottom needed the money. So he says, just sign it. What was beautiful about the interview was after this particular government official, I got done lecturing from his ivory tower. The journalist asked, do you think maybe the problem is that everybody in Congress is a millionaire? Or do you think that that maybe the problem is that everybody in Congress has so much money, that they are looking down on the people they claim to lead doing the guy to shut his mouth.
F**k it sat there, not for a long time, but for long enough eyes got all big and that he's just changed the subject completely. And it was, it was a beautiful clip. I wish more people could see it. And more journalists would talk about that. The people in Congress, the people in our government, they don't represent working people. They don't represent. And I don't care if you're a high end, a working person are a low end working person. If you are not making millions of dollars a year, the government's not for you. There is no way towns or cities or constituents or, or anybody like that can compete with the ability to lobby Congress like a sovereign wealth fund.
So there is a lot of that going on. And I think that's part of the reason our country is so divided in. So messed up is that a lot of people see our country as our country. However, in the halls of government, the American populace is a work horse needed to generate revenue to give. We wanna, it seems to me that they take money from a poor people in rich countries and give it to rich people in poor countries.
And again seems a lot like the economic system of the middle ages. All right. So in conclusion, let us, let us summarize a little bit about the public's fear in the network society. Our argument is so far rests on to the main points. One, the socially mediated public sphere is increasingly based on logics of visibility and mutual Surveillance and two that this societal form originated in our KX societies and returns to a model that ruled the medieval community more than the emancipatory modern public sphere, logics of reason and deliberation.
There are a pistol illogical as well as ontological points in this from an epistemological point of view, the ideal Haber amazing account on the public's fear makes assumption that are unrealistic ignoring factors like emotion that impinge on any public sphere, broader and more realist interpretations, encompassing aspects of entertainment, visibility, and these spectacular more adequately describes and analyze the public sphere as it appears in any highly mediated society deepening our first point concerning the socially mediated public from an ontological point of view, internet technologies, not at least social media contribute to a substantial change in the conditions upon which the public sphere operates.
The public sphere is not only a space of communication facilitated by mass media with a privilege center of attention and a dominant discourse that most people refer to. It is also a fragmented space, have a disparate, not necessarily connected public spheres or a fear Nichols, where people can engage in particular topics or isolate themselves among like minded. This is how paradoxically the internet can be dominated by media monopolies and still be the epicenter of polarization.
In our democracies, Donna Boyd has discussed the potential of networked publics. This is positive as long as there is a commitment to a meta discourse, a joint recognition of overall values and truths of society. If this is not mean tained, the decline of common reference might create problems for democracy and the legitimacy of central political power, as it is increasingly seen, for instance, in the American society where public discourse is increasingly fragmented.
When the values of truth, give away to the values of the tech generated algorithm that hooks you up to a marketing demographic, the common Ty's of humanity are strained critics talk about the filter bubble, but as demonstrated filter, bubbles are not confirmed. In most research. People actually engage across different spheres. Sometimes with those, with opposing views, since the internet, doesn't set up an actual wall between different factions, there are innumerable platforms and sights for the user since the internet media is uniquely.
Peer-driven what this means is that overlooked, eccentric social circles emerge in greater visibility. Allowing those who believe in which is polar guise or the immediate return of Jesus Christ to find each other. In our current media landscape, it becomes increasingly difficult to isolate in such practices as media noise creates disturbances and boundary challenges. Contrary to the synoptic econ of the pre linked in era of mass media visibility increasingly becomes mutual.
When the directional model of media fell a new model of visibility emerged in which media users both observe and are observed. This model also makes it both easier to escape and to isolate within certain media on social media, people willingly exposed themselves to uncertain audiences, creating context, collapse, and boundary turbulence. The reward is insight into other people, whether they're daily life or more intimate details, social media fulfilling a natural human desire to know about the others, but in using this means the possibilities of eavesdropping and spying have increased exponentially to an extent exceeding the close knit mutual Surveillance of the medieval village, the mass media society with a joint societal spectacle with a privilege center yields to one of dispersed publics based on emotions, community and kinship, but as well, one with a possible lack of common references, given the high place accorded to the special nature of the particular community's experiences and a subscription to a met a discourse of overall societal values, problematically such sub spheres might lack the corrective force of the surrounding community, allowing them to sink into medieval logics, a false beliefs, superstition, and ultimately exclusion of the outsiders.
