Comment by kossTKR | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kossTKR | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, this is the real dark future right here.

It will be a continuation though.

The uppermost echelons of society have waged information warfare since the dawn of modern PR in the beginning of the 20'th century. Lots of theory on this have apparently been memoryholed, but it's easy to just start with the genealogy around Edward Bernais and the plutocracy and robber baron families still existing in the interwar period.

The masses don't really think about or realise that manufactured circus and foreverwars have been going on for a hundred years while a microscopic elite that controls the media and various organs in the state have been siphoning most wealth towards themselves in a increasingly dense cloud of smoke, while promoting rebranded ideologies for the genpop and systems of control that has become advanced cybernetic systems that steer the flow of information 100% from top to bottom.

The sad thing is that you could deduce this in the noise if you visited the last remnants of actual research journalism on the internet, but that will end now.

So where is one going to get to know the powerstructures of the world? Old physical libraries only, some dude on the corner, some "crazy guy" with a harddisk from before AI took over.

Are you claiming that powerful people only started using their power a hundred years ago when "modern PR" was formed? That nobody ever worried about information before that?

Why did you pick that as your starting point? To make things seem like a linear worsening? But even wealth inequality, which you talk about at length, got better before getting worse again during that time frame in the US... so I'm having trouble following the claim.

The Dawn of PR is just a good starting point. You can read Machiavelli or study the politics of the roman empire - all hierarchical societies tend to function like this, it's a like a mathematical distribution.

The New Deal along with social democracy in europe was a bargaining deal against the revolutionary forces existing at the time. After this was stamped out the Gini coefficient started to rise when the masses had no alternatives and global trade and outsourcing increasingly obscurred the falling realwages.

Who are the "microscopic elite that controls the media"? How many people are in the "uppermost echelons of society" to where they try to influence other people?

From my middle-of-the-road perspective, everyone is trying to change how everyone else thinks, from the small insignificant details to a cult-like brainwash. Even here and now both you and I are trying to change each others and everyone who reads this's mind.

I see so much calling out of "elites" with a negative connotation, yet anyone can post anything, and everyone can ignore it. Is it general paranoia? Do you know who these people are? How are they special/different, and why should we be scared of them?

From a european perspective even asking the question "why should be scared of these so called elites" is so bizarre it's almost frightening, i'm sorry.

It's a testament to the absurd amount of philanthropic whitewashing, PR and media control these billionaries hold.

"Elites" have conspired to exploit the masses throughout 5000 years of civilisation, it's simply a fact of history.

It's almost physically impossible to comprehend the power a group of billionaires has to pull and push issues, narratives, law, war and discourse in general, especially when the masses have zero organisation as a counterweight, and when numbers like "trillion" just doesn't register in any meaningful way in regular people.

If you study history you’ll notice that groups and their leaders are rising and falling, conquering and pillaging and then losing it all. The world is too dynamic for your reductive theory to fit in.

Elites compete with each other. They don’t sing kumbaya and cooperatively share the keys to power.

I agree, and the world is dynamic, it's just not as dynamic as especially american collective consciousness would have you believe.

There is very little social mobility, wealth transfers very solidly between generations at the absolute top and organisation around PR and Politics is tightly integrated in this class.

Off course you can always fall from grace, but that does not in any way diminish the collective power of this class. That's why it's called a class and not a "person" or one singular family or group of people that clownish conspiracy theories would have you believe.

A good primer to the historical context could be this new book from Cambridge: "The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity".

Elites have always formed tightly knit clubs that most couldn't get into.

This is not a reductive theory, it's based on solid academic research on wealth transfer and academic books like the one above.

It's a almost like a biological or physical property of advanced civilizations - like social patterns seen emerging in larger groups of monkeys, or a precursor to the labour divisions seen in ant hives - there's clear distinctions set fourth for an individual at birth or because of location or family, and no amount of ideology is able to change this unless very, very lucky - this is mirrored in the social mobility data.

While they will absolutely backstab each other given an opportunity (see the VCs who caused a bank run that primarily affected other VCs), they do seem pretty chummy. Davos is quite literally the summit of the elites.

But is the summit "let's all get together and stomp on the poor while holding hands", or is it just another high stakes poker game to show off who's winning or losing, making alliances and seeing who talks to who?

Assuming Kings/Feudal Lords can be considered elites, we were taught that these systems formed as a means of protection and overall ability to not worry about a lot of aspects of life- raiders, setting up trade routes, negotiating prices, farming, etc.

I see a direct mirroring in today's corporations. If you join a big company, it's because you don't want to risk branching out on your own. You exchange lots of potential money for a steady paycheck, and you don't have to worry about things like finding customers, figuring out taxes, etc.

It's clear that humans need some sort of hierarchy, and I just don't see why we should be frightened of the people whose skill is organization/mediation between people. I surely don't want to play the power game with them, and I don't think it's because of their brainwashing?

Isn't that just Europeans being antisemitic again?

Actual American billionaires lose half their fortunes in divorces (Gates and Bezos), are retired and don't need to care about controlling any media (…Gates and Bezos), or spend all day posting on Twitter (Musk, who is currently under the Rasputin-like hold of a retired postal worker named "catturd2".) They only have 24 hours a day and few of them seem to be secretly manipulating the media.

I mean, Murdoch does manipulate the media, but not secretly. It's completely obvious he's doing it! And nobody is tricked by it, they happily participate.

From manufacturing consent to manufacturing reality

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