TrueLife - Control, Surveillance & Digital Feudalism: Power, Privacy & the Modern World

Starting point is 00:00:01 Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

Starting point is 00:00:49 The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Monday. It's just another manic Monday. Monday, Monday, Monday. What's going on, everybody? Welcome to the middle of October.

Starting point is 00:01:23 Today's Monday episode. episode. I hope you had a great weekend. I hope you're enjoying yourself. I hope your family's healthy. I hope you're healthy. I hope you got a smile on your face. You got something to look forward to. Maybe even this podcast. Maybe you've been looking forward to this podcast all weekend. That would bring a smile to my face. I wanted to continue today with the next series of power, politics and poverty in the digital age. It's fascinating. I know a lot of you have seen the documentary, the social dilemma,

Starting point is 00:02:12 and it talks a lot about some of the issues we're having with the Internet, the way it's changing our society, the way it's changing and organizing new laws around itself. I found it fascinating. and it had dovetailed nicely with a lot of different books I've been reading, most of which I have done reviews on or spoke about in the podcast. Let me tell you a little bit about some of those, and then I'm going to dive into the series, which is going to get into the medieval internet

Starting point is 00:02:48 and how we're kind of sliding backwards in a lot of areas. The first few books I read were Marshall, McLuhan, the global village, the medium in his message, his ideas on the printing press, and how linear print has given way to linear thinking. I want a lot of ways, although it was a phenomenal invention, it narrowed our view of the world. I'm going to link in the show notes to an experiment that I did with a penny. And I can tell you a little bit about the penny. experiment here. So take a penny, you set it on the table, and you look down on it from an overhead point of view. And you'll see a circle with some, you know, some etching on it,

Starting point is 00:03:37 depending on how good your eyes are. You might see some letters and some numbers, but you'll see a lot of detail and even some depth. Now, if you slowly squat down until your eyes are level with the table and you look at that penny, it'll actually turn into a straight line. if you get dead even with it. And that is a good experiment to explain and visualize what linear print has done to our point of view. It's a really cool experiment. You can check it out with a link in the show notes or you can try it with yourself. It's a highly recommended.

Starting point is 00:04:14 It's really cool. The next set of books I was reading is by a Russian mathematician called Anatoly Famico. And you can follow along that series. the podcast. It's called history, science, or fiction. I don't, I can't speak to the validity of the book. However, it's fascinating to read the amount of detail and the inconsistencies in which history has been recorded. It brings up the George Orwell quote that he who controls the future controls the And in order to control the past, you must control the present. Also, it helps me understand that when people talk about truth, if you talk about truth or

Starting point is 00:05:12 someone claims something to be true, you should ask yourself, is that true enough? Because nothing's really ever true, right? It's more of an opinion. So those are two books that kind of led me here. And as I dive down a little deeper, I wanted to share with you some new insights I got from this book I'm currently reading called The Medieval Internet by Jacob Lina Jensen. The first is, I'll read a couple passages and then I will try to dive in and do a little breakdown and tell you my thoughts on it.

Starting point is 00:05:49 Here's the first passage that I was reading. It is a paradox that the internet, the ultimate symbol of modernity, transparency, and enlightenment, facilitates logics of enclosure, censorship, and social control. The internet is used in the service of democracy and freedom movements around the world, but it is also used by dictatorships to clamp down on activists and opposition. It is used to preach the gospel of freedom and to liberate the suppressed and alienated, at the same time sworn enemies of modernity and education, like ISIS, Al-Qaeda and Boko Haram.

Starting point is 00:06:31 They use it to advocate their viewpoints and achieve their goals. New medium technologies liberate and educate, but they are also used to narrow our horizons, create information bubbles, and willfully or not, make us more ignorant and less aware of worlds unfamiliar to our own. It's relatively new, the internet, at least for most people. And I think everybody remembers the golden age. of, well, at least for me, when I began to learn about the internet, they had America online and I'm sure most of you remember had that dial up like, you've got mail. You know,

Starting point is 00:07:15 it took super long to get on the internet. But there was this sense of freedom. There was this sense of you had the ability to go and do whatever it is you wanted to do. And it was like a public public sphere, like a town square where you could go, say whatever you wanted to. There didn't have to be any consequences. And as it grew and matured, it's become, obviously, monetization has changed the rules and the landscape. And human behavior has also changed it quite a bit. And for me, you know, I've, I have become increasingly more skeptical towards the internet and its consequences. The digital technologies, they were meant to enhance social life, social skills and mutual cooperation. It seems that they have come to set us apart from each other.

