| In the past I've not been a fan of the phrase "global elite" , or given it all that much thought. But a few things have made me rethink that: (1) I watched The Century of Self by Adam Curtis, which was a recommended documentary in this recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32799789 I feel like as an educated person in his 40's, I should have at least heard of Edward Bernays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays But I hadn't until that documentary. Summary of what I got out of it: once TV arrived, it was inevitable that someone figured out the best ways to influence people's opinions with that medium. i.e. everything people are complaining about with social media is not new. Once TV was invented, there was way to influence elections more effectively, etc. It was very interesting to see who were the analogs of "Elon/Trump/Kanye" in the 50's. i.e. how politicians, businessmen, and entertainers all vied for attention and control over ideas. And paid for it handsomely! I guess the main idea is how money can be converted directly and deterministically into the opinions of the masses. I'm sure this is all old hat to people who study media, but ironically the current reflection about social media seems mostly ignorant of this, i.e. ahistorical. I had to learn this from a 20-year-old documentary! --- (2) This is kind of dark, but it was clear through watching some of Kanye's unhinged interviews that he thinks of population influence as sort of an engineering feat. He admires objective metrics, aligned interests, power, etc. He is amoral about it -- if trolling works, it works. It doesn't matter what it means. He would love Bernays, or he probably knows 1000x more about him and his methods than any of us do. He constantly talks about Elon and Trump because he admires how they control populations -- he says this explicitly. And Kanye is successful at it himself, so this is not an empty opinion. It's an interesting case of the mentally ill being more in touch with reality along one specific dimension than "normal people". --- (3) "It's not greed that drives the world, but envy" -- Charlie Munger (4) The idea of "mimetic desire" from Rene Girard (who Thiel studied at Stanford, etc.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimetic_theory So to me those are all basically the same idea, and a bit depressing ... And it works on me too. Because even if you don't have social media accounts or "keep up with the news" (I've been failing at this lately), I still think you're the "average of the 5 or 10 people closest to you". And those 5 or 10 people are influenced by these memes / media, etc. It does feel like a trap It is not an accident that someone paid $44 B for Twitter ... Control over the zeitgeist is simply valuable. |