So their, you have it folks. They are, you have it. The technology, the has the ability to Fri everyone also has in is the ability to enslave everybody. But we are going to go a little bit deeper. Talk about some more similarities, get into the modern and the medieval. Talk about the communities, how the online community is similar to the physical community. Have the middle ages are going to get into some of the events, some algorithmic biases, and it's going to be interesting and your just going to love.
Love, love it. I love it. I think it's fascinating. Well, thank you for taking a few minutes to spend time with me. I hope you have a great day. Are you.
Based on a phenomenal book by Jakob Linaa Jenson: “ The medieval Internet”
https://books.google.com/url?client=ca-google-gppd&format=googleprint&num=0&id=01xtzQEACAAJ&q=https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/_/_%3Fean%3D9781839094132&usg=AFQjCNFfVMUuvVasbzyny83HOe-woq9rGQ
Transcript:
https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/54618977
Speaker 0 (0s): March day is just another man manic Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, what's going on, everybody. Welcome to the middle of October. Today is Monday episode. I hope you've got a great weekend. I hope you are enjoying yourself. I hope your family's healthy. I hope you're healthy. I hope you've got a smile on your face. You've got some to look forward to. Maybe even in this podcast, maybe you've been looking forward to this podcast all weekend that will bring a smile to my face.
Wanted to continue today with the next series of power politics and poverty in the digital age. It's fascinating. I know a lot of you have seen the documentary, the social dilemma, and it talks a lot about some of the issues we're having with the internet, the way its changing our society, the way its changing and organizing new laws around itself.
I found it fascinating and it had dovetailed nicely with a lot of different books. I've been reading most of which I have done reviews on or spoke about in the podcast. Let me tell you a little bit about some of those. And then I'm going to dive into the series, which is going to get into the metal internet and how we're kind of sliding backwards in a lot of areas. The first few first few books I read were Marshall.
McLuhan's the global village, the medium in his message, his ideas on the printing press and how linear print has given way to linear thinking. I want a lot of ways, although it was a phenomenal invention, it narrowed our view of the world. I'm going to link in the show notes to an experiment that I did with a penny. And I can tell you a little bit about the penny experiment here.
So take a penny, you set it on the table and you look down on it from an overhead point of view and you'll see a circle with some, you know, some etching on it, depending on how good your eyes are. You might see some letters in some numbers, but you will see a lot of detail and even some depth. You know, if you slowly squat down until your eyes are level with the table and you look at that penny, it will actually turn into a straight line if you get dead, even with it.
And that is a good experiment to explain and visualize what linear print has done to our point of view. It's a really cool experiment. You can check out with a link in the show notes where you can try out with yourself. It's a highly recommended. It's really cool. The next set of books I was reading is by a Russian mathematician called Anatoli Flamingo. When you can follow along that series and the podcast it's called history of science or a fiction, I don't, I can't speak to the validity of the book.
However, it's fascinating to read the amount of detail and the inconsistencies in which a history has been recorded. It brings up the George Orwell quote that he who controls the future. Control's the past,
Speaker 1 (3m 56s): Right?
Speaker 0 (3m 59s): And in order to control the past, you must control the present. Also it helps me understand that when people talk about truth, if you talk about truth or someone claims something to be true, you should ask yourself, is that true enough? Cause nothing's really ever true. Right, it's more of a opinion. So those are two books that kind of led me here. And as I dive down a little deeper, I wanted to share with you some new insights I got from this book.
I'm currently reading called the medieval internet by Jacob Lena
Speaker 1 (4m 37s): Jensen.
Speaker 0 (4m 41s): The first is I'm going to repeat a couple of passages and then I will try to dive in and do a little breakdown and tell you my thoughts on it. Here's the first passage that I was reading is a paradox that the internet, the ultimate symbol of modernity transparency and enlightenment facilitates logics of enclosures, censorship and social control on the internet is used in the service of democracy and freedom movements around the world. But it is also used by dictatorships to clamp down on activists and opposition.
