What's unique now is decentralized + extreme potential reach. Or it was. Now we have to consider bias in the algorithm that sticks stuff in front of us and is, I suspect, the modern equivalent of those daily newspaper presses.
The yellow journalism era, on the other hand, was a little closer to the rich owning the press.
Times are not as different as we'd like to believe
But corporations were an act of Congress in 1776. Early America was decidedly anti-corporate (the Boston Tea Party was about a tax break to a corporation). Early Americans (and early thinkers who influenced Americans) were grossly distrustful of corporations and pools of money.
> The directors with of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own
Adam Smith, the Wealth of Nations
You're assuming that "rich" is the only relevant dividing line, which it isn't.
I think you missed my point: printing at scale needs a support system and a distribution system, and that requires capital. The "age of mass, top-down communications" didn't start "in the mid 20th century", and the printing press should not be used as a counterexample to support rayiner's argument. William Randolph Hearst was born in 1863.
The point is you are letting a system designed by elites to uphold elites set the boundaries. There are many forms of alternative media out there, some more popular than any billionaire owned rag.
Just expand your definition and don't let others tell you what is or isn't appropriate. Especially when it comes to political thought.
Add in the red scare + knee capping more leftists + academics during the 60s, 70s and you have a once massively influential independent confederate type of worker lead organizations that now amount to some moderate pundit's substack where they traded advocacy for ad dollars.
But before all this there were dual power institutions and mutual aid even going as far as providing free public education to all (who do you think taught cattle ranchers how to read in the 1880s? Then look at how quickly they took up leftist literature then writing their own).
What are you truly saying here because it just sounds like you don't know the history of labor in the US, which no shit. They don't teach this stuff anywhere, you have to purposely seek it out because neoliberals consider this type of stuff heretical.
It's why I hate people looking down on fanfiction, too. Aliens was Alien fanfiction. The New Testament is OT fanfiction. Hell, nolan's The Odyssey is fanfiction.
The establishment uses terms to dismiss outsider art as less-than, and this isn't much different. (They of course get to decide what the "inside" is)
Just because an established Hollywood director was a fan of the first Alien movie does make his script for Alien's sequel "fan fiction".
Cameron had already written and directed The Terminator when the owners of the Alien franchise chose his script for the sequel.
(Fifty Shades of Grey in contrast really did originate as fan fiction.)
I'm hopeful that the next one will last even longer since we'll have to build it explicitly for resisting corruption. Neither the printing press nor radio nor webs 1 or 2 had fighting back as part of their DNA. 3 was a bit of a flop, but there's a lot of design space still out there to explore.
Central points of control are also single points of failure. I think that without this bias we'd have a much more resilient infrastructure, not just in the face of corruption, but in the face of things like solar flares.
Says who though? The current front runners? Who can't even not let them hack into into other companies over the weekend unsupervised already?
Our earlier communication technologies merely had to work... at all. The next one will have to work in a world full of adversaries. The current front runners' products are those adversaries.
Sure, they have legitimate uses, but when it comes to trustworthy communication between humans, AI agents have nothing to offer except for the ability to interfere. Sure, they can also defend against that interference, but that's a bit like how gmail blocks spam while simultaneously serving ads to your inbox: they're not so much solving a problem as protecting a monopoly on their ability to cause that problem.
First, let me acknowledge the quasi-monopoly aspect -- it definitely constrained choice and filtered world events through the lens of their corporate overlords, the CIA dripped propaganda into discourse, etc.
But there was so much shared experience that that pretty much unified the US as a tribe. Conspiracies were passed around but were kind of like underground whispers. There was no Red vs Blue.
I'm not arguing to go back to those times, but in many ways the internet and more so, social media, is a deal with the devil.