I recommend Carole Cadwalladr's Substack essay "Total information collapse" today.

William Lindsey :toad:

I recommend Carole Cadwalladr's Substack essay "Total information collapse" today. As with everything she writes, it's incisive, richly thoughtful, and disturbing (in the best way possible). Hard to choose passages to excerpt in an essay so dense. Here's a taste:

"We are so ill-equipped to face the coming threat."

#Trump #Musk #Zuckerberg #disinformation #EconomicElites #authoritarianism
/1

Total information collapse

It's started. And it's only going to accelerate from here.

(broligarchy.substack.com)

William Lindsey :toad:

"Our entire news and information system was submerged by a barrage of noise from the richest man on the planet and because we’ve failed to grapple with the enormity of what’s happened to the underlying communication and power structures of our world, we are helpless to withstand them. We walked straight into Musk’s trap and allowed him - facilitated him - to set the political agenda in a crucial week."

#Trump #Musk #Zuckerberg #disinformation #EconomicElites #authoritarianism
/2

William Lindsey :toad:

"We need to start understanding that Elon Musk’s X is a weapon. It’s a weapon that is currently owned and controlled by a non-state entity. But from January 20, that changes. At that point, Musk’s behaviour must be understood in the context of information warfare from a hostile nation state."

Notice the pronoun "it's" a weapon. Not "he's" a weapon. A deliberate word choice here….

#Trump #Musk #Zuckerberg #disinformation #EconomicElites #authoritarianism
/3

William Lindsey :toad:

"A few days after the US presidential election, I wrote a piece about how the coming age of information chaos and the profound consequences on what comes next. The destabilisation in our information system that we woke up to in 2016 has now entered a wholly dangerous new reality: the merger of Silicon Valley and an authoritarian US state."

#Trump #Musk #Zuckerberg #disinformation #EconomicElites #TechBros #SiliconValley #authoritarianism
/4

William Lindsey :toad:

"But, the speed of it still shocks. And the events of the last week show how fast this is going to happen, in a confused hyper-accelerated political news cycle that cannot even process what is happening let alone adequately respond.

The world has never seen power like this before. The state machinery of a global superpower allied to the power and reach of global information platforms."

#Trump #Musk #Zuckerberg #disinformation #EconomicElites #TechBros #SiliconValley #authoritarianism
/5

CartyBoston

@wdlindsy yes, and I do want to carve out some space for how depraved the New York Times was and is. It was a team effort.

yuhasz01

@wdlindsy Yes agree, Maga dominates the information social media ecosystem and it was a critical tool for political success last Fall. Fox TV, Joe Rogan podcast, X, Facebook all "flooded the information zones" daily with lies and false narratives. Corporate mainstream media were enablers as well, failing to critically question all the Maga lies and normalizing it.
What is important is that this was a "bloodless coup" by GOP/Maga, using information/cyber warfare and lawfare tools.

Court Cantrell will not comply

@wdlindsy I am horrifiedly fascinated about how the moment the election was over, we stopped hearing anything from or about JD Vance. I always thought Trump was the red herring and Vance was the threat we should be most concerned with.

I am so very dismayed to have been wrong. Vance as the herring and Musk as the real threat is infinitely worse.

ManyRoads ☕ 🇺🇦

@wdlindsy People can ALWAYS vote with their feet and walk away from evil. I always disturbed to see how few choose that simple option.

Dana🗽theres more to love

@wdlindsy she invents the word infodystopian so lets all credit her for #infodys

Dusk To Don :raccoon:

@wdlindsy

Subscribed! Great article, thanks for the recommendation!

ooblick

Shame on us in the late 80s and early 90s for believing the biggest threat to the Internet was it turning into nothing but shopping malls. Little did we know it would be turned into a delivery service for propaganda so useful it would become the new Fourth Estate.

Hammer

@wdlindsy

'My Paranoia' - Censorship will be a major weapon in Trump's Arsenal. Musk and the Project 2025 crowd will lead the way.

Håkon Alstadheim 🇪🇺 🇳🇴🇺🇦

@wdlindsy I'd like to highlight this bit: " from January 20 [...] Musk’s behaviour must be understood in the context of information warfare from a hostile nation state. "

Jon

@wdlindsy prescient words.

Nizami

@wdlindsy
"don’t have to prove or disprove anything, you just need to drown the zone in shit"

T2R

@wdlindsy #boycottfacebook

William Lindsey :toad:

@T2R I definitely recommend reading Carole Cadwalladr's article.

William Lindsey :toad:

@EvilK Yep, Bannon's famous words that may prove to be his epitaph.

William Lindsey :toad:

@freshstart I agree. Prescient seems to me a good word to use to describe Cadwalladr's commentary.