Caitlin Johnstone

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/real-democracy-means-democracy-of?r=iw8dv&utm_medium=android

The media are lying to us, as evidenced by reality never matching with their stories.

The politicians are lying to us, as evidenced by their never delivering on their promises.

The capitalist class are lying to us, as evidenced by their getting richer while workers get poorer.

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I don’t want innovations which improve my shopping experience or make smartphones a tiny bit better, I want innovations which eliminate world hunger, innovations which make it so people have more free time, innovations which help humans live in harmony with our ecosystem.

If you’re a middle class westerner, technology is already at a point where they’re not going to be coming out with any new personal gadgets that make your life significantly better. But there’s a massive amount of room for innovation that can make life much better for people as a whole. In terms of societal transformation technology still has the ability to radically improve the quality of human life, while in terms of rugged individualism technology is just going to give the wealthiest humans more of the same kinds of toys that are already failing to make them happy.

The line of technological progress which is premised on individuals purchasing new inventions for themselves has long passed its point of diminishing returns, and now those returns are functionally nil. We don’t really need any more inventions for individual purchase and consumption. What we need are collective-oriented innovations which change the way humans live on this planet. And it won’t look like flying cars or fancier personal gadgets, it will look like advancements which change and improve our ability to get food, shelter and resources to everyone.

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Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz

The Cuban Missile Crisis was ended by negotiations and compromise. Maybe Holman Jenkins should shut up.

11:20 AM ∙ Nov 6, 20222,549Likes591Retweets

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Democracy of the vote without democracy of information is not democracy. It doesn’t matter if people are able to vote as long as the media-owning class are able to manipulate how they vote. “One person, one vote” is meaningless if influence and control of information is highly concentrated in an elite few. And it is.

Mass media propaganda, internet censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, government secrecy and the war on journalism are all anti-democratic in nature, because they restrict the information the citizenry are allowed to access to inform their vote. And none of those instruments of narrative control have any influence from, or accountability to, the rank-and-file public. This means that while everyone gets a vote, how those votes are applied is subjected to aggressive and ubiquitous manipulation by the ruling class.

The US empire’s unprecedented investment in soft power control systems has given rise to the most sophisticated propaganda system that has ever existed. Human thought is being manipulated at mass scale like never before. If you control how people think, you control how they vote. 

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