Toxic sludge is good for you
Toxic sludge is good for you blows the lid off of today's multi-billion-dollar propaganda-for-hire PR industry, revealing how public relations wizards concoct and spin the news, organize phony "grassroots" front groups, spy on citizens and conspire with lobbyists and politicians. --Publisher.
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2015–2026years
88% recommend13% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > People seem unable to make up their mind if AI is very dangerous or is it not.
This is a propaganda tactic. For decades, tobacco companies claimed that there was no evidence that smoking was bad for one's health. Then, only after losing dozens of lawsuits did the propaganda switch to "but everyone knew for 100+ years that smoking was lethal".
One can read about it by reading Trust Us, We're Experts, or Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, or the other books written by the authors.
- Watch the pretty mainstream movie "Get Me Roger Stone" about how gamed certain segments of the population is to mobilise them politically, maybe read the book "Toxic sludge is good for you" about the history of astroturfing in the US - all what used to be mainstream views, that propaganda and fake grassroots group mobilisation has been rampant for over 100 years, then realise how many fed and mil connected people were in Q, and how there's been hundreds of thousands people rioting right in front of the white house with no one getting near the entrance, then suddenly a tiny group of people waltz in with cameras all over - makes absolutely zero sense in a historical or organisational context but already functions as judicial and political leverage almost weekly.
I'm not concluding anything, but sceptical speculation about state-, military pretexts, or corporate action like this didn't use to be as fringe as it is today, where it will quickly earn you an "enemy actor", "russia bot", "china bot", or "enemy of the state" badge - the oldest play in the book in my opinion, echoing mccarthyism, ww2 state sponsored xenophobia or similar strategies.
Since Bernais et. al. wrote about propaganda and the mouldable psyche of the masses for state power and profit in the 1920's it's like these perspectives have been forgotten.
In my view this is how business and politics have always worked until the modern "everything is just chaos and randomness" discourse conveniently became the paradigm - and conveniently that is for the ownership classes - even rather tame marxist historians or a plurality of historiographies outside of the tiny anglosphere bubble would laugh at this perspective and say the state and the upper classes have always and will always conspire in class warfare, propaganda and PR to spin, mobilise and smokescreen resource political and judicial strategies that people wouldn't support organically via PR playbooks, campaigning and event driven political action.
- Let me recommend the book "Toxic Sludge Is Good For You" - despite the rather silly title that book is an extremely thorough historical examination of PR, AstroTurfing and in general a rather shocking unveiling of an aspect corporate power that most people know very little about - from Edward Bernais right up until about when the internet really took over.
Lobbying, policy writing, press release creating, corrupting and local power infiltrating hidden complexes was already completely all encompassing and dangerous to everything "scientific" and everything "true" 20 years ago.
I can't even begin to imagine how advanced that system has become today with social media, fake grassroots, corporate sponsored think tanks and targeted advertisement. Rather scary.
- This thread is weird to me.
How are so many in the dark about the fact that it's mainly corporate PR that are behind all off the confusion about dangerous consequences from both energy-, agri-, and chemistry business?
Energy companies have known about potential catastrophic consequences for years, scientists have known, people living in nature have known.
People are "confused", doesn't get the urgency or simply ignore the issue because of PR, astroturfing and corporate campaigns.
It's all because of huge corporations hiring armies of lawyers, marketing people and greenwashing lobbyists that write both the laws and the news. (*see my sources if you doubt this )
Forget about the politicians and the consumers - they have been massively propagandized by a conglomeration of enormous agricultural and energy sector companies for half a century.
Seriously it's __well described and documented__ and has been since Exxon found out about climate change and hid its own findings in the 70's.
How do you some of you people know so little about the culprit, and instead blame mostly consumers or the politicians who are bought by corporations?
There is no debate and hasn't been for decades - the culprit is growth capitalism and the mega-corps that ruthlessly lie and distort in service of profits.
This has happened for over 100 years when US car manufacturers killed public transport in the US, and Edward Bernays created modern public PR, that apparently is working frighteningly well still.
Read:
Merchants of doubt https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7799004-merchants-of-dou...
Toxic Sludge Is Good For You https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/659246.Toxic_Sludge_Is_G...
Exxon Has Known for over 40 years: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
- PR comes from PR companies. A great book on this topic is "Toxic Sludge Is Good For You," which I highly recommend. PR is designed for mass consumption.
If you poke around in the documentation on their websites which is designed for developers, you'll see that these computers cannot be used for general problem solving, which any computer (a Raspberry Pi, for example) can.
If you go further and actually sign up for a trial account on these services (which I have done), you'll find that the "problems" they can solve are quite contrived and, as the OP points out, only consist of issues where the programmer already knows the solution.
Quantum computers are not as useful as a Raspberry Pi. That's it in a nutshell.
- Let me reccomend "Toxic sludge is good for you". http://www.prwatch.org/tsigfy.html. Its a book about PR in the twentieth century.
Basically the corporate elite has been hiring armies of secret and hidden agencies, front groups, lawyers PR people, ex-army agents etc. for decades. They smear , threaten, distort and ultimately change the publics perception of reality.
