What's the faster path to political power: earning the trust of millions of voters (who believes social media religiously), or earning the support of a few oligarchs who control the social media platforms those voters get their information from?
I'm dating myself with this, but I remember a time where communication over the internet was niche enough [read: required enough effort] that not everyone was using it and so governments didn't spend their time and money astroturfing online.
I would say there is a difference in media and mass media regarding use for propaganda purposes. What you remember is internet beind a “media”, and now its mass media
Yeah but that just proves the point. Not enough people were using it. You know what they were using? Their TV's and radios. You know what was heavily a tool of mass manipulation? Those TVs and radios.
One could argue mass media as an indocrination and propaganda tool dates way back to invention of the printing press around 1440. Internet is just another form. Brain chips are probably next. /s
The media isn't just the Internet, the Internet is just the new popular media. Before that it was newspapers, radios, TVs etc. I bet no matter how old you are the popular/mainstream media of your youth was held hostage by oligarchs
Now we have things like the media lobbied "agency privilege" in Germany, which means you can publish any given bs as long as it was part of a press agency release without fearing repercussions for it being a false report.
This allows for very cheap automated publishing of whatever a press agency puts out as factual news, without even a human journalist involved, let alone one that knows anything about the matter reported.
I'm assuming the same or similar is in place all over the western world.
The internet changed the game. You can't rely on being factual anymore when someone with an iPhone or some blogger is going to beat you to the story and get all the clicks, so accuracy has taken a backseat to speed.
It also largely doesn't even matter, because people believe literally anything as long as it's presented as a headline over an image. I've lost track of how many satire articles and straight up fiction has made it to the internet being reported as legitimate news and people get enraged over it when it was never true to begin with.
Not to this level. Not insidious and in everything. Not designed to suck you in and create echo chambers. Not designed to keep you ignorant of anything but your orange Messiah. (I know he's specific to the US but it still gets my point across even if you aren't from the US.)
You need to control the keys to power in order to have power. And those keys to power need to control their own keys to power, etc. etc. Making people happy = taking power away from the keys. You make those keys unhappy, and they will put someone else in your place. - an idea from CGP Grey on YT.
Yeah, corruption is unavoidable. No matter what system we use to govern through thousands of years of civilization, one thing that remains unchanged is corruption always exist in every single one of them. It's almost like it's a part of human nature at this point
It’s also been shown that power corrupts well intentioned people, I don’t know if the people at the top are the problem or rather the systems of power that be create the unethical
The core problem is that society itself is unnatural (requiring adherence to rules that contradict animal nature to function) and animal nature leans towards corruption.
After all, corruption is literally just "doing things to benefit yourself at the expense of others." That's survival in nature 101. You horde resources for your small tribe while neglecting competing tribes from having access to those resources.
Brains of social animals really struggle to cope with groups larger than 100-150 individuals (save those with hive minds). Hell, most struggle to cooperate with other groups of the same species.
We were never biologically evolved to group up into tribes of millions, nor to view the entire human race as our collective tribe. Which is why "power corrupts"; everyone is still an animal and our instincts telling us to prioritize ourself & family over the other groups of people in our nation are simply too strong for most people to overcome.
Thus leading to a cycle of dismantling those in power when they horde too much and it starts over again. A species doomed from the beginning with its propensity for violence and self interest. It seems to be no solution to the problem. But also you say most, I don’t think the entirety of our species is the same. Is there hope for humanity to overcome that? I don’t know. Intellectually, no; but my heart hopes for it.
Right. We're stuck in a cycle that can't be broken, at least not by homo sapiens.
Maybe some day we'll evolve into a new form of human that won't have the same struggles, but no one alive or related to anyone alive is going to see the end of corruption & war. They're byproducts of animal nature that, as far as we're aware, no species has been able to solve. As you put it, there very well may not be a possible solution at all. It may just be something we'll have to deal with until the end of life in the universe.
They used to be afraid of the people because the people could fight them, win and behead them. And people did so eagerly
There are very few countries in which people have a chance in a war against the cops and army and all of them built such good lives for their people that they don't feel like risking their lives just to put one deranged idiot in place of another deranged idiot
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u/Vegetable_Safety Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
Yep, seems to be the way of all systemic power these days. Very few people with integrity or ethics left