I’m about to get this book, World Without Mind, suggesting that Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook should be trust-busted. When you consider that Facebook and Google control what information we recieve, and that Amazon is positioning itself to be the sole provider of goods and services, and Apple is positioning itself to entrap all of it’s users… I think that suggesting is 100 percent worth consideration.
I am old enough to remember the dawn of the internet. We thought it would bring people together. We thought it would enable us to pool our knowledge and come up with better solutions. Instead it enabled us to form massive angry mobs, and for disinformation to flourish and encapsulate nearly half of the population. Instead of the dissemination of valuable information, the democratization of voices allowed those best at emotional manipulation to swallow our entire media in it’s attempt to compete with their draw on the masses.
I heard this analogy once, and I keep returning to it. There are things that are too powerful for us to wield. Nuclear weapons aren’t used, their existence is only serves to ensure that they will not be used. And what if unlimited voices with no trusted arbiter is too powerful for our democratic society to wield. And our systems, dependent on our coalescing around some core truths and values, in turn dependent on the arbiter, cannot hold.
Kate's Queen City Notes 