Starting point is 00:08:16 Like, we might be together physically, but we're not together mentally. We're separated by the geography and our screens, and it's kind of real, but it's not real. There was a great quote that said, social media is like playing bingo. You're all alone together. And that's exactly what it is. I'm often fascinated by the idea of the internet. There seems like it's in some ways it seems as though the newness, The ideas coming upon us from the internet are new.

Starting point is 00:08:58 They're this brand new idea of capitalism. It's a brand new idea of democracy. It's a brand new idea that has the ability to change us forever. However, you must be like Socrates and ask the question, is that true? Is it really true? Probably not. There's some people that say there's nothing new under the sun. But you can't have a new idea, but you can only change the position of the words to,

Starting point is 00:09:34 God damn it, that's not right. You can't have a new idea, but you can rearrange ideas to come up with a different method. Does that make sense? I hope so. Let me tell you what I mean by the internet, maybe not being so new. And what this book describes is that The medieval perspective Understanding contemporary digital social media savvy society

Starting point is 00:10:06 Through metaphors and concepts from medieval society Is a useful prism for investigating the social and political challenges Facing us 20 years into the 21st century The main argument is that apparently Distinct Social Phenomena related to the spread of new media and related and a product of logics that dominated medieval society, not at least those of control, surveillance, and feudalism. So let me first touch on the topic of control.

Starting point is 00:10:43 It seems to me that what we're seeing now is a neo-feudalism. And by that I mean the control in which, society is governed is fundamentally changing from governments to corporations. And there's always been an element of fascism throughout history. In fact, I believe that every government is a fascist government just to a different degree. Some are more, some or less. And that if you look at the giant multinational corporations today, you could make the argument that the GDP of Google, the GDP of Apple, the GDP of Facebook, if there were such a thing, would be bigger than the GDP of a lot of different countries.

Starting point is 00:11:45 You know, the employees of a corporation are a lot like the citizens of a nation, especially some of the new, like the big tech industries. They have more power and they have more authority than a lot of governments. They definitely have more money. And what you're seeing now, I think, is a hostile takeover of countries by corporations. Some of the evidence that is, remember the TPP and all these free trade agreements, they have all these crazy rules written into them that, governments are not allowed to disrupt the business of certain companies.

Starting point is 00:12:30 If that's not a fascist takeover of the world, then, you know, I don't know what is. And that's growing. And you can see that by, you know, if you look at the United States of America, how many times has the president called the heads of the big, the fangs to the White House or to Congress to testify? and nothing ever comes out of it. Additionally, I believe that big tech has probably all the dirt on all the politicians, right? They know what they're doing.

Starting point is 00:13:07 They can look at all their stuff. And so not only that, but where does the money come from? Right? Big tech has big lobbies, has big pockets and pays big daddy to make rules that siphon more money from people like us. that's part of the control issue another part of the control issue is here's an interesting one that i thought a society structure and government are linked at the core to the organization of space and vice versa the definition and regulation of space is seen as governmentality a tool for controlling and governing society defining certain spaces by assigning them

Starting point is 00:13:53 certain properties, regulating their use and exchange, controlling access to them, and organizing how the space is categorized, labeled, and distributed. Correlates to an image of societal roles and hierarchies. By navigating and assimilating the heuristics for such spatial structures, individuals reproduce power structures. Obvious examples of regulatory spatial tools are fences, gates, and city walls. But we should also think of town squares, fairs, royal forests, paved streets and walkways,

Starting point is 00:14:28 the boundaries of estates, and the pastures for grazing animals, as manifest examples of the exercise of power through space. Space became even more important in modernity as the state's centralized commons were eliminated and strong distinctions between public and private space were inscribed in law

Starting point is 00:14:48 as one of the foundations for liberal democracy. You see, in these passages, you can begin to see the author pointing out similarities between the medieval world and the world in which we see ourselves moving today. When you think of the medieval world, think about a castle outlined by parcels of land, and then you go out a little bit further, and then you have the no man's land, where there's some trade routes, there's some roads, but that infrastructure is not really that great. You know, you're protected inside the castle walls.

