Taken for a censorship ride
It is interesting lately to see all the deplatforming of what mainstream media has considered controversial personalities from the centralized systems, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter etc. The reason they are demonetized and pushed out, shadow-banned and demonized is of course because of the all mighty. Not God. The advertising dollar. Advertisers don't like controversy that costs them revenue, they only like controversy that brings them revenue, something that I haven't really seen spoken about in regards to the deplatforming.
When it comes to building the hype, a lot of these platforms positioned themselves as places for people to 'speak freely' to have a voice and a platform on which they could be heard. This gave rise to a fair bit of controversy in and of itself and a great many faux pas but, we were all learning a new way to communicate. The learning phase is over though and now it is time to capitalize on the lessons and what has been discovered is that centralized control of information was never released, something we know.
What they have done is leveraged the controversy raised by various members of society to attract and build an audience around, made it easy and ubiquitous for the user and then, are transplanting the controversial centerpieces with their own information. And because of how they have been nudged and how integrated these platforms are in their lives, the users no longer pay much attention to what is fed.
I was reading a post from @caitlinjohnstone about Wikileaks accounts being blocked on Twitter and was thinking about just how much money Wikileaks has made for these platforms and mediahouses with the controversies they have raised over the years. Their tweets, retweets, shares, news reports, spin-off programming and all kinds of various data leverages they have employed to capitalize on them. But, once no longer seen as income generating (or rather, income generating enough) they are disposed of and in the process, raises more controversy to sell. They are puppets of the engine.
This is the way all centralized platforms are learning to operate their information flow, they attract users in with a diversity of content and then slowly crush it down to what maximizes their income which is ultimately, what they approve of and often, what they themselves create. Netflix is a good example where they draw people in with a couple big name shows but their app continually pushes their own productions into the eyeline as 'suggested' viewing and 'people like you also liked' content. What it means is that in time, they can have all users (Netflix has 137+ million subscribers) demand the same content and slowly, drop off what they pay for, the outsourced information.
They don't call it programming for nothing. Centralization at play.
They all do it in various ways though, they all tailor the information down to make it feel that it is personalized for us but what it actually is, is a generalized information flow made to appear as what we ourselves would choose and due to how disconnected we actually are, we do not know what others are getting. It is not that it is all the same of course, but it is in their best interest. News services profile users and feed stories to increase polarization, entertainment wants to reduce production costs so tailor in that way.
Social media is a distributor of centralized messages, agendas and authority. Every advert, every link, every share is designed by a team to maximize its reach and therefore, its marketing and advertising revenue potential by profiling and leveraging the consuming eyes. People think that sharing memes of left and right is their version of freedom of speech but, it is engineered polarization that keeps the advertising mechanism and balls rolling. Due to the programming crush and the broad-line narratives.
Our voice is not ours, it is an echo of the message they want delivered. But, we all think we are unique and in control of our own minds, don't we? If we are, how come so many of us repeat the same words, words that have been interjected into the lexicon like, shadow-banning, alt-left/right, fakenews, identity and gender politics and so many other terms. The memes aren't just the Pepe the frog pictures, the actual ones that do the damage are those of insidious nature fed to us through the centralized media we consume and repeat as our own, our thoughts, our identity.
It all leads to a common story where alliances are created to face created enemies to deliver economy to war and more news controversy to sell, more programming to create, more conspiracy theories to spin. It is an endless forked cog that keeps turning the carousel but, the horse we are riding is going nowhere.
The operator standing to the side keeps taking the admission price though.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
True. But centralised media reliance on ads revenue will be there demise
yup.
That may be the case, but the lack of revenue from paid promotion will be the demise of any type of platform in the end. To run any kind of social media, centralized or decentralized, you're going to need money. If you're never going to have revenue streams in place that leverage the consuming user base and what it has to offer, namely its attention, what you have is a essentially a Ponzi. There are people out there saying silly things like Steem will never need a revenue stream "because it's decentralized". Pep talking newcomers into never powering down and even powering up everything while dreaming of financial freedom via Steem begs the question when that person themselves is going to start selling to pay their bills.
Apps that are actual businesses such as SteemMonsters or DStors and others like them that will emerge in the coming years, will come to ask themselves why they would have to pay for the traffic generated by the bloggers if monetizing their attention is not allowed. The business apps tolerate the freeloading bloggers now because speculators pay everybody's bills for now. But what about the future? Are the blogging apps destined to remain the province of those with enough Steem Power "mined" by blogging in the early days (that is, in the stage we're in now) to give them sufficient ownership to have the RCs to use the system without paying for it?
The current revenue from advertising model is untenable from a societal standpoint (we are seeing it break now) and from an economic model that keeps driving income to a very few by drawing it from the masses. At some point, there is nothing left to draw, what then?
There is a difference between having businesses in the ecosystem and only leveraging the data of users I think.
If that is the case, then the subscription model will be the only one left. If that fails, it's goodbye to social media.
But is it centralized social media even very effective at concentrating wealth into the hands of few? There are not many platforms as huge as Facebook or Google. Facebook's profits were $4.3 billion last year. It has two billion users. That translates into two dollars per year per user. I don't think it is accurate to say that Facebook is generating a lot of income on the back of it's user base. Facebook actually operates on a very thin margin. It's generating almost nothing per the average user who, after all, gets to use a well-designed social media platform for free.
