The internet when it first appeared promised a new era of information democracy. The old media would lose control and new social movements, protests even revolutions could be organised from the bottom up from dispersed information sources. It was like that at first.

Progressive social movements are often first to take up new technologies because they are by nature unconventional and innovative. You really would not expect dreary conservatives and demented fascists to be at the forefront of cultural innovation. As  a result we enjoyed several years of digital democracy, viral campaigning for human rights and the environment and a contagion of grassroots revolutions of various kinds toppling entrenched authoritarian regimes around the globe. These halcyon days are now hard to recall. The internet today feels more like a dystopian cosplay convention for wealth scammers, wellness frauds, conspiracy peddlers, demented billionaires, aspiring populist fascists, and the same old vested interests.

Having seen the power unleashed by progressive social movements digital campaigning (which relied upon unpaid viral reach) the big corporate elites and authoritarian regimes quickly embarked on two projects, firstly, using the internet’s capabilities to actively surveil social movements and secondly to build their own massive systems for algorithmic political influence online.  But the big end of town it didn’t need to rely on unpaid viral reach, and unlike progressive social movements, it was never going to be constrained by any ethical framework that required honesty nor integrity. The corporate elites have always been marketing experts  so it was easy to merge manipulative marketing with the porous reach of the internet into everyone’s homes, phones and lives. Giant ‘communications’ firms were set up, to take advantage as cynically as possible of the new opportunities to confuse, divide and influence the public. The great digital democracy was quickly converted to the great digital dementia.

It first became apparent during the Brexit campaign, how marketing firms were being paid by conservative forces to identify and target individuals with misinformation tailor-made to swing them into line with the hard right agenda, by sugar coating messages in the recipient’s own value system.  Vegans in Britain were suddenly barraged with apparently random posts carefully explaining how EU policies (those terrible continental meat-eating cultures) were holding back animal rights reform in Britain, and that Brexit was the answer if you cared about animals.  

We all now exist awash in a personally targeted labyrinth of disinformation. Whether you are being constantly fed information about the resources needed to build EVs, or the concrete needed to build wind generators, this is being funded by the fossil fuel lobby to undermine renewables. If you are being fed a daily feed of outrage over the extreme censorship being forced upon you by the terrible woke movement, or you are constantly being told that feminism has emasculated men beyond recognition, you should be aware that it is being curated and fed out to you specifically for the purpose of distracting you from the very much greater threats to liberty in the form of resurgent fascism. Regardless of how you feel about political correctness, wokeness and whatever, it’s not really anywhere near the threat it is being made out to be. We have all been annoyed at times by holier-than-thou virtue signallers, but ‘annoying’ is all that it is. These people aren’t pointing guns at anyone, in fact they have almost zero impact on anyone who isn’t already sympathetic to their causes.

Fascism always generates scapegoats to distract and enrage the population, and also thrives in the kind of valueless chaos that currently populates our feeds.

There is simply no comparison between the faux battles that we are having our attention distracted onto, and the real power abuses that they are covering up for.

Of course EVs and solar panels and wind turbines have impacts of their own, but it still pales by contrast to the Mordor like horror of the coal or nuclear industries that are behind the anti-renewables disinformation.

Of course we can all get irritated by woke correctness but compared to the real violence enacted by  authoritarian regimes around the world, compared to the human rights travesty in Palestine, compared to the rise of angry, militant fascist and neo-nazi groups, compared to the fact that we have already arrived a point in history where a convicted fraudster, rapist and aspiring dictator can still be even considered remotely electable to US president, why would we even be worried about a few green haired college kids getting ansty about gender identities. Wokeness is just not a civilisational threat, fascism is.

We live in a mirror world where fascism weaponsies the words ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’, when history tells us that freedom and liberty are the very first casualties of fascism. There is simply no equivalence between the mere words of virtue signallers and the very real guns, violence and hatred of Trump’s hillbilly Taliban.

Sadly, despite the insanity of the modern internet distracting us into faux battles within our own communities, the same old global corporations and authoritarian regimes continue as ever to run amok with their life-threatening agendas.  

We are still struggling to save ourselves from the very real measurable empiric problem of human-induced climate change. Multinational corporations still control the vast majority of the world’s wealth. The global and domestic distribution of wealth and income is steadily becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of a mega wealthy few. Major corporate interests still control the lucrative arms industry and benefit from each and every global conflict.

The dismal tide of neo-liberalism still pushes for lower taxes on corporations and the mega wealthy and continues to leave governments with an ever-dwindling portion of revenue to undertake the important jobs of governance such as providing schools, hospitals, humane prisons, support for victims of domestic violence, housing for all and environmental repair.

One thing that has changed is that we have added a new layer of corporate overlords, the tech giants. The big tech companies, Meta, X, Amazon, Google and so on have annointed a new generation of psychopathic billionaires armed with all of the data they need to surveil you, to know your ideas and values and to process all of this data about you and to sell it to the highest bidder.

The real threats to our ongoing lives upon this beautiful threatened planet are not men, women, or trans people, dole bludgers, greenies or progressive politicians, the medical profession, the climate scientists or the gun control lobby.

If we can do anything to protect our freedom and our future, it is to avoid being tricked into seeing small scapegoats in the lived community around us, when collectively what we all need is a re-invigouration of collective social action, redistributive economics, revitalisation of our lived communities and to look through the onslaught of deliberate misinformation to see that behind every cynical meme that mocks and stirs outrage against other humans, lies a giant global corporate elite that thrives on our confusion. It is time to swipe left on the far right.

This was first published in the Nimbin Good Times, July 2024

 

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