Starting point is 00:15:30 However, once you leave that area, once you leave that territory, it's fair game for anybody. You could make the argument that there's things like that now, like NGOs, non-government organizations, or SEOs, special economic zones. The world, to me, If you do a little bit of reading, you can see that the world is already being divided up into different territories.

Starting point is 00:15:59 And a lot of those territories are owned by corporations. Think about Ireland. Why does so many companies move to Ireland? Well, they have very favorable laws for businesses to incorporate there. You know, that's a type of special economic zone where you can be an American company. incorporate in Ireland and not pay any taxes to America. Yet, as that American corporation, when you get in trouble, you can still run to the American White House or a Congress

Starting point is 00:16:33 and get on your knees and beg for military help to kill people in other countries so you can continue to suck out their resources. And the only people that, I mean, there's a lot of people that lose there. But the corporations don't lose and the government doesn't lose. The people going to fight the war lose, they die. And then the citizens of both of those countries lose because the citizens of one area have to pay for it. And then these citizens in the other country

Starting point is 00:17:02 are going to feel the repercussions of people dying there. So that's a form of control. It's almost like sending the king's army to go conquer stuff. There's another similarity there. All right, let's try to tie in a little bit of surveillance here. Excuse me Everyone is seeing all the cameras in China

Starting point is 00:17:23 And the social credit scores And the Astrical amount of cameras That are just everywhere And I challenge you If you go to a modern building today If you go to like a college campus You see cameras everywhere

Starting point is 00:17:37 If you live in a big city You can look up and probably see them on streetlights Cities in medieval society Lived extremely close together Houses were small and cramped And they were placed close to each other People lived in confined, close-knit communities where everybody saw each other, and it was difficult or impossible to deviate from norms of expected behavior. Contrary to the modern panopticon, defined by Michael Foucault, which its central observer, with its central observer, medieval cities and villages were a kind of omnopticon.

Starting point is 00:18:17 Did I say that right? Omnopticon? based on intense mutual surveillance. What does that sound like? That sounds to me like the urbanization, the pack and stack apartments, the pack and stack condos, everybody moving into potential smart cities

Starting point is 00:18:38 where you can have the internet of everything with 5G, you can have your microwave, talk to your washer and dryer, you can have your smartphone, talk to your, TV and all those things can also listen to you. They can tell when you're turning your power on with your smart meters. They could restrict your power if you're using too much.

Starting point is 00:19:04 They can find you for using electricity at the wrong time of the day. Hey, don't use them during peak hours. You know, there's on a little on a side note, I got something in the mail a while back that talked about how much I'm using as far as electricity versus my neighbors. And it's funny because it's all, it was kind of all bullshit. It's an attempt to socially engineer you into using less. Everybody who got one, it was, it was similar in that everyone who got one, they said that the neighbor was using less than them. Think about that as like a form of social control. The popular understanding of surveillance and visibility in our society share basic

Starting point is 00:19:48 principles with those of medieval times. The exercise of power is different in as much as the dynastic legitimation of the governing class is different, but within the corporate dominated spheres of the life world and the state's concession of power to these spheres, the fundamental building blocks remain the same. Medieval exercise of power addressed reproduction, either of human beings or of existing order. The medieval goal of power was to uphold a stable society in God's eyes,

Starting point is 00:20:25 with those appointed by God to do governing. The stable society was not conceived in terms of growth, but under the image of the Wheel of Fortuna, where eventually all riches in one era will be paid for by downturn in the next. Modern capitalist society, on the other hand, is obsessed with growth and development, the exercise of power addresses production from the biopolitics that prioritizes securing a stable workforce to create a system of power

