Internet Censorship By Controlling Elites Will Not End Well
by James Kalb, Crisis Magazine:
Like any complex functional system, human society involves distinctions, hierarchies, and lasting connections.
The Internet, and electronic media generally, disrupt all that. They make everything equally present to everything else, and put all things on the same footing. Relationships become fluid, and sounds and images can be chopped up and reassembled, so that anything can be presented as anything else. The resulting liberation of experience from concrete connections and realities turns the world into a riot of self-indulgent fantasy. If you want to believe that the earth is flat, or run by shape-shifting alien reptilians, you can find a community on the Internet that supports you.
Other features of modern life push in the same direction. Technology, industrialism, modern concepts of expertise, and modern bureaucratic management reject nature, history, and tradition as guides. They want to cut things apart so the pieces can be reassembled to fit the purpose at hand.
The Internet and electronics make that tendency pervade all social life and understandings. The result is that the world, our connections to others, and even other human beings disappear as stable knowable realities. People come to inhabit a narcissistic world in which nothing seems more real than feeling and fantasy. They confuse their hatreds, resentments, and personal dramas with reality.
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