Tag Archives: social media

Hate Inc.

Posted on October 21, 2019 by Mark C. Rathbun | Comments Off

Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another (OR Books 2019) is an essential read for anyone caught up in today’s news cycles.

Taibbi traces the news media’s devolution since Noam Chomsky’s 80’s classic Manufacturing Consent.

Taibbi provides insider evidence to demonstrate that while the media’s overall purpose and function has remained relatively unchanged since the late 20^th century, its means of achieving that have shifted. The aim remains to line its and its sponsor’s (big corporate America) pockets. It continues to do so by entertaining in a fashion that keeps the public’s eyes off the more significant issues facing humanity and thus ignoring its victims (most of the population). Instead, it distracts with non-stop coverage of the class of victims it deems worthy, or in current terms those liable to command the most eyeballs and clicks.

Taibbi shows that media has discovered a bonanza by tailoring itself to specific publics, right wing vs left wing, religious vs anti-religious, xenophobes vs immigrant friendlies, warnicks vs. peaceniks, etc. and plying them with around-the-clock tailored, hyperbolic bias confirmation that feeds their fears and prejudices. It has abandoned the façade of objectivity in order to overtly stoke and exacerbate conflicts between factions. Media is now in the business of manufacturing hate. It has enhanced its manufacturing consent function by ditching public-interest investigative reporting, leaving its corporate sponsors free to rape, pillage and plunder at unprecedented levels while its viewers do virtual war on one another. Parenthetically, see the BBC documentary The Century of Self available free on Youtube, to understand the mass psychology marketing trend that lead to this ‘have it your own way’ model’s inevitability).

This passage sums up the current picture and its effects:

We are always at war with each other. It never stops, not for one second. This is a profound expression of political instability at the top of our society. There is a terror of letting audiences think for themselves that we’ve never seen before. There’s no, ‘Go back home tonight, rest, and think it over.’

Even from show to show the viewer is asked to remain glued to the conflict at all times. In print media your eyes scroll down to similarly themed stories, stringing you from one outrage to another. Keep clicking, keep delving deeper into the argument, make it more and more your identity.

We don’t want you signing off until tomorrow because we don’t want you to even understand that you have an inner dialogue separate from the news experience. Click on, watch, read, tweet, argue, come back, click again, repeat, do it over and over, rubbing the nerve ends away just a little bit each time. With each engagement, you’re signing over more and more of your intellectual autonomy.

You’ll soon become dependent on the cycle, to the point where you’ll lose the ability to dispute what you’re being told, because disputing would mean diluting the bond with your favorite news sources. Once you reach this point, you’ve entered the realm of belief, as opposed to conclusion.

This without a doubt is a form of religious worship.

Taibbi’s conclusion is both ironic and telling. While he makes a snarky indirect reference to Scientology (although it could just as easily be read as a double entendre including its critics) in teasing out the religious worship angle, he finally concludes with something that Scientology’s founder was endlessly crucified for recommending:

It will be hard to keep concealed for long the obvious fact that turning off the news results in an instantly positive psychological change for most people. If you want to be happier, if you want to live in a world that may be thick with problems but is at least a sunnier place where people are more decent to one another and more willing to cooperate and show kindness, just turn off the tube.

It is no wonder you don’t see Taibbi riding the cable news circuit much these days after the release of his important book. He is just too direct and effective in removing media masks. After recounting the Iraq-WMD hype that was foisted on the public to garner its support of war, he distinguished that from what is going on today:

This current craze is far more intense, bipartisan, and open-ended. It’s not designed to be a temporarily blinding fervor This is panic you’re told not to excise from your life, ever, or else…

Or else what? We [the media] don’t articulate that, for a very good reason.

Of all the taboos and deceptions in media, this is the one we lie about most. The thing we’re most afraid to discuss has to do with precisely that question of what happens if you should stop following the news.

The answer, of course, is nothing. Not only can you live without us, you probably should, most of the time anyway.

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When Distraction Becomes Catastrophic

Posted on December 17, 2016 by Mark C. Rathbun | 71 comments

“Carbon dioxide is being added to the earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at the rate of 6 billion tons a year. By the year 2000 there will be about 25 percent more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere than at present…

…The climate changes that may be produced by the increased CO₂ content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings.”

From Special Report of the Environmental Pollution Panel, President’s Science Advisory Committee, dated November 1965, entitled “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment” (Government Printing Office).

If one could manage to forego an hour of daily online distractions and spend that time instead on some directed google searches, one would find that the statistical predictions from the above report turned out to be pretty accurate.

If you would like to understand how these statistics affect our future as a species and how we are conditioned to ignore facts like these in favor of infotainment diversions, a meticulously researched book ably treats those subjects: Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.