Starting point is 00:20:59 supporting the logics of capitalism. Modern societies are meant to evolve, hence the Silicon Valley obsession with disruption. I want to pause just for a second. Disruption makes a lot of people wealthy. It also makes a lot of people in poverty. And won't it be the ultimate irony? Or is it even possible for disruption to be disrupted? Something to think about. That is also the point in a recent work on Surveillance Capital by Sashiyah Zuboff. It's a great book, by the way, and it really gets into the, I think she's actually in that documentary, the social dilemma. but she really gets into, you know, all these services that we think are free are really just ways of stealing all our information and our data and then commodifying it and selling it.

Starting point is 00:21:59 She makes the claim that the surveillance capitalism in the platform economy is still basically about production. I will add, however, that logics of digital society are also about distribution. The battle of platform companies is fought over the right to control and distribute information, services, and products. Those who win the battle have amassed not only wealth but power. With all that implies economically and politically. The case of the great firewall in China tells us that in the future, those who distribute and control the information are those in power, which returns us through a different rhetoric and apparent ideals back to the medieval paradigm. Further, the rise of the internet facilitates a mutual surveillance,

Starting point is 00:23:01 a closeness, even a confinement that resembles that of medieval towns and villages. Ironically, modern technologies might bring us back to social logic similar to an age we have been taught was brutal and backwards. Some of the economic and political logic characteristics of medieval society can also be identified today. The way consumers sacrifice privacy for convenience and let corporations exploit their data, expose them to targeted marketing, or make them dependent on certain subscriptions, plans, and other kinds of economic dependency. It reminds me of the way feudal lords committed and controlled their pestil. and servants.

Starting point is 00:23:47 You know, I've done quite a bit of marketing on Facebook and some other platforms. Nowhere near as much marketing as someone who's a professional or who's in that field. However, I can speak to you about target demographics. Think for a moment about that word, target demographics. If I want to sell a pair of basketball shoes, which demographic am I targeting? If I want to sell a high-end handbag, which demographic am I targeting? You see, this idea of targeting demographics, I think, leads to further splintering of society. In order to have a target demographic, you must break down the differences in people so you can fine-tune how to appeal to that group.

Starting point is 00:24:44 And when you spend money and time and you have scientific experiments trying to figure out what is it about this small subset over here that's different than everybody else, you can find out some really interesting things. And some of those interesting things might not be that good. Some of those interesting things may be ideas and issues that are incredibly exploitable. Some of those things you find out may fall into the wrong hands or be used in a way that is not meant to be particularly helpful to society. The law of unintended consequences. So we've tied together a little bit of surveillance and control. And we've talked a little bit about how corporations are slowly taking over the form of government that was done by politicians. I want to dig into a little bit more of why big tech and those particular corporations are doing the things they're doing. Here's another passage from the book.

Starting point is 00:26:08 And it's about big tech. It's about what their mission is, about the phenomenon of it. the big data ideology, if you will. The ultimate postmodern phenomenon, the Internet itself necessitates categorization and systemic approaches. Information and data have to be uniquely identifiable and categorized in order for the system

Starting point is 00:26:35 to process and understand it. This fundamental framing principle is one of the basic features in machine learning, going to show the enormous importance of exact categorization. Before algorithms can handle data, data need to be ordered and to be categorized. But by categorizing data,

Starting point is 00:26:56 the world is organized and perceived in a certain way with a privileged view even before it is assimilated. There is no algorithm that can avoid reflecting the inherent power structure in the way data are categorized. No God's eye, Classifications are not value-neutral or unbiased, but a result of deliberate choices. In a controversial and much-sided, Wired Article, Chris Anderson 2008, claimed that with the abundance of big data, it is only a matter of time to find methods to let the data speak for themselves, automating categorization, calculation, and subsequently, decision-making.

Starting point is 00:27:42 No more need for human interpretation. In the words of Anderson, that will mean the end of theory. Big data evangelists like Anderson are committed to the claim that the big data approach is neutral value-free and rational in itself. The idea is that quantification can basically mirror everything, reducing all quantities to their calculable substrate. Human decision-making then would be simply to derives. derive the correct result from the automatic calculation.