It has used to preach the gospel of freedom and to liberate the suppressed and alienated at the same time, sworn enemies of modernity and education like ISIS, Al Qaeda and Boko Haram. They use it to advocate their viewpoints and achieve their goals, new medium technologies, liberate and educate, but they are also used to narrow our horizons, create information, bubbles and willfully are not make us more ignorant and less aware of worlds unfamiliar to our own.
It's relatively new the internet. I mean, at least for most people. And I think everybody remembers the golden age of what, at least for me, when I began to learn about the internet, they had a America online and I'm sure most of you remember had that dial up, like pretty would have to do. You've got mail. You know what? It's like super long to get on the internet, but there was this sense of freedom. There was this sense of you have the ability to go and do whatever it is you wanted to do.
And it was like a public school, a public sphere, like a, a town square where you could go say whatever you wanted to, they didn't have to be any consequences. And as it grew and matured, it's, it's become, obviously monetization has changed the rules and the landscape and human behavior has also changed it quite a bit in for me, you know, I've, I've become increasingly more skeptical towards the internet and its consequences.
The digital technologies that they, they were meant to enhance social life, social skills and mutual corporate cooperation. It seems they have come to set us apart from each other. Like we might be together physically, but were not together mentally or separated by the geography on our screens and its kind of reel, but it's not real. It's a, there was a great quote that said social media is like playing bingo.
You're all alone together. And that's exactly what it is.
Speaker 2 (7m 41s): Right? Right.
Speaker 0 (7m 43s): I'm often fascinated by the idea of the internet. There seems like its in some ways it seems as though the newness, the idea's coming upon us from the internet are new. There's this brand new idea of capitalism. It's a brand new idea of democracy. It's a brand new idea that has the ability to change is forever. However, you must be like Socrates and ask the question, is that true?
Is it really true? Probably not. There's some people that say there's nothing new under the sun that you can't have a new idea, but you can only change the position of the words to God damn it. That's not right. You can't have a new idea, but you can rearrange ideas to come up with a different method. Does that make sense?
I hope so.
Speaker 2 (8m 49s): Right.
Speaker 0 (8m 49s): Let me tell you what I mean by, by the internet. Maybe not being so new and what this book describes is that the medieval perspective, understanding contemporary, digital, social media savvy society through metaphors and concepts from medieval society is a useful prison for investigating the social and political challenges facing us 20 years into the 21st century.
The main argument is that apparently distinct social phenomena related to the spread of new media and related and a product of logics that dominated medieval society. Not at least those of Control Surveillance and Feudalism so let me first touch on the topic of Control. It seems to me that what we're seeing now is, is a Neal Feudalism.
And by that, I mean the Control in which society is governed is fundamentally changing from governments to corporations. And there's always been an element of fascism throughout history. In fact, I believe that every government is a fascist government just to a different degree. Some were more, some are less. And that if you look at the giant multinational corporations today, you could make the argument that the GDP of Google, the GDP of Apple, that GDP,
Speaker 3 (10m 34s): Of course
Speaker 0 (10m 36s): Facebook, if there were such a thing would be bigger than the GDP of a lot of different countries. You know, the employees have a corporation are a lot like the citizens of a nation, especially some of the new, you know, like the big tech industries, they have more power and they have more authority than a lot of governments. They definitely have more money in what you're seeing now, I think is a eight, a hostile takeover of countries by corporations.
Some of the evidence that is it, remember the ti the TPP and there's all these free trade agreements. They have all of these crazy rules written in to them that government's are not allowed to disrupt the business of certain companies. If that's not a fascist takeover of the world, then you know, I, I don't, I don't know what is and that's growing and you can see that buy, you know, if you look at the United States of America, how many times has the precedent called the heads of the big FA the fangs to the Y to the white house or to Congress to testify and, and nothing ever comes out of it?
Additionally, I, I believe that big tech has a, probably all the dirt on all the politicians Right they know what their doing and they can look at all their stuff. And so not only that, but where does the money come from? Right big tech has big lobbies has big pockets and pays big daddy to make rules that siphon more money from people, right?
Speaker 1 (12m 22s): I guess that's right.
