Comment by barishnamazov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barishnamazov | Hacker News Reader

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The author missed the mark on the financial barriers to entry. He predicted that the shift from text to broadband/multimedia would make politics "more expensive" and raise entry barriers because video is costly to produce.

In reality, the cost of video production dropped to near-zero (smartphones, TikTok, YouTube). However, he was right about the outcome. The "entry barrier" isn't the cost of the camera, it's the cost of the algorithmic optimization and the "strategies to draw attention" in an information glut. The rich didn't win because video is expensive; they won because virality is gameable with resources. Credits where due, he indeed called out this potential for "international manipulation of domestic politics" well before the major scandals of the 2016 era.

The rich won in America before the Revolution. The Revolution was led by rich men who wanted to set their own tax policy, workhouses and vagrancy laws were used to control the poor in early America, union busting and violent strike breaking began in the late 1800s, inequality has soared since the 70s. The only time you could say that the rich were really on the back foot was from the Great Depression to the end of the gold standard, after which we entered the era of unlimited currency expansion (currency which somehow always finds its way into the pockets of rich men). Media in the 90s was controlled by a handful of companies who consolidated further as soon as the government stopped enforcing rules about concentration.

In other words, the present day is just business as usual.

I am against this growing notion that the internet is creating a unique situation where the average person is more oppressed than ever. It enables both good and bad things, and yes we really need to pay attention to the bad things. But it’s still a tool that can be used for engagement in the democratic process, for speech, for small scale commerce, and for communication.

This needs to be stated because those who oppose the good aspects of the internet are fully prepared to hijack anti-internet sentiment in the name of protecting the public. “Locking down” the internet will do nothing to improve the situation of ordinary people. Quite the opposite in fact.

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