Matt Taibbi recapped this last crazy month of this crazy year. The FBI and CIA have for years been treating Twitter (and presumably other outlets) as a sister intel collection and propaganda dissemination bureau. Details here.
“A world run by anti-people”
Taibbi observes how government has been manipulating us, with eager news organizations fine-tuning the message to drive the herd and produce the desired public response…
I can’t have been the only person to have struggled psychologically during this time. This is why these Twitter files have been such a balm. This is the reality they stole from us! It’s repulsive, horrifying, and dystopian, a gruesome history of a world run by anti-people, but I’ll take it any day over the vile and insulting facsimile of truth they’ve been selling. Personally, once I saw that these lurid files could be used as a road map back to something like reality — I wasn’t sure until this week — I relaxed for the first time in probably seven or eight years.
“The snake oil standard”
Then I found this gem, courtesy of In Our Times. 17 years ago, Kurt Vonnegut made the case that facts and solid information in the hands of the masses are a grave danger to those in power…
This is the information revolution. We have taken it very badly so far. Information seems to be getting in the way all the time. Human beings have had to guess about almost everything for the past million years or so. Our most enthralling and sometimes terrifying guessers are the leading characters in our history books. I will name two of them: Aristotle and Hitler. One good guesser and one bad one.
The masses of humanity, having no solid information to tell them otherwise, have had little choice but to believe this guesser or that one.
[…]
Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting.
They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they want standards, and it isn’t the gold standard. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.
What say you?