Starting point is 00:28:16 The assumption of the big data priesthood is that as some things can be calculated, so to all things can be calculated, and that the entire world can be reduced to numbers. In short, tech companies are trying to move us from a world of classification to a world of calculation. The consequences are not only limited to the information we see and that frames our horizon and actions, it also applies to the way we understand ourselves. By being registered in databases, both public and private, that are linked to the algorithmic operations, we are objectified. As such, this is not only about a certain bias, but also about the framing of our life world. By using non-transparent

Starting point is 00:29:00 algorithms to register, monitor, and watch individuals with no democratic control on its use or extent, tech companies have been given a strong implicit exercise of power over individuals. The social control and mutual surveillance of the medieval village, which depended on proximity and high arc, have been automated and anonymized. So you can see that there's a lot of similarities there between medieval society, medieval public spheres and today's public spheres. You can get an idea of feudalism versus digital feudalism. You can get an idea of their surveillance, the control,

Starting point is 00:29:49 and how perhaps distribution is becoming much more important than productivity. A way to underscore that particular point, in my opinion, is to look at how many people are producing content on the internet. A lot. millions, maybe billions, I don't know. But there are a lot of content creators. So many content creators that if you want your things to be seen on the internet, you have to pay people to market it, be it on Facebook, be it on YouTube or any of these

Starting point is 00:30:25 new smaller platforms that are kind of coming up, be it Rockfin or these new Twitch or, you know, whatever the new one is. They're trying to change it somewhat. However, it's going to be very difficult to do. But that, in my opinion, is how you are seeing. It used to be that the Holy Grail of profit was productivity. It seems to me now that there's so much productivity that the Holy Grail of profit is going to be distribution.

Starting point is 00:31:00 And that's one of the changes we see ourselves in right now. Since we're talking about the public square, I think we could talk a little bit more about that. You know, there was a gentleman by the name of Haberman, a German fellow, that in 1962, he wrote a book called The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. In Haberman's ideal model, the public sphere is the fundamental link between citizens and the political system and political discussions are based on the rule-based deliberative process taking place within the public sphere. Haberman and his followers have realized that the public sphere is a model, or in the terms of Max Weber, an ideal type of democracy. Fundamental in the theory of Habermann and his followers is the implicit construction of so-called discourse ethics, the rules for communication in ideal democratic processes. Deliberation in a broad sense is fundamental, hence the name of the theoretical position.

Starting point is 00:32:05 deliberative democracy. In order for deliberation to take place, the debate needs to be open to all concerned persons. One has to listen to all arguments. And finally, participants must consider the public good rather than their own interests. Here, reciprocity, taking the others into account, is of central importance.

Starting point is 00:32:32 In the ideal public sphere, particular interests are excluded from the debate. Rather, the common good is to be considered and the end of the deliberation much contributes to it, the deliberation is successful. I'm sorry. Contributes to it if the deliberation is successful.

Starting point is 00:32:54 Think about our public discourse now. Twitter's confined to 100 characters, 140 characters. Most people are just slaying, hominem attacks at one another. Look at the debates. If you live in America, look at the presidential debates we have. If you look at today's debates versus the Lincoln Douglas debates, where the two men toured the country talking for hours, we don't have that now. In fact, you don't even get to choose who your president is. Right? It's a false choice. You can have anything you want for

Starting point is 00:33:33 dinner. Do you want a brown carrot or an orange carrot? I don't want either of those. The public debate today is sickening, which, you know, I had an idea I was thinking about. Wouldn't it change the world if instead of having, say, people go to stadiums to watch people play basketball or football or soccer, why don't we have people go to stadiums or local town halls to see people, to see people, debate incredible issues in our community. Take the best person for global warming, take the best person for for anti-global warming and do a tour. I think you could fill stadiums. I think you I know that there's certain towns in which you could fill, you know, performing art centers. What about today's ideas on foreign policy? What about on how to give subsidies to

