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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.
    

    Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda




  • I’m new here, and I dont have a very developed opinion about this, but my gut says that Meta is going to try to absorb (embrace, extend, extinguish) the fediverse.

    I’ve seen a lot of good reasons to do that, but I think that it might just be to get at the software. It seems silly that they would do that given that it’s free, but also they would be destroying a competitor at the same time, and really I’ve been working long enough that it wouldn’t surprise me.

    Anyway, i think that maybe democracy would be a great way to decide a question like this, and it would also be interesting to figure out how to set that up in a way that the people asking the question can know whether someone is trying to cheat.