Propaganda
“Bernays' honest and practical manual provides much insight into some of the most powerful and influential institutions of contemporary industrial state capitalist democracies.”—Noam Chomsky
Stats for nerds
33recommend
77mentions
63people
2009–2026years
51% recommend49% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- It does reflect the will of the people, but the causal chain doesn’t stop there.
The will of the people is the result of the corporate interests that control the democratic system.
Manufacturing Consent is an excellent read - and don’t stop at Chomsky, read Bernays, who pretty much codified the system as it runs today. Propaganda is a good place to start.
- > Ultimately, the bigger problem is that even in crowds like HN's, no one seems to have a good idea of what should be done about governments abusing datascience so efficiently.
The general-populace/crowd/mob has already lost this game. Govts/Companies (all of them irrespective of ethics/democracy/etc.) are doing what they want with data and datascience. The populace is easily propagandized/distracted from reality and can be easily cocooned.
The only recourse left for the individual is to learn and start playing the game himself. Fortunately the new tools are a great help in this asymmetric warfare. Organizations like EFF/OpenSource/GNU/etc. need to take the lead on this since most people are like sheep when it comes to uses/misuses of technology.
Palantir is just "Cambridge Analytica" redux but with more money/connections/data/breadth/depth/etc. Watch this old presentation by their then ceo Alexander Nix and extrapolate to today's AI world - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc
Finally go and read the works of George Orwell, Edward Bernays, Jacques Ellul, Marshall Mcluhan, Noam Chomsky etc. on the whole subject of Propaganda/Manipulation to really understand where we are now.
- One of the best opening sentences, from the book Propaganda by Edward Bernays: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society."
- Read Bernays' "Propaganda" and everything will make sense.
- I think not, there are some official meetings, like those hosted by the WEF, casually renamed https://www.worldgovernmentsummit.org to be a bit more modest but there is no special need to meet someone like you to understand your common interests. If you are a blacksmith you know your "cohort" interests without the need to meet some competitor/colleagues. You might occasionally meet them anyway, for lobbying, for a common cause (like the farmers against John Deere for the right to repair their tractors, or to be more precise the tractors they have bought but they do not really own anyway), some meetings might be public, some others behind closed doors, but the common interests of a category are well known by all belonging to that category.
The cohort who seems unable to understand it's own common interests are the 99% of the people who apparently, as usual, fails to see where are their enemy and their potential allies, regularly fighting against their own interests...
I suggest if you have a bit of patience an old book from 1841 by Clinton Roosevelt, The Science Of Government, Founded On Natural Law, it's strange at first bug get clear quickly and it's very fast to read: https://dn790002.ca.archive.org/0/items/sciencegovernme00roo... try and you'll see in a succinct and crystal clear the TODAY world, economy, with anything we have. Another good reading would be Eduard Bernays Propaganda and to complete the game a bit of modern network theory like some Albert-László Barabási.
- Yes, everyone has to one degree or another. No one is an expert in all fields, no one has perfect knowledge and so you will often be presented with things that seem perfectly reasonable but which are entirely false. Worse yet, most of the information you receive will be partly true and partly false with no easy way to tell which is which without engaging in a significant amount of legwork. The trope is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect which you face every morning when you read a few interesting articles or listen to the daily news. The practices of active deception for sales and influence are all quite clearly laid out by Edward Bernays in his book Propaganda, even our modern concept of "influencers" was known during his day, the more exoteric framing being that people will trust and follow the advice of people that they like or think are similar to them in some way.
