It’s not so much that big things are for blandness and censorship. They’re for opacity. They are against being mappable. Blandness is boring, and being boring deflects attention. It makes it unrewarding to investigate things, to map the territory. Critics, unable to keep up, have to resort to criticizing the whole system.
“I know you’re up to a whole bunch of bad stuff, even if I can’t keep up with the particulars because you’re actively hiding them from me with your gigantic budgets and political power” is not untrue. Also, “I know that I have an exaggerated notion of how much good you’re doing, because you’re using your money and power to spread propaganda and I don’t have the capacity to distinguish your lies from the truth” is also not entirely unfair.
Hence, asymmetric injustice as a corrective to propaganda.
Of course, even if it’s producing neutrality on average, the landscape is lots of regions of intense propaganda for or against the system. Work for a major corporation, and you’re in a region of intense pro-corporate propaganda. Work for the Sanders campaign, and you’re in a region of intense anti-corporate propaganda.
Material wealth just sits there, waiting to be consumed. It doesn’t exist unless you make it. It’s a thing: a bushel of wheat, an mRNA vaccine, a mile of water pipe.
Knowledge is fugitive. Have an edge in the stock market? Better hide it if you want to use it. Need to criticize your opponent but don’t have any dirt on them? Make something up. Expert in your field? Better not exit the field, because your current skills and network will be obsolete in a year or two.
If you have a budget of time, and you’re trying to invest it wisely, you invest in material wealth, technical skill, or political power.
Only giant institutions or deeply invested players can really afford to invest in serious technical knowledge about the political landscape. It changes too fast, and it doesn’t produce anything of direct value.
Activists can’t afford fugitive knowledge about fugitive knowledge. So they criticize the shell game of the whole system, and we get the results we observe. Particular examples aren’t meant to be accurate, just illustrative.
Any activists who deviate from this and actually try to accurately model the current state of some political subsystem are building a form of knowledge that’s only lucrative in terms of power or money from within that system.
They’ll eventually either get tired or get hired.
Maybe there’s a sort of “efficient market hypothesis” at work here? Anybody who understands the system well enough eventually does it for a living? So anybody who isn’t part of the system doesn’t have an updated model about it, i.e. doesn’t understand it?
It’s not so much that big things are for blandness and censorship. They’re for opacity. They are against being mappable. Blandness is boring, and being boring deflects attention. It makes it unrewarding to investigate things, to map the territory. Critics, unable to keep up, have to resort to criticizing the whole system.
“I know you’re up to a whole bunch of bad stuff, even if I can’t keep up with the particulars because you’re actively hiding them from me with your gigantic budgets and political power” is not untrue. Also, “I know that I have an exaggerated notion of how much good you’re doing, because you’re using your money and power to spread propaganda and I don’t have the capacity to distinguish your lies from the truth” is also not entirely unfair.
Hence, asymmetric injustice as a corrective to propaganda.
Of course, even if it’s producing neutrality on average, the landscape is lots of regions of intense propaganda for or against the system. Work for a major corporation, and you’re in a region of intense pro-corporate propaganda. Work for the Sanders campaign, and you’re in a region of intense anti-corporate propaganda.
Material wealth just sits there, waiting to be consumed. It doesn’t exist unless you make it. It’s a thing: a bushel of wheat, an mRNA vaccine, a mile of water pipe.
Knowledge is fugitive. Have an edge in the stock market? Better hide it if you want to use it. Need to criticize your opponent but don’t have any dirt on them? Make something up. Expert in your field? Better not exit the field, because your current skills and network will be obsolete in a year or two.
If you have a budget of time, and you’re trying to invest it wisely, you invest in material wealth, technical skill, or political power.
Only giant institutions or deeply invested players can really afford to invest in serious technical knowledge about the political landscape. It changes too fast, and it doesn’t produce anything of direct value.
Activists can’t afford fugitive knowledge about fugitive knowledge. So they criticize the shell game of the whole system, and we get the results we observe. Particular examples aren’t meant to be accurate, just illustrative.
Any activists who deviate from this and actually try to accurately model the current state of some political subsystem are building a form of knowledge that’s only lucrative in terms of power or money from within that system.
They’ll eventually either get tired or get hired.
Maybe there’s a sort of “efficient market hypothesis” at work here? Anybody who understands the system well enough eventually does it for a living? So anybody who isn’t part of the system doesn’t have an updated model about it, i.e. doesn’t understand it?