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1. Embed this notice
   William Lindsey :toad: (wdlindsy@toad.social)'s status on Monday, 13-Jan-2025 22:54:40 JST William Lindsey :toad:

   I recommend Carole Cadwalladr's Substack essay "Total information collapse" today. As with everything she writes, it's incisive, richly thoughtful, and disturbing (in the best way possible). Hard to choose passages to excerpt in an essay so dense. Here's a taste:

   "We are so ill-equipped to face the coming threat."

   #Trump #Musk #Zuckerberg #disinformation #EconomicElites #authoritarianism
   /1

   https://broligarchy.substack.com/p/total-information-collapse

   • Embed this notice
     William Lindsey :toad: (wdlindsy@toad.social)'s status on Monday, 13-Jan-2025 22:54:37 JST William Lindsey :toad:

     in reply to

     "But, the speed of it still shocks. And the events of the last week show how fast this is going to happen, in a confused hyper-accelerated political news cycle that cannot even process what is happening let alone adequately respond.

     The world has never seen power like this before. The state machinery of a global superpower allied to the power and reach of global information platforms."

     #Trump #Musk #Zuckerberg #disinformation #EconomicElites #TechBros #SiliconValley #authoritarianism
     /5

   • Embed this notice
     William Lindsey :toad: (wdlindsy@toad.social)'s status on Monday, 13-Jan-2025 22:54:38 JST William Lindsey :toad:

     in reply to

     "A few days after the US presidential election, I wrote a piece about how the coming age of information chaos and the profound consequences on what comes next. The destabilisation in our information system that we woke up to in 2016 has now entered a wholly dangerous new reality: the merger of Silicon Valley and an authoritarian US state."

     #Trump #Musk #Zuckerberg #disinformation #EconomicElites #TechBros #SiliconValley #authoritarianism
     /4

     idefix repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     William Lindsey :toad: (wdlindsy@toad.social)'s status on Monday, 13-Jan-2025 22:54:39 JST William Lindsey :toad:

     in reply to

     "Our entire news and information system was submerged by a barrage of noise from the richest man on the planet and because we’ve failed to grapple with the enormity of what’s happened to the underlying communication and power structures of our world, we are helpless to withstand them. We walked straight into Musk’s trap and allowed him - facilitated him - to set the political agenda in a crucial week."

     #Trump #Musk #Zuckerberg #disinformation #EconomicElites #authoritarianism
     /2

     Andre F Machado repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     William Lindsey :toad: (wdlindsy@toad.social)'s status on Monday, 13-Jan-2025 22:54:39 JST William Lindsey :toad:

     in reply to

     "We need to start understanding that Elon Musk’s X is a weapon. It’s a weapon that is currently owned and controlled by a non-state entity. But from January 20, that changes. At that point, Musk’s behaviour must be understood in the context of information warfare from a hostile nation state."

     Notice the pronoun "it's" a weapon. Not "he's" a weapon. A deliberate word choice here….

     #Trump #Musk #Zuckerberg #disinformation #EconomicElites #authoritarianism
     /3