Speaker 0 (12m 25s): Part of the Control issue. Another part of the control issue is here's an interesting one that I thought a society structure and government are linked at the core to the organization of space and vice versa. The definition and regulation of space is seen as govern mentality, a tool for controlling and governing society, defining certain spaces by assigning them, certain properties, regulating there, use and exchange, controlling access to them and organizing how the space is categorized, labeled and distributed correlates to in image of societal roles and hierarchies, by navigating and assimilating the heuristics for such spacial structures, individuals reproduce power structures, obvious examples of regulatory, spatial tools are offenses Gates and city walls, but we should also think of town squares, fares, rail forests, paved streets, and walkways, the boundaries of the States and the pastures for grazing animals as manifest examples of the exercise of power through space space became even more important in Mandara nutty.
As the state centralized commons were eliminated and strong distinctions between public and private space were inscribed in law as one of the foundation's for liberal democracy.
Speaker 1 (13m 53s): You see
Speaker 0 (13m 54s): In these passages that you can begin to see the author pointing out similarities between the medieval world and the world in which we see ourselves moving to that
Speaker 1 (14m 8s): When you are,
Speaker 0 (14m 8s): We think of the medieval world, think about a castle outlined by parcels of land. Then you go out a little bit further and then you have the no man's land where there are some trade routes. There are some Rhodes, but that infrastructure is not really that great. You know, you're protected inside the castle walls. However, once you leave that area, once you leave that territory, it's fair game for anybody, you could make the argument that there's things like that now, like INGOs non-government organizations or SEOs special economic zones, the, the world to me, if you do a little bit of, you can see that the world has already being divided up into different territories.
And a lot of those territory's are owned by corporations. Think about Ireland. Why do so many companies move to Ireland? Well, they have a very favorable law's for businesses to incorporate there. That's a, that's a type of special economic zone where you can be an American company incorporate in Ireland and not pay any taxes to America. Yet as an American corporation, when you get in trouble, you can still run to the American white house or a Congress and get on your knees and beg for military health to kill people in other countries.
So you can continue to suck out their resources and you only people that, I mean, there's a lot of people that lose there, but the corporations don't lose and the government doesn't lose the people going to fight the war, loos, they die. And then the citizens of both of those countries lose because the citizens of one area you have to pay for it. And then the citizens in the other country, you're gonna feel the repercussions of people dying their so that's a, a form of Control, you know what?
It's almost like sending the King's army to go conquer stuff. It was another similarity there. All right, lets try to tie down a little bit of Surveillance here. Excuse me. Everyone is seeing all the cameras and China and social credit scores and the, the Astrical on the amount of cameras. They're just everywhere. And I challenged you. If you go to a modern building today, if you go to CU like a college campus to see cameras everywhere, if you live in a big city, you can look up and probably see I'm on streetlights cities.
And medieval society lived extremely close together houses where small and cramped and they were placed close to each other. People live and confined close knit communities were, everybody saw each other and it was difficult or impossible to deviate from norms of expected behavior, contrary to the modern Panoptix con defined by Michael Foucault, which is central observer with it. Central observer, medieval cities and villages were a kind of art, not the con.
I say that, right? I'm not to con based on intense mutual Surveillance what does that sound like? That sounds to me like the urbanization, the pack and stack apartments, the pack and stack condos. Everybody moving into potential smart cities where you can have the internet of everything with 5g. You can have your microwave talked to your washer and dryer. You can have your smartphone talk to TV in all of those things can also listen to you.
They can tell when you're turning your power on with your smart meters, they could restrict your power. If your using too much, they can find you for using electricity at the wrong time of the day Hey you don't use them during peak hours. You know, there's on a limb on a side note, I got something in the mail a while back that talked about how much I'm using as far as a trustee versus my neighbors. And it's funny because it's, it's all, it was kind of all b******t.
It's an attempt to socially engineer you into using less everybody who got one. It was, it was similar in that everyone who got one, they said that the neighbor was using less than them. Think about that as a form of social, Control the popular understanding of Surveillance and visibility in our society share a basic principles with, for those of medieval times, the exercise of power is different in as much as the dynastic legitimation of the governing class is different, but within the corporate dominated spheres of the life world and the state's concession of power to these spheres, the fundamental building blocks remain the same medieval exercise of power address reproduction either of human beings or of existing order.