Starting point is 00:34:38 to companies? What about on tax reform? We could have these debates right now in our communities and we could have two. I mean, you could have a tour. I think that that is the kind of public discourse that needs to happen. The whole idea of public sphere based on rational debate and discourse ethics subscribes heavily to a modernist discourse on reason, most clearly apparent in the works of philosopher Emmanuel Kant on reflective judgment and informed reflections. and codified by Max Weber in his sociological works. Weber differentiates between three modes of legitimating social action, the charismatic, which refers all authorization to some individual,

Starting point is 00:35:23 the traditional, which refers all authorization to the tradition to which the social action is related, or the rational, which refers all authorization to reasoning concerning the legality of the rules and the right of those using such rules to issue commands. I think a lot of the problem with today's debate is the education system. That might go back to the industrial revolution when we decided we no longer needed philosophers. We no longer needed people of incredibly high moral character.

Starting point is 00:36:05 What we needed was factory workers. And so we utilized the Prussian education. education system and began the Pavlovian training of people with bells and whistles. Another passage states, let me read it here and you can kind of understand where we are today. Many later works on the public sphere have focused on its decline. McKee has identified five common complaints about the public sphere at the turn of the 21st century. It is trivialized, commercialized, fragmented, and relies on spectacle rather than arguments. As a result, citizens become apathetic or irrationally fanatic about public issues.

Starting point is 00:36:51 Maybe there has always been a larger problem with the theory of deliberative democracy as much as it is too strict. Its expectations of the behavior of the citizens too psychologically and anthropologically dubious and its terms both too optimist and too credulous about rule-bound rationality. For instance, there might be a trade-off between deliberation and inclusion. When the public sphere is expanded to include more people, it could be that the quality of debate declines as more and more time is spent on deciding about the credentials and the relevance of the speaker's opinion to the subject of the hand. A tendency Haberman himself mentioned in the original work. Only the well-educated, used to deliberation and discussion, may be able to live up.

Starting point is 00:37:44 to the strict criteria of the discourse ethics. Thus, the less educated might be a priori excluded from qualitatively ideal democratic processes, which ironically makes it the case that the less educated will not be ruled by their own representatives, thus contradicting the very basis of democracy. You can bet your bottom dollar

Starting point is 00:38:06 that the people in Congress have that exact mindset. Without a doubt, people who are in... positions of authority in Congress believe wholeheartedly that the majority of their constituents are fucking retarded. You can hear the way they talk to people. It's so condescending. I saw a clip today. I forgot what it was on. I'll try to find it. However, it was a journalist who was talking to, I think a California senator about this new stimulus deal. And,

Starting point is 00:38:44 what the issue is with it and why it's being held up. And this particular senator was saying that he is for signing both stimulus bills, that he would like, he is less worried about the pork and he's less worried about all the money being funneled at the top due to the fact he thinks that people on the bottom need the money. So he says, just sign it. What was beautiful about the interview was after this particular, government official got done lecturing from his ivory tower, the journalist asked,

Starting point is 00:39:23 do you think maybe the problem is that everybody in Congress is a millionaire? Do you think that maybe the problem is that everybody in Congress has so much money that they are looking down on the very people they claim to lead? Doing the guy just shut his mouth. Fucking sat there. not for a long time, but for long enough. Eyes got all big, and then he just changed the subject completely. And it was a beautiful clip.

Starting point is 00:39:50 I wish more people could see it, and more journalists would talk about that. The people in Congress, the people in our government, they don't represent working people. They don't represent, and I don't care if you're a high-end working person or a low-end working person. If you're not making millions of dollars a year, the government's not for you. There's no way towns or cities are constituent.

Starting point is 00:40:11 or anybody like that can compete with the ability to lobby Congress like a sovereign wealth fund. So there is a lot of that going on. And I think that's part of the reason our country is so divided and so messed up is that a lot of people see our country as our country. However, in the halls of government, the American populace is a workhorse needed to generate revenue to give we want to it seems to me that they take money

Starting point is 00:40:46 from poor people in rich countries and give it to rich people in poor countries and again seems a lot like the economic system of the Middle Ages all right so in conclusion let us summarize a little bit about the public sphere

Starting point is 00:41:04 in the network society our argument so far rests on two main points. One, the socially mediated public sphere is increasingly based on logics of visibility and mutual surveillance. And two, that this societal form originated in archaic societies and returns to a model that ruled the medieval community more than the emancipatory modern public sphere, logics of reason and deliberation.

