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Slate: Social Media Is The Enemy Of The Status Quo
“Nor is social media, as some people like to say, merely a neutral means—one that can be directed, with equal ease, toward any number of ends. Instead, social media has a very specific impact: It weakens the power of insiders and strengthens the power of outsiders. As a result, it favors change over stability—and constitutes a big, new threat to political systems that have long seemed immutable. …
The same logic applies to more sophisticated technology. For much the same reasons that old-fashioned flip phones proved an important tool for African rebel leaders, Facebook and Twitter have given radicals in North America and Western Europe an important tool in their fight against the democratic consensus.
It used to be challenging to put together a protest, much less to start a campaign, without access to established political organizations and vast financial resources. Finding like-minded people and coordinating their efforts was simply too complicated. But thanks to the rise of new technologies, it has become much simpler and cheaper to build a base of supporters and to align what they do. The technological gap between establishment parties and fringe movements has rapidly narrowed—so, as a result, has the ability of outsider candidates to win elected office. …
The same phenomenon is in the middle of transforming the media landscape. Until a few years ago, a small elite of writers, editors, producers, and news anchors effectively decided what views were mainstream enough to be given a hearing. This may sound sinister, but it served an important purpose. It allowed the journalistic class to contain false claims and to refuse to publish racist articles. It also meant that critics who rejected polite political discourse had trouble breaking in. Building a distribution network was expensive, so they couldn’t do much beyond writing angry letters to the editor (which those newspapers could decline to print).
Today, by contrast, just about any citizen can start tweeting, running a blog, or even building a big website like Breitbart. If he amasses enough of a following, he can quickly turn into a major purveyor of fake news. Little wonder, then, that establishment barriers against blatant lying or racist rhetoric in the press have seemingly fallen by the wayside. …”
Very true.
As I have said here several times, I now have the capability to fire a back a cruise missile from the Alabama Black Belt at David Brooks in The New York Times whenever the mood strikes. Like PewDiePie in Sweden, I can use social media to find fans all around the world. I can poison discourse from a treestand in the woods in the middle of nowhere. I can contribute to the epidemic of “fake news” which drives counter narratives in the UK. I can gang up with other true believers and trolls to wreck the Narrative.
Ultimately, we need to take a hard look at the impact Breibart and talk radio have had on American politics, and then we need to create webzines and podcasts to the right of Breibart in order to pull the Overton Window to the Right. We need sites with lots of contributors like Infowars which can pump out a firehose of content that spreads virally through social media networks and dissolves the reigning taboos. As Ryan Cooper has noted, we can even get involved in mainstream politics and move into the vacuum left behind by the collapse of the conservative intelligentsia.
Do we need talking heads like Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg? We have the means the bypass all of these Eastern Jews now. We have the power to become Tyler Durden in cyberspace.
Source: http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2017/02/17/slate-social-media-is-the-enemy-of-the-status-quo/