The medieval goal of power was to uphold a stable society in God's eyes with those appointed by God to do governing the stable society was not conceived in terms of growth, but under the image of the wheel of Fortuna were eventually all riches in one era will be paid for by a downturn in the next modern capitalist society. Only in the hand is obsessed with growth and development. The exercise of power addresses production from the bio politics that prioritizes securing a stable workforce to create a system of power supporting the logics of capitalism.
Modern societies are meant to evolve hints. The Silicon Valley obsession with disruption. I want to pause there just for a second. Disruption makes a lot of people wealthy and also makes a lot of people in poverty. And won't it be the ultimate irony or is even possible for disruption to be disrupted?
Speaker 4 (20m 27s): Is it something to think about
Speaker 0 (20m 31s): That has also the point in a recent work on Surveillance capital by a Sasha Zuboff, it's a great book by the way. And it really gets into the, I think she's actually in that documentary, the, the social dilemma, but she really gets into, you know, all services that we think are free. Our really just ways of stealing all our information and our data and then commodifying it and selling it.
Speaker 1 (20m 57s): Yep.
Speaker 0 (20m 59s): She makes it a claim that the surveillance capitalism in the platform economy is still basically about production. I will add, however, that logics of digital society are also about distribution. The battle of platform companies is fought over the right to control and distribute information services and products. Those who win the battle have a mass, not only wealth, but power with all that implies with all that implies economically and politically the case of the great firewall in China tells us that in the future, those who distribute and control the inflammation are those in power, which returns us through a different rhetoric and a parent ideals back to the medieval paradigm.
Further the rise of the internet facilitates a mutual Surveillance a closeness, even a confinement that resembles that of medieval towns and villages. Ironically modern technologies might bring us back to social logic. Similar to an age we have been taught was brutal and backwards. Some of the economic and political logic characteristics of medieval society can also be identified today, the way consumers sacrifice privacy for convenience and let corporations exploit their data, expose them to targeted marketing, or make them dependent on certain subscriptions plans and other kinds of economic dependency.
It reminds me of the way feudal Lords committed and controlled their peasants and servants.
Speaker 1 (22m 47s): You know, I have it
Speaker 0 (22m 48s): Done quite a bit of marketing on Facebook and some other platforms, nowhere near as much marketing as someone who's a professional or just in that field. However, I can speak to you about target demographics. Think for a moment about that word, target demographics. If I want to sell a pair of basketball shoes, which demographic am I targeting if I want to sell a high end handbag, which demographic am I targeting?
You see this idea of targeting demographic,
Speaker 1 (23m 27s): Right?
Speaker 0 (23m 28s): I think leads to further splintering of society in order to have a target demographic, you must break down the differences in people, so you can fine tune how to appeal to that group. And when you money and time, and you have scientific experiments trying to figure out what is it about this small subset over here, that's different than everybody else,
Speaker 4 (23m 58s): Right?
Speaker 0 (23m 58s): You can find out some really interesting things. And some of those interesting things might not be that good. Some of those interesting things may be ideas and issues that are incredibly exciting,
Speaker 4 (24m 15s): Right?
Speaker 0 (24m 17s): Some of those things you find out may fall into the wrong hands or be used in a way that is not meant to be particularly helpful to society
Speaker 4 (24m 29s): The law of unintended consequences.
Speaker 0 (24m 33s): So we have tied together a little bit of Surveillance and Control, and we've talked a little bit about how corporations are slowly taking over the form of government that was done by politicians. I want to dig into a little bit more
Speaker 4 (24m 54s): Of why a big tech
Speaker 0 (24m 59s): And those particular corporations or doing the things that we're doing,
Speaker 4 (25m 2s): Right?
Speaker 0 (25m 5s): Here's another passage from the book and it's, it's about big tech, its about what their mission is about the phenomenon of at the, the big data ideology. If you will, the ultimate postmodern phenomenon on the internet itself, necessitates categorization and systemic approaches, information and data have to be uniquely identifiable and categorized in order for the system to process and understand this fundamental framing principle is one of the basic features in machine learning, going to show the enormous importance of exact categorization before algorithms can handle data.