What I think is that we are ultimately going to see an ecosystem with businesses that generate fiat profit giving STEEM value with us lucky early adopters owning a large part of the platform the majority being owned by the business apps having gradually bought us out. There will be blogging done on Steem but not much is made in the way of profits. I'm guessing the blogging community will be by and large similar to what we have now except that most of us hardcore hodlers will have 5-10 times the SP we have now with the price of STEEM being $20 as a cherry on top. Most of the SP will be delegated to the business apps because they can pay for the delegations well and they will use them for their own fiat-generating purposes.
If you believe free speech between people has no monetary value, you are grossly ignorant of the benefits to be gained only when facts can be discussed and reasonable people manage to effect their aims.
Society is so much more than merely an economy that I have essentially eschewed finance altogether, although once being an accredited investor. I find other social investments far more compelling, and profitable.
Eventually, in fact, technology is going make money obsolete. Scoff (I am sure you will. Many do), but society long existed prior to the invention of money, and will long survive after money is obsolete. Finance matters little today for folks technologically able to create their own goods and services, and 3D printing, aquaponics, IPFS, mesh networks, CRISPR, etc., are all enabling individuals to manufacture personally those goods and services which we can only even conceive of being available today by having a job so we can earn money and buy them from capitalized institutions that do so for profit.
Freedom isn't free, but it doesn't cost money.
Are you saying that there are significant numbers of people out there who want to buy STEEM and power up just so they will be able to speak their mind?
I take it that you're saying you find social investments compelling but their superior profitability is merely an afterthought. Am I correct?
You're talking about a post-scarcity scenario. It's plausible but not in the near future. Anyone who runs a full Steem node has bills to pay right now.
An opportunity to exchange ideas on a social media platform costs money. Someone has to pay the cost of infrastructure and development. Users pay it out of their own pockets or they allow the platform to sell their data. (Steem users own the platform.)
Quite true we are little advertisements for what we see. It is an information war. They want to program our minds. Most folks are compliant and even eager. For for those of us that are awake, well we see though it. I personally believe the end goal is - for those who cannot be programmed - They will be eliminated. Evil has no boundaries.
The elimination is ongoing and they are eliminated by the programmed group, not the masters.
Great post with many noteworthy points, but to be brief, I think a key observation is how much sharing memes has come to substitute for a feeling of political involvement, or even power. As always, the true power of the people is with their donations to those who don't take corporate money and their bodies in the streets interrupting the flow of business as usual. It's best when violence isn't introduced into the equation, though sometimes it has even come to that. But always, someone has to contribute actual power into the situation to change it. Money, disruption of making money, and clear demands repeated until fulfilled .... this is the power of the people. Because this is what works, much of the corporate and political agenda is to give us shiny objects that distract us from this.
Freedom of speech, but no one wants to take the responsibility to actually do something. I think even now the protests are bandwagoners, not activists.
I feel that a lot of the polarization and associated response is another shiny object to let the people think they are doing something.
I very much appreciate your thoughtful intention to work towards a society that functionally benefits it's members, rather than merely some scum that rises to the control surface (banksters).
However, your thinking seems to be limited to economic terms, and disrupting extant mechanisms and their profiteers. This prevents you from working towards a society that better manages it's resources than via extant financial mechanisms, which therefore is limited to the battlefield in which banksters have the best weapons and expertise.
There have been people long before there were businesses, and there will be people long after the economy we have been subject to all our lives is obsolete. Those people, as well as us, do have real power.
Please, thoughtfully consider what real power is, and no longer remain trapped in the paradigm that has been imposed on us by banksters, whose power is entirely based on the economic paradigm. I believe that I, and those I care about, might be hugely profited by your insights - and not financially, but in metrics that actually matter.
Thanks!
This is just one comment in direct response to taraz's post. If you read my most recent post you'll see me talk about communities that don't even need money to thrive.
But in this context, we are being directed toward behavior that serves the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few. And this is oppressing a lot of people. So as soon as we see that we can disrupt their flow of money we have a lot of power of them, since that's the only thing THEY care about. (I included donating also, because the reality is that not everyone has the kind of nervous system to actually go out into the streets and disrupt the flow of business, but they can still do more than just sharing memes on Facebook.)
The mechanism you describe is real, but it is not the bulk of the reason for deplatforming and censorship. It never was.
The financial interest in profitable corporations is inevitably captured by stake, and that stake isn't limited (generally) to those interests, but is diversified. The most profitable investments are generally defense industries.
The enemedia is owned by the same people that own Raytheon, General Dynamics, and the like. The use their stakes to create profit potential across their portfolios, and this generally results in war propaganda, disinformation, and censorship of contrary information, because that enables their most profitable interests to maximize ROI.
IMHO, this is a more compelling reason for the enemedia to be deplatforming controversial voices.
Thanks!
All a form of directional "brainwashing", steering viewers in the direction that they want you to go and believing in the propaganda that they put in front of you.
"Make them think it is their idea."
Exactly!
Many are waking up to this and I think it give rise to the attention economy being taken over by the users instead of the platforms... Why become the product and be manipulated when we can het paid for our attention instead? This is only the start but I feel a type of digital revolution will follow...
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The 'free internet' model hasn't worked for a long time, it needs a revolution.
Curated for #informationwar (by @Gregorypatrick)
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