Back in the ‘good old days’ of broadcast media, the heyday of mass-media, newspapers, advertising campaigns and ‘Demography’ our social world was viewed in a conveniently packaged way: The Public was a true entity, and pundits, politicians, journalists always appealed to this entity as being representative of all of us.
The days of broadcast media being the only choice, when we were all passive audiences quietly absorbing the stream of content being pumped out to us all, when we were all hypnotized and seduced into believing our world was shaped just the way it was depicted on television and radio, magazines and newspapers, those days are finished.
The development of the internet, and then the World Wide Web in 1989 changed the entire nature of publication; being able to publish to a global medium and able to distribute your published work, respond to media in ‘real time’ has completely eclipsed the previous order of mass-media. Despite attempts to trivialise, and dumb-down web media, it has genuinely ‘disrupted’ the dominant influence of the broadcast empires.
The asymmetric warfare of Information: this is quite a mouthful, but in simple terms this is what we are presented with on today’s sophisticated media platforms. Just like many people I welcomed the Internet, and the emergence of independent publishing, it seemed that finally ‘the people’ were given access to publishing, a true Vox Populi !
However, it was very naive of me to imagine that this new freedom would be a pure offering.
We have seen how Silicon Valley has steadily sought to dominate the WWW, with their vastly copious financial resources and venture capital the community of Silicon Valley were positioned to build very powerful communication platforms; the rest of us also have access to build, but in much more modest terms.
An independent media builder however, can potentially build an audience, and also present narratives!
The nature of the World Wide Web can work in our favor (the little guy), it is not all about scale, or possessing infrastructure; however ultimately the ownership of infrastructure is going to determine the longevity of projects, and ability to negotiate.
We have seen that so-called ‘conservative’ political voices are being denied access to financial processing, hosting services, and other critical resources necessary for digital media publishing.
What people call ‘Conservative’ in these times is really not the same animal as in previous times, Populism, Nationalism and those parts of our communities who resist ‘Progressive’ technocratic ideology, Wokism, and the more extreme voices among the Social Justice groups make up the conservative voices; even ‘Centrist’ Libertarians and avid Constitutionalists are being included in this conservative bucket.
However, the ‘bones’ of the internet are made up of shared communication resources, telecommunication backbones, and submarine cabling which are independently owned, collectively negotiated; we need to ensure that these resources are not politically dominated by any one faction, otherwise the internet will become a true ‘Leviathan’ of horrendous proportions!
Communication is the one true human agency, this underpins everything that humanity can achieve.
So Who Is The Public?
The one major effect of the two-way communication dynamic of the Web has been to reveal the true ‘niche’ qualities of our society, really it has destroyed the demographic simplicity of the Broadcast era; we used to have this very clear idea of The Public, but we have been compelled to revise this old myth completely.
The Public were often depicted in films from the 30’s right up to the 90’s as being ‘the masses’, the great bodies of humanity crossing large city intersections, traveling on trains, planes and automobiles. We were used to seeing vast patchworks of urban sprawl, this is where The Public lived and went about their incessantly futile business.
This demographic image of The Public as being a kind of mindless mass, a passive standing army of petulant kids who need to be mollified, cajoled, soothed by a hypnotic stream of pleasures: sport, trivial quiz shows, tabloid rumor and celebrity gossip, personality politics, booze, prescription tranquilizers and vapid entertainment; all of this is not terribly flattering, but is how we have been groomed to regard ourselves. This is certainly how the “elites” regard us!
The emergence of social media has done little to dispel this unflattering image of The Public, with legions of ‘Toilet Wall’ writers leaving their hateful comments, and toxic feuding all over these open fora; but along with the adolescent level persiflage we have the exchange of views, the real time responses to events and published content, the clash of politics, the information exchanges. Always the elite, technocratic groups have underestimated the qualities of the ‘common man’.
In reality we do not have a monolithic mass who are The Public, we have a profusion of nuanced grouping, the ‘niche’ communities and special interest factions: this image of the public was largely driven by advertising, the Madison Avenue analysts, and the social/political science communities of academia.
The vigor, and health of our society is driven by this variation, this profound multiplicity among the ‘common man’; the so-called elite factions are themselves critically limited by their arrogant self regard, the homogenous quality of their thinking, these groups laack the organic imagination and vision which the working classes and ‘artisan’ classes naturally evince.
Consider who the great artists, writers, builders of the Western world have been: these remarkable human beings have seldom originated from the aristocracy, or the plutocracy, or the privileged groups, rather they have most often sprung from artisan families, and ordinary backgrounds; All that the ‘upper crust’ have to offer is decadence and hubris.
It has always been through the financial systems, the ownership of financial instruments, insurance, banking that the elite factions have dominated the western world. The removal of media and publishing from the elite faction’s foundational structure has enabled us to break through the hypnotic streams, the consistent projections of their world view. ‘The Great Reset’ is the current program of social engineering, but this has stalled at the launch stage. Covid was the means to stealthily impose an authoritarian, technocratic social ‘order’; I placed ‘order’ in quotation marks because of course this is a keyword which triggers the predictable ‘conspiracy theory’ response. We have been trained to dismiss any narrative which speaks of ”new world orders’, to lump it all together with ‘flat earth’ gibberish and extremism. This however is openly being discussed, this is not any kind of furtive, or clandestine project, they even have a website.
We who make up what the billionaire think tanks consider to be ‘The Public’ are faced with a very real existential threat, make no mistake about this. You might think that Covid, and the unfolding pandemic response is just about our health, but if you look around you, at how the police have been empowered to thwart your freedoms, how the petty officials have become so brazen and arrogant, how many new rules have suddenly become necessary, at how difficult it has become to travel, to socialise, to visit your aging relatives: all in the name of a flu-like illness which has a recovery rate of over 99.6%. Consider how the rate of death from ‘all causes’ is actually lower this year than for 2015 (check out the CDC, or official population statistics from reputable sources, this metric is the most difficult to manipulate or stack), this is not about ‘public health’.
Do you really think the present situation is solely down to a virus?
Research, and delve into as many sources as you can find, don’t accept anything that is proclaimed at face value: don’t accept my word either.
We face the gravest test of our human qualities in coming months, 2021 will be the test for humanity, will we take a knee to the technocrats and the elite think tanks, or will we discover the true value of our lives once again; this question is the only one I am thinking about as we consider the end of this insane year.