Data need to be ordered and to be categorized. But by categorizing data, the world is organized and perceived and a certain way with a privileged view, even before it is assimilated, there is no algorithm that can avoid reflecting the inherent power structure in the way data are categorized know God's eye algorithm, classifications are not value neutral or unbiased, but as a result of deliberate choices in a controversial and much cited wired article, Chris Anderson 2008, claimed that with the abundance of big data, it is only a matter of time to find methods, to let the data speak for themselves, automating categorization, calculation, and subsequently decision making.
No more need for human. In the words of Anderson, that will mean the end of theory, big data evangelists like Anderson are committed to the claim that the big data approach is neutral value for free and rational in itself. The idea is that quantification can basically mirror everything, reducing all quantities to their calculable substrate human decision making then would be simply to derive the correct result from the automatic calculation.
The assumption of the big data priesthood is that as some things can be calculated so too, all things can be calculated and that the entire world can be reduced to numbers. In short tech companies are trying to move us from a world of classification to a world of calculation. The consequences are not only limited to the information we see and that frames our horizon and action's, it also applies to the way we understand ourselves by being registered in databases, both public and private that are linked to the algorithmic operations.
We are objectified as such. This is not only about a certain bias, but also about the framing of our life world by using non-transparent algorithms to register, monitor and watch individuals with no democratic control on its use or extent tech companies have been given a strong implicit exercise of power over individuals, the social control and mutual Surveillance of the medieval village, which depended on proximity and hierarchy. I have been automated and anonymized.
So you can see that there's a lot of similarities there between mid evil society, medieval public spheres, and today's public spheres. You can get an idea of Feudalism versus digital Feudalism. You can get an idea of their Surveillance, the Control and how perhaps distribution is becoming much more important than productivity.
A way to underscore that particular point in my opinion is to look at how many people are producing content on the internet,
Speaker 4 (29m 4s): Right?
Speaker 0 (29m 7s): Millions, maybe billions, I don't know, but there are a lot of content creators, so many content creators.
Speaker 4 (29m 15s): Is that okay
Speaker 0 (29m 18s): If you want your things to be seen on the internet, you have to pay people to market it, be it on Facebook, be it on YouTube or any of these new, smaller platforms that are kinda coming up, be it rock fan, or are these new Twitch or, you know, whatever the new one is, they are trying to change it. Some what, however, it's going to be very difficult to do that in my opinion, and how you are seeing it used to be that the Holy grail of profit was productivity.
It seems to me now that there's so much productivity, that the Holy grail of profit is going to be a distribution. And that is one of the changes we see ourselves in right now. So as we're talking about the public square, but I think we could talk a little bit more about that,
Speaker 4 (30m 12s): Right?
Speaker 0 (30m 12s): There was a gentleman by the name of Haberman the German fellow in that in 1962, he wrote a book called the structural transformation of the public sphere in Haberman is ideal model. The public's fear is the fundamental link between citizens and the political system and political discussions are based on the rule based deliberative process, taking place within the public sphere Haberman and his followers have realize that the public sphere as a model or an, the terms of max Weber, an ideal type of democracy fundamental in the theory of Haberman, he and his followers, his, the implicit construction of so-called discourse.
Ethics are the rules for communication in ideal democratic processes. Deliberation in a broad sense is fundamental. Hence the name of the theoretical position, deliberative democracy in order to, in order for deliberation to take place, the debate needs to be open to all concerned persons. One has to listen to all arguments and finally participants must consider the public good rather than their own interests here.
Reciprocity taking the others into account is of central importance. In the ideal public sphere, particular interest are excluded from the debate. Rather the common good has to be considered at the end of the deliberation, much contributes to it. The deliberation is successful. I'm sorry, contributes to it. If the deliberation is successful, think about our public discourse.
Now Twitter's confined to a hundred characters, 140 characters. Most people just slaying ad hominem attacks at one another. Look at the debates. If you live in America, look at the presidential debates we have. If you look at today's debates versus the Lincoln Douglas debates or the two mentored the country, talking for hours, we don't have that. Now. In fact, you don't even get to choose who you're president is, right?
