[rm_-rf_slash]

I would argue that date was in 1917, when President Wildon founded the Committee on Public Information to sell WWI to Americans. The committee then hired Edward Bernays, who was struck by the ability for war to motivate people, and used his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories on psychoanalysis to contrive ways to get people to do or buy things they normally wouldn't.

The stunning success of psychologically tuned propaganda taught generations of political masterminds how to not only rile up the public to make big changes, but to structure society as a disconnected atomized collection of individuals too caught up with their own lives and consumerism to seriously challenge the powers that be. From then on, it becomes easier and easier to circumvent the constitution and even basic ethics because people are less likely to care for longer than a news cycle.

[mindslight]

What about 1861, when the mutual agreement of the Constitution was reinterpreted as an inescapable suicide pact? I don't think there's necessarily a specific turning point - it seems a long line of gradual erosion.

[rm_-rf_slash]

It's all about how you read your history. You could just as easily point to the amendments expanding voting rights to men without property, then freed slaves, then women, and so on, as an aberration of the founders' original design.

I prefer to look at it through the lens of propaganda because it marked the beginning of an era when big changes in culture and society can be reliably made through subtle manipulation instead of conquest or impassioned public debate.

[mindslight]

What's your constructive result (as opposed to reactive/condemning) of that characterization?

To me, propaganda is just a result of mass media, which itself is a result of the longer trend of advancing of communication technology. It's impossible to oppress someone who is not in your "light cone", or to control actions which are below your limit of resolving.

In the past things weren't as developed, so it was easier to circumvent a model that was less reflective of reality. But going forward, I feel the quest for individual freedom entirely comes down to information architectures.

[rm_-rf_slash]

Not just mass media.

In Bernays' Propaganda, he describes a new process to sell pianos based on psychoanalysis rather than traditional big-print advertisements.

Essentially, get leading architects to incorporate "music rooms" into their residential designs. Most architects will follow the greats and add music rooms as well. The average homeowner will then walk into the hardware store someday and notice a piano for sale - another Bernays innovation - and think to themselves that the idea to buy a piano was theirs all along. In fact, this all could have been done before the invention of the radio, maybe even the telegraph.

Propaganda itself is neither good nor evil. We must accept that biases and manipulable aspects are a part of all of us. We have to work with them, or ignore them at our peril.

One of Bernays' biggest early arguments pro-propaganda was that if the business and political elite don't figure it out now, someone else down the line will, and they'll use it to take you down. We as a species will have to consider this with every generation until Homo sapiens goes extinct.

[dalke]

How does the average homeowner know what's going on with the leading architects, without mass media?

I think you have mistakenly limited "mass media" to radio, telegraphy, TV, etc., and omitted print.

As a reminder, "big-print advertisements" have been around for a long time. The penny press predates useful electric telegraphy, though just barely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper#Industrial_Revolutio... says "In France, Émile de Girardin started "La Presse" in 1836, introducing cheap, advertising-supported dailies to France." 60 years previous, Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" pamphlet was distributed by the 100,000s during the US revolution, and I would put that as part of mass media and political propaganda.

Aspect of mass media in Europe of course go all the way back to Gutenberg. I'm not trying to establish a certain date, but rather demonstrate that mass media and its effects on propaganda have been part of the US for its entire history.

Even your 1917 is a semi-arbitrary date. Why not the yellow journalism of the 1890s, or more specifically the propaganda of the Spanish–American War ?

Going back further, the 1840 campaign song "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too", coupled with printed sheet music, helped bring Harrison to power. I'm a bit iffy of if that counts as mass media, but if not, it's close. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tippecanoe_and_Tyler_Too , that song "firmly established the power of singing as a campaign device", and surely was not ignored by future candidates.

[mindslight]

Let's not let different characterizations get in the way of our common understandings...

The local architects would follow the leading architects from their industry, but lumping it into "mass media" was probably a bad characterization. I'd describe it as as a kind of communication-based centralization, regardless of whether specifically enabled by periodicals, telegraph, train, etc.

You could accomplish the same thing with a more-local architect at the town or city level, but would the smaller gains pay off?