An outside perspective helps - it is very hard to have the cognizance and understanding to see through subtle propaganda like this when it has been ‘normal’ your entire life.
Growing up abroad I almost exclusively saw print and TV media coverage of murder, fraud, rape, etc trials whilst almost never seeing a real image of the accused - just pastel courtroom sketches and videos of vans like that swerving into prison yards flanked by journalists throwing their cameras up at the tinted windows, hoping their photo flash can punch through and get a blurry headshot.
Conversely in the US where a lazy/complicit media will routinely engage in access journalism in a quid pro quo with the state/wealthy/famous, where they are fed information directly from the source they are ostensibly ‘investigating’ who will demand to remain anonymous, whilst also feeding the press select information and context that build a narrative. “Journalist” gets a story for their deadline with minimal effort and can repeatedly go back to that source in the future as long as they don’t challenge the state/PR narrative. Rinse and repeat, collect paycheck and vie for that Pulitzer headpat.
Why do you think we keep having these ‘open secret’ and #MeToo falls from grace despite decades of predatory behavior? Real journalists get careers cancelled, death threats, or assassinated in a carbombing for exposing the Panama, Paradise, & Pandora Papers, we have far too much lazy reposting masquerading as actual journalism.
I appreciate the concern, but we all already live in the digital panopticon.
The basic setup of Bentham’s panopticon is this: there is a central tower surrounded by cells. In the central tower is the watchman. In the cells are prisoners – or workers, or children, depending on the use of the building. The tower shines bright light so that the watchman is able to see everyone in the cells. The people in the cells, however, aren’t able to see the watchman, and therefore have to assume that they are always under observation.
The Victorian idea was to ensure compliance of the incarcerated by actualizing the impression of omnipotent surveillance. They’ve built that into the framework of digital spaces by hijacking the ISPs at the source, creating a permanent man-in-the-middle.
The room… contains several racks of equipment, including [devices] designed to intercept and analyze Internet communications at very high speeds. It is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic… [giving] access to all Internet traffic that passes through the building, and therefore “the capability to enable surveillance and analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and purely domestic traffic.”
‘Swimming in the noise’ was a decent way to stay unnoticed, but AI and ML processing throughput combined with metadata is carving that out rapidly.
An outside perspective helps - it is very hard to have the cognizance and understanding to see through subtle propaganda like this when it has been ‘normal’ your entire life.
Growing up abroad I almost exclusively saw print and TV media coverage of murder, fraud, rape, etc trials whilst almost never seeing a real image of the accused - just pastel courtroom sketches and videos of vans like that swerving into prison yards flanked by journalists throwing their cameras up at the tinted windows, hoping their photo flash can punch through and get a blurry headshot.
Conversely in the US where a lazy/complicit media will routinely engage in access journalism in a quid pro quo with the state/wealthy/famous, where they are fed information directly from the source they are ostensibly ‘investigating’ who will demand to remain anonymous, whilst also feeding the press select information and context that build a narrative. “Journalist” gets a story for their deadline with minimal effort and can repeatedly go back to that source in the future as long as they don’t challenge the state/PR narrative. Rinse and repeat, collect paycheck and vie for that Pulitzer headpat.
Why do you think we keep having these ‘open secret’ and #MeToo falls from grace despite decades of predatory behavior? Real journalists get careers cancelled, death threats, or assassinated in a carbombing for exposing the Panama, Paradise, & Pandora Papers, we have far too much lazy reposting masquerading as actual journalism.
Stay anonymous, stay safe, and please keep doing what you do. We need to hear this.
I appreciate the concern, but we all already live in the digital panopticon.
The Victorian idea was to ensure compliance of the incarcerated by actualizing the impression of omnipotent surveillance. They’ve built that into the framework of digital spaces by hijacking the ISPs at the source, creating a permanent man-in-the-middle.
‘Swimming in the noise’ was a decent way to stay unnoticed, but AI and ML processing throughput combined with metadata is carving that out rapidly.