Market Failure For Manufactured Consent
The biggest problem the establishment (call it the system, the Deep State, whatever) has is that it lost most of its ability to manage perceptions.
It used to be that if you saw a viewpoint expressed over and over in the NYT, on the news, by Yale professors, that would be the Official Truth. You might discount it by some factor. Maybe, if you were some sort of snake worshiper living in a West Virginia holler, you might disbelieve it entirely. But there would be no doubt in your mind that this viewpoint was that of the vast majority of the People Who Mattered, and eventually, you would come to more or less accept it.
At some point in this process, publicly expressing the opposite viewpoint would become enough to get you expelled from your school, fired and unemployable in most professions.
And then a new, more progressive Official Truth would be issued. Lather, rinse, repeat. This is how progress would progress.
As a certain Ivy League professor I know says, you can’t find a homophobe under 80 these days.
The Internet, once it gained critical mass, entirely undercut this ability to manufacture the illusion of consent. Even on the mainstream megaphone sites, you’re always a scroll away from the comments section. There, you can see lots of comments from people with the opposite view, and some of them are better writers than the article author. If there is no comments section, or it’s censored, well, that tells you something too. And that’s before you start reading blogs, Twitter, the chans…
We’re already seeing a belated scramble to regain control over the discourse. For instance, the purge of right wing Twitter accounts. There will be much more to come. Facebook has built a whole censorship apparatus, apparently.
I suspect it will fail. Once you let the magic smoke out, it’s hard to get it back in.