Its it's a false choice. You can have anything you want for dinner. Do you want a Brown carrot or an orange carrot?
Speaker 4 (32m 36s): I don't want either of those
Speaker 0 (32m 41s): Public debate today is, is sickening. Which you know, I had an idea I was thinking about wouldn't it changed the world. If, instead of having say F people go to the stadiums to watch people play basketball or football or soccer, why don't we have people go to stadiums or local town halls to see people debate, incredible issues in our community, take the best person for global warming, take the best person for, for anti global warming and do a tour,
Speaker 4 (33m 20s): Right?
Speaker 0 (33m 20s): It would fill stadiums. I think I know that there's certain towns in which you could fill, you know, performing arts centers. What about today's idea's on foreign policy. What about, on how to give subsidies to companies? What about on tax reform? We could have these debates right now in our communities and we could have two. I mean you can have a tour. I think that is the kind of public discourse that needs to happen.
The whole idea of public sphere based on rational debate and discourse, ethics, subscribes heavily to a modernist discourse on reason. Most clearly apparent in the works as a philosopher, a manual con on reflective judgment and informed reflections and codified by max Weber in his sociological works Weber differentiates between three modes of legitimate cutting social action, the charismatic, which refers all authorization to some individual, the traditional, which refers all authorization to the tradition, to which the social action is related or the rational, which refers all the authorization to reasoning concerning of legality of the rule in the right of those using such rules to issue commands.
Speaker 4 (34m 45s): Right?
Speaker 0 (34m 45s): A lot of the problem with today's debate is the education system that might go back to the industrial revolution and we decided we no longer needed philosophers. We no longer needed people of incredibly high moral character or what we needed was factory workers. And so we utilize the Prussian education system and began the Pavlovian training, have people with bells and whistles.
Another passage states' let me read it, hear, and you can kind of understand where we are today. Many later works on the public sphere have focused on its decline. Ki has identified five common complaints about the public sphere at the turn of the 21st century. It is trivialized commercialized, fragmented and realize on spectacle rather than arguments as a result, citizens become apathetic or irrationally fanatic about public issues.
Maybe there was always been a larger problem with a theory of deliberative democracy in as much as it is too strict is expectation. Expectations have the behavior of the citizens to psychologically and anthropologically dubious and its terms, both to optimist and to credulous about rule bound. Rationality, for instance, there might be a trade off between deliberation and inclusion when the public's fear is expanded to include more people.
It could be that the quality we have debate declines as more and more time is spent on deciding about the credentials and the relevance of the speaker's opinion to the subject of the hand. A tendency Haberman himself mentioned in the original work. Only the well-educated, you know, just to deliberation and discussion may be able to live up to the strict criteria of the discourse ethics. Thus the less educated might be on a priori excluded from qualitatively ideal. So democratic processes, which ironically makes it the case that the less educated will not be ruled by their own representatives.
Does contradicting the very basis of democracy. You can bet your bottom dollar, that the people in Congress have that exact mindset without a doubt, people right, are in positions of authority in Congress believe wholeheartedly that the majority of their constituents are f*****g retarded. You can hear the way they take it to people. It's so condescending. I saw a clip today.
I forgot what it was on. I'll try to find it. However, it was a journalist who were there was talking to, I think, California Senator about this new stimulus deal and what the issue is with it and why it's being held up. And this particular Senator was saying that he is for signing both stimulus bills, that he would like, he is less worried about the pork and he's less worried about all the money being funneled at the top.
Due to the fact he thinks the people on the bottom needed the money. So he says, just sign it. What was beautiful about the interview was after this particular government official, I got done lecturing from his ivory tower. The journalist asked, do you think maybe the problem is that everybody in Congress is a millionaire? Or do you think that that maybe the problem is that everybody in Congress has so much money, that they are looking down on the people they claim to lead doing the guy to shut his mouth.
F**k it sat there, not for a long time, but for long enough eyes got all big and that he's just changed the subject completely. And it was, it was a beautiful clip. I wish more people could see it. And more journalists would talk about that. The people in Congress, the people in our government, they don't represent working people. They don't represent. And I don't care if you're a high end, a working person are a low end working person. If you are not making millions of dollars a year, the government's not for you. There is no way towns or cities or constituents or, or anybody like that can compete with the ability to lobby Congress like a sovereign wealth fund.
