Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Matthew F.'s avatar

That was the the real lightbulb moment for me back when the first thorough exposés of online astroturfing were coming out. The fact that the goal is not to persuade people of your case. It’s to make the entire public discourse so poisonously unmoored from reality that people just throw up their hands and tune out. Then you’ve cut the legs out from under anyone who actually wants to make a case or report a fact. And then you can do utterly whatever the fuck you like.

In the words of Ms Penny, a problem that the Marketplace Of Ideas struggles to deal with is that a lot of people aren’t there to shop.

Expand full comment
Andrew Reilly's avatar

It gets worse, of course. The ultimate outcome of the latest ACMA-misinformation bill percolating the parliament as we speak will probably be legislated robot-gatekeepers. Side-effect of the number and width of the gates now, and the supposed censorship-industrial complex now metastasizing.

Leave the question of who gets to tell the robot-gatekeepers what the truth is as a deeply buried footnote. And let's not worry about the many, many realms of life and discourse where reasonable humans reasonably differ.

I reckon that coffee houses, pubs, and other venues for face-to-face discussion might once again become popular, or closed chat-groups, at least among the sane.

Expand full comment
31 more comments...

No posts