By Free Republic | Created at 2024-12-21 19:27:27 | Updated at 2024-12-22 07:04:24
11 hours ago
Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment
Tablet Magazine ^ | 21 December 2024 | Kurt Hoffman
Posted on 12/21/2024 11:14:47 AM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
If anyone in the future cares enough to write an authentic history of the 2024 presidential campaign, they might begin by noting that American politics exists downstream of American culture, which is a deep and broad river. Like any river, American culture follows a particular path, which has been reconfigured at key moments by new technologies. In turn, these technologies, which redefine both space and time—canals and lakes, the postal system, the telegraph, railroads, radio and later television, the internet, and most recently the networking of billions of people in real time on social media platforms—set the rules by which stories are communicated, audiences are configured, and individuals define themselves.
Something big changed sometime after the year 2000 in the way we communicated with each other, and the means by which we absorbed new information and formed a working picture of the world around us. What changed can be understood as the effect of the ongoing transition from the world of 20th-century media to our current digital landscape. This once-every-five-centuries revolution would have large effects, ones we have only just begun to assimilate, and which have largely rendered the assumptions and accompanying social forms of the past century obsolete, even as tens of millions of people, including many who imagine themselves to reside near the top of the country’s social and intellectual pyramids, continue to imagine themselves to be living in one version or another of the long 20th century that began with the advent of a different set of mass communications technologies, which included the telegraph, radio, and film.
The time was ripe, in other words, for a cultural revolution—which would, according to the established patterns of American history, in turn generate a political one.
I first became interested in the role of digital technology in reshaping American politics...
(Excerpt) Read more at tabletmag.com ...
TOPICS: Government; Politics/Elections
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From further on in the article:
The permission structure machine that Barack Obama and David Axelrod built to replace the Democratic Party was in its essence neither modern nor conservative, though. Rather it is totalitarian in its essence, a device for getting people to act against their beliefs by substituting new and better beliefs through the top-down controlled and leveraged application of social pressure, which among other things eliminates the position of the spectator.
That explains a lot.
To: E. Pluribus Unum
To: E. Pluribus Unum
...which among other things eliminates the position of the spectator.
Thus the "If you are against the Ukraine war you are a Putinista" demagoguery.
3 posted on 12/21/2024 11:21:27 AM PST by E. Pluribus Unum (The worst thing about censorship is █████ ██ ████ ████ ████ █ ███████ ████. FJB.)
To: E. Pluribus Unum
4 posted on 12/21/2024 11:22:53 AM PST by 230FMJ (From my cold, dead hands.)
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