So there is a lot of that going on. And I think that's part of the reason our country is so divided in. So messed up is that a lot of people see our country as our country. However, in the halls of government, the American populace is a work horse needed to generate revenue to give. We wanna, it seems to me that they take money from a poor people in rich countries and give it to rich people in poor countries.
And again seems a lot like the economic system of the middle ages. All right. So in conclusion, let us, let us summarize a little bit about the public's fear in the network society. Our argument is so far rests on to the main points. One, the socially mediated public sphere is increasingly based on logics of visibility and mutual Surveillance and two that this societal form originated in our KX societies and returns to a model that ruled the medieval community more than the emancipatory modern public sphere, logics of reason and deliberation.
There are a pistol illogical as well as ontological points in this from an epistemological point of view, the ideal Haber amazing account on the public's fear makes assumption that are unrealistic ignoring factors like emotion that impinge on any public sphere, broader and more realist interpretations, encompassing aspects of entertainment, visibility, and these spectacular more adequately describes and analyze the public sphere as it appears in any highly mediated society deepening our first point concerning the socially mediated public from an ontological point of view, internet technologies, not at least social media contribute to a substantial change in the conditions upon which the public sphere operates.
The public sphere is not only a space of communication facilitated by mass media with a privilege center of attention and a dominant discourse that most people refer to. It is also a fragmented space, have a disparate, not necessarily connected public spheres or a fear Nichols, where people can engage in particular topics or isolate themselves among like minded. This is how paradoxically the internet can be dominated by media monopolies and still be the epicenter of polarization.
In our democracies, Donna Boyd has discussed the potential of networked publics. This is positive as long as there is a commitment to a meta discourse, a joint recognition of overall values and truths of society. If this is not mean tained, the decline of common reference might create problems for democracy and the legitimacy of central political power, as it is increasingly seen, for instance, in the American society where public discourse is increasingly fragmented.
When the values of truth, give away to the values of the tech generated algorithm that hooks you up to a marketing demographic, the common Ty's of humanity are strained critics talk about the filter bubble, but as demonstrated filter, bubbles are not confirmed. In most research. People actually engage across different spheres. Sometimes with those, with opposing views, since the internet, doesn't set up an actual wall between different factions, there are innumerable platforms and sights for the user since the internet media is uniquely.
Peer-driven what this means is that overlooked, eccentric social circles emerge in greater visibility. Allowing those who believe in which is polar guise or the immediate return of Jesus Christ to find each other. In our current media landscape, it becomes increasingly difficult to isolate in such practices as media noise creates disturbances and boundary challenges. Contrary to the synoptic econ of the pre linked in era of mass media visibility increasingly becomes mutual.
When the directional model of media fell a new model of visibility emerged in which media users both observe and are observed. This model also makes it both easier to escape and to isolate within certain media on social media, people willingly exposed themselves to uncertain audiences, creating context, collapse, and boundary turbulence. The reward is insight into other people, whether they're daily life or more intimate details, social media fulfilling a natural human desire to know about the others, but in using this means the possibilities of eavesdropping and spying have increased exponentially to an extent exceeding the close knit mutual Surveillance of the medieval village, the mass media society with a joint societal spectacle with a privilege center yields to one of dispersed publics based on emotions, community and kinship, but as well, one with a possible lack of common references, given the high place accorded to the special nature of the particular community's experiences and a subscription to a met a discourse of overall societal values, problematically such sub spheres might lack the corrective force of the surrounding community, allowing them to sink into medieval logics, a false beliefs, superstition, and ultimately exclusion of the outsiders.
So their, you have it folks. They are, you have it. The technology, the has the ability to Fri everyone also has in is the ability to enslave everybody. But we are going to go a little bit deeper. Talk about some more similarities, get into the modern and the medieval. Talk about the communities, how the online community is similar to the physical community. Have the middle ages are going to get into some of the events, some algorithmic biases, and it's going to be interesting and your just going to love.
Love, love it. I love it. I think it's fascinating. Well, thank you for taking a few minutes to spend time with me. I hope you have a great day. Are you.
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Codex Serafini
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