At this moment, while a majority of the United States electorate is engaged in a game of who is punking who with ‘fake news’ and illegally obtained news, the climate-change denying president-elect is proposing the longtime head of Exxon Mobil (which acknowledged in writing internally as early as 1980 the truth of the above-referenced report, but buried it and continued to profiteer on oil for another 36 years and counting) to be our ambassador to the world at large, proposing a climate-change denier to uproot the Environmental Protection Agency (established by Richard Nixon largely based on the above cited report and its progeny), and proposing the most environment-antagonistic governor Texas ever had to establish our Energy policies (don’t forget, he vowed in 2011 to dismantle the department he’s now been named to run). But Democrats and Republicans alike are cool with it because in the short term they think they might earn a few more coins in yet another fossil fuel bubble and a get a couple percentage points discount in taxes. Their kids and their grandkids be damned.

If you choose to look and think honestly with it, you may wind up asking yourself, “fifty years later, and I’ve been obsessing about what?”

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Tagged Climate Change, Global Warming, Infotainment, social media

Has Your Mind Become Infected?

Posted on July 17, 2016 by Mark C. Rathbun | 46 comments

The following passage from The Four Agreements by Don Migel Ruiz was first published nearly twenty years ago. Consider the implications with the subsequent widespread proliferation of social media, online life, and “reality” culture.

Looking at everyday human interactions, imagine how many times we cast spells on each other with our word. Over time this interaction has become the worst form of black magic, and we call it gossip.

Gossip is black magic at its very worst because it is pure poison. We learned how to gossip by agreement. When we were children, we heard the adults gossiping all the time, openly giving their opinions about other people. They even had opinions about people they didn’t know. Emotional poison was transferred along with the opinions, and we learned this as the normal way to communicate.

Gossiping has become the main form of communication in human society. It has become the way we feel close to each other, because it makes us feel better to see someone else feel as badly as we do. There is an old expression that says, ‘Misery likes company’, and people who are suffering in hell don’t want to be all alone. Fear and suffering are an important part of the dream of the planet; they are how the dream of the planet keeps us down.

Using the analogy of the human mind as a computer, gossip can be compared to a computer virus. A computer virus is a piece of computer language written in the same language all the other codes are written in, but with a harmful intent. This code is inserted into the program of your computer when you least expect it and most of the time without your awareness. After this code has been introduced, your computer doesn’t work quite right, or it doesn’t function at all because the codes get so mixed up with so many conflicting messages that it stops producing good results.

Human gossip works exactly the same way. For example, you are beginning a new class with a new teacher and you have looked forward to it for a long time. On the first day of class, you run into someone who took the class before, who tells you, ‘Oh that instructor was such a pompous jerk! He didn’t know what he was talking about, and he was a pervert too, so watch out!’

You are immediately imprinted with the word and the emotional code the person had when saying this, but what you are not aware of is his or her motivation in telling you. This person could be angry for failing the class or simply making an assumption based on fears and prejudices, but because you have learned to ingest information like a child, some part of you believes the gossip, and you go on to the class. As the teacher speaks, you feel the poison come up inside you and you don’t realize you see the teacher through the eyes of the person who gave you that gossip. Then you start talking to other people in the class about this, and they start to see the teacher in the same way: as a jerk and a pervert. You really hate the class, and soon you decide to drop out. You blame the teacher, but it is gossip that is to blame.

All of this mess can be caused by one little computer virus. One little piece of misinformation can break down communication between people, causing every person it touches to become infected and contagious to others. Imagine that every single time others gossip to you, they insert a computer virus into your mind, causing you to think a little less clearly every time. Then imagine that in an effort to clean up your own confusion and get some relief from the poison, you gossip and spread these viruses to someone else.

Now imagine this pattern going on in a never-ending chain between all the humans of earth. The result is a world full of humans who can only read information through circuits that are clogged with a poisonous, contagious virus. Once again, this poisonous virus is what the Toltecs called the mitote, the chaos of a thousand different voices all trying to talk at once in the mind.

Even worse are the black magicians or ‘computer hackers’ who intentionally spread the virus. Think back to a time when you or someone you know was angry with someone else and desired revenge. In order to seek revenge you said something to or about that person with the intention of spreading poison and making that person feel bad about him- or herself. As children we do this quite thoughtlessly, but as we grow older we become much more calculated in our efforts to bring other people down. Then we lie to ourselves and say that person received a just punishment for their wrongdoing.

When we see the world through a computer virus, it is easy to justify the cruelest behavior. What we don’t see is that misuse of our word is putting us deeper into hell.