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1. Embed this notice
   Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 15:46:44 JST Strypey

   "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."

   #CaroleCadwalladr, 2025

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

   Nice that liberals are finally catching up. The writing was on the wall when Dubya passed the Patriot Act in 2001. Snowden confirmed in 2010 that the surveillance capitalists of SillyCon Valley were hand in glove with the surveillance state.

   (1/2)

   #surveillance

   • Embed this notice
     My name is RAGE (how@ps.s10y.eu)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 15:46:27 JST My name is RAGE

     in reply to

     @strypey

     This #Zuck shit... The guy looks like an old carpet, doesn't he? The utter stupidity of opposing #FreeSpeech and #FactChecking.

     🤔

     I can't help it but...

     https://deadpioneers.bandcamp.com/track/no-one-owns-anything-and-death-is-real

     Maybe, before everything falls apart, and we only have lead water left to drink, and AI conspire to make us all get at each other's throat, simply because the trend reinforces itself into a self-fulfilling prophecy, people will start listening to our small singularities, and stop believing crap...

     🏴

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     Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 15:46:29 JST Strypey

     in reply to

     "Zuckerberg took a smashing ball this week to eight years’ worth of “trust and safety” work that has gone into trying to make social media a place fit for humans. That’s undone in a single stroke."

     #CaroleCadwalladr, 2025

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

     Wow, that's a lot of trust & safety folks who are going to need new jobs. I suggest that anyone who values T&S in social media start forming organisations, and fundraising so you can employ them to work in the #fediverse, Nostr, BlueSky etc.

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     Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 15:46:31 JST Strypey

     in reply to

     "What I didn’t anticipate is that those witch hunts would start in the UK against elected officials before Trump had even been sworn into office."

     #CaroleCadwalladr, 2025

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

     I guess that's because you keep mistaking politicians like Orange Stalin for "leaders", when what they are is mouthpieces. Empty windsocks, gesturing in whatever direction the winds of popular sentiment appear to be blowing, to gain and keep power.

     The real leadership is happening elsewhere.

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     Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 15:46:33 JST Strypey

     in reply to

     For that matter, we could say that's why Palestine and Lebanon. If we interpret the ongoing survival of Israel - despite it's consistently appalling behaviour towards its neighbours - as made possible by its role as the base for US military power in the Middle East. Which I do, because it also explains US administrations of all stripes turning a blind eye to genocide.

     I believe this is also why Orange Stalin is raving and pointing at Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Mexico and Panama.

     (3/3)

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     Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 15:46:34 JST Strypey

     in reply to

     Fortunately, for those of us who don't live inside one of the remaining global empires, the reason for US decline - demographic collapse - is also faced by the other two; Russia and China. The sabre-rattling that's going on at present is the core nations of those empires grabbing what they can, while they can, and entrenching their occupations. It won't last.

     That's why Aghanistan and Iraq. That's why Syria and Ukraine. That's why Hong Kong and Taiwan. That's why Palestine and Lebanon.

     (2/3)

   • Embed this notice
     Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 15:46:37 JST Strypey

     in reply to

     "And for us, in Europe, trade agreements aka 'economic force' are nothing compared to the big one: US withdrawal from NATO, a sword of Damocles, over our heads."

     #CaroleCadwalladr, 2025

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

     I'm not sure that's really a big threat. My friends who study international relations at postgrad level have been telling me for years that the US is in decline as a military-industrial power, and has been for decades. Even if they stay in NATO, they'll be less and less useful.

     (1/3)

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     Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 15:46:38 JST Strypey

     in reply to

     Reading this piece, it strikes me that someone can know a lot about current events and journalism - and deserve full respect and attention when commentating on those topics - but at the same time, know very little about media history and analysis.

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     Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 15:46:39 JST Strypey

     in reply to

     "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."

     #CaroleCadwalladr, 2025

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

     Actually we have. Newspapers, radio, film and television were all used by the global superpowers of the day (especially the US and USSR) to expand soft power beyond their territorial borders.

     (1/2)

     #InformationWarfare #CyberWarfare

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     Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 15:46:42 JST Strypey

     in reply to

     As for the influence operations aspect of state-corporate collaboration, I thought knowledge of that went mainstream in 2020 with the release of The Social Network. Weren't journalists onto that a couple of years before? When Cambridge Analytica's election manipulation, in cooperation with FarceBook, was exposed.

     Again, some of us were concerned about the potential years before, based on our understanding of how the tech works, and the number of people crammed into the biggest DataFarms.

     (2/2)

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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 16:19:26 JST clacke

     in reply to
     @strypey It's very different. Newspapers and TV could do a lot, they could shape national discourse, but they were not as ever-present as our social networks. And they were write-only for the propagandist, not read-write like today.
   • Embed this notice
     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 16:19:28 JST clacke

     in reply to

     @strypey Yes. If the US withdraws from Europe, the countries there can just double their military spending.

     They have the resources, and they're already going that way thanks to leading NATO recruiter and morale officer Putin.

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     Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 16:19:31 JST Strypey

     in reply to

     "The Financial Times published an op-ed from Peter Thiel on Saturday. It billed Thiel, the founder of the data firm Palantir, as a “technology entrepreneur and investor” and not as the libertarian who’d bought himself a vice president ..."

     #CaroleCadwalladr, 2025

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

     Describing Palentir using the euphemism "data firm", instead of calling it a mass surveillance company, is an editorial error of exactly the same type.

     clacke likes this.
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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 16:19:53 JST clacke

     in reply to
     @strypey They know so much more about us now. They can tailor 1024 lies to different demographics to synthesize engagement and manufacture consent. You can see how powerless the old media are against them.
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     Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 16:19:54 JST Strypey

     in reply to

     @clacke
     > they were write-only for the propagandist, not read-write like today

     Doesn't that make them less powerful as progaganda tools, not more powerful?

     (2/2)

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     Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 16:19:56 JST Strypey

     in reply to

     • clacke

     (1/2)

     @clacke
     > Newspapers and TV could do a lot, they could shape national discourse, but they were not as ever-present as our social networks

     I don't think that's true. You must have seen the memes comparing the photos of everyone in public transport, reading their phone in one, and reading newspapers in the other. Families used to gather around the radio and television in their homes every nightly for news.

     Whatever the dominant form of media, it builds the frames in which the public live.

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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 16:20:06 JST clacke

     in reply to

     @strypey They didn't read the newspaper for hours in bed. It wasn't tailored to them and didn't have moving cats. You finished it during breakfast and your commute.

     State and newspapers built one rough frame. Think tanks and social media build a million, or a thousand, each with a thousand fringes.