Starting point is 00:41:34 There are epistemological, as well as ontological points in the world. this. From an epistemological point of view, the ideal Habermazian account on the public's fear makes assumption that are unrealistic ignoring factors like emotion that impinge on any public sphere. Broader and more realist interpretations encompassing aspects of entertainment, visibility, and the spectacular, more adequately describes and analyze the public sphere as it appears in any highly mediated society. Deepening our first point concerning the socially mediated public from an ontological point of view, internet technologies, not at least social media, contribute to a substantial change in the

Starting point is 00:42:24 conditions upon which the public sphere operates. The public sphere is not only a space of communication facilitated by mass media with a privilege center of attention and a dominant discourse that most people refer to. It is also a fragmented space of disparate, not necessarily connected public spheres or sphericals where people can engage in particular topics or isolate themselves among like-minded. This is how, paradoxically, the internet can be dominated by media monopolies and still be the epicenter of polarization in our democracies. Donna Boyd has discussed the potential of networked publics. This is positive, as long as there is a commitment to a meta-discourse, a joint recognition

Starting point is 00:43:18 of overall values and truths of society. If this is not maintained, the decline of common reference might create problems for democracy and the legitimacy of central political power, as it is increasingly seen. For instance, in the American society where public discourse, is increasingly fragmented. When the values of truth give way to the values of the tech-generated algorithm

Starting point is 00:43:44 that hooks you up to a marketing demographic, the common ties of humanity are strained. Critics talk about the filter bubble, but as demonstrated, filter bubbles are not confirmed in most research. People actually engage across different spheres, sometimes with those with opposing views

Starting point is 00:44:02 since the internet doesn't set up an actual wall between different factions. There are innumerable platforms and sites for the users, since internet media is uniquely peer-driven. What this means is that overlooked eccentric social circles emerge in greater visibility, allowing those who believe in witches, poltergeist, or the immediate return of Jesus Christ to find each other. In our current media landscape,

Starting point is 00:44:30 it becomes increasingly difficult to isolate in such practices as media noise creates disturbances and balance. challenges. Contrary to the synopticon of the pre-linked in era of mass media, visibility increasingly becomes mutual. When the undirectional model of media fell, a new model of visibility emerged in which media users both observe and are observed. This model also makes it both easier to escape and to isolate within certain media. On social media, people willingly expose themselves to uncertain audiences, creating context, collapse, and boundary turbulence. The reward is insight into other people, whether their daily life or more intimate details.

Starting point is 00:45:19 Social media fulfill a natural human desire to know about the others. But in using this means, the possibilities of eavesdropping and spying have increased exponentially, to an extent exceeding the close-knit mutual surveillance of the medieval village. The mass media society with a joint societal spectacle with a privileged center yields to one of dispersed publics based on emotions, community, and kinship, but as well one with a possible lack of common references given a high place accorded to the special nature of the particular community's experiences and a subscription to a meta discourse of overall societal values. Problematically, such subspheres might lack the corrective force of the surrounding community, allowing them to sink into medieval logics of false beliefs, superstition, and ultimately exclusion of the outsiders. So there you have it, folks. There you have it.

Starting point is 00:46:20 The technology that has the ability to free everyone also has in it the ability to enslave everyone. But we're going to go a little bit deeper, talk about some more similarities, get into the modern and the medieval, talk about the communities, how the online community is similar to the physical community of the Middle Ages. I'm going to get into some events, some algorithmic biases. And it's going to be interesting. And you're just going to love, love, love it. I love it. I think it's fascinating. Well, thank you for taking a few minutes to spend time with me. I hope you have a great day. Aloha.

TrueLife - Control, Surveillance & Digital Feudalism: Power, Privacy & the Modern World

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