I am not a mass media consumer. I do not subscribe to a newspaper for at least 20 years, and the only reason I have TV subscription is that Comcast will not sell me the internet service without it. I love movies, but these days I mostly stream some older ones to my 4K projection screen. I stopped going to movie theaters about a year ago when I realized that most new Hollywood productions are little more than the establishment propaganda, increasingly more obvious and increasingly more desperate. While production values of Hollywood movies are higher than ever before, moral values are absent, replaced by the pro-establishment indoctrination.
So where do I get my news instead? From the web of course. My browser has shortcuts with over 30 news sites offering many different points of views from all over the world. I often try to find at least two or three differing points of view to get a better understanding of a particular story. The composition of my news shortcuts changes all the time, when Guardian broke Edward Snowden’s story, it was on top of my list, later I switched to Der Spiegel which covered brilliantly Russian/Ukrainian conflict. Today both publication lost their priority position on my list as they succumbed to the siren song of globalism and made 180 degrees U-turn. The same happened to Al Jazeera after it started its US website. A few years ago I found that Russian RT had excellent stories covering some US events and South China Morning Star had deep coverage of Chinese events as well as Hong Kong student uprising. Alas RT and Morning Star got co-opted too and today are both propaganda organs for their respective governments. I also used to follow FOX News website until they fired their top moderators recently. Today Fox News is no different from the leftist online publications like New York Times or CNN, they neatly fill their assigned role of “soft” critique in the mainstream propaganda, pretending to be a conservative publication. They are not a conservative publication, just like CNN is not a liberal publication, they both print what they are told.
To put it bluntly, we have witnessed that just like print publications, web news sites too can get co-opted by the establishment once they reach a certain threshold of success. I discovered that Google news lost its independence streak a few weeks after they helped to elect Obama in 2012 presidential elections and dropped their “Do no Evil” mission manifesto. Twitter did likewise, although its cooperation with the establishment and censorship of conservative points of view did not help to lift their stock price. As I write these lines, Facebook, Twitter, Google and other are all deploying “fake news” filter with the help ofleft-leaningg political operatives, and Soros funded NGO’s. The upshot of all of this is that it seems that no corporate entity is beyond the reach of the global establishment. Even Drudge Report, still blocked by Twitter, seems funky to me these days.
But there is hope on the horizon. At the same time as I was losing trust in one corporate web site after another, I found myself following over the last few years increasingly more web sites and blogs created by INDIVIDUALS on platforms such as Twitter, Google+, Youtube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Medium. So far, I have been loyal to my picks and should they get banned by Twitter or by YouTube I am reasonably certain that I could find them again as long as browsers themselves do not block valid IP addresses.
This is an amazingly positive development. For the first time in human history, an individual without the establishment support or even without a corporate structure can bypass, bitcoin style, the media intermediaries and and gate keepers altogether and change the course of history through his or her bold action amplified by resonance of millions of individuals listening to their message on broadband internet. Such was the case with Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Donald Trump, each of whom acted and succeeded without the support of established ruling class, often despite their fierce opposition. For now, at least, all three can be followed by anyone on Twitter. There were others who tried and failed, and they too are heroes of this new age.
My news feeds are in fact comprised of direct links to individual writers across the world and the political spectrum. In addition to the above three, I follow on Twitter Ron Paul, Kim Dotcom, Glenn Greenwald, Dr Robert Epstein, John McAfee, Caitlin Johnstone, Tucker Carlson, Milo Yannopoulos, Mark Karpelles, Jim Rogers, Rachel Maddow, Esther Dyson, Charles Krauthammer, Walt Mossberg, Newt Gingrich, James Damore and many others. While some of them perhaps make your blood boil, I found that none of them changed in a major way their beliefs and the point of view of their posts. I may not agree with them, but I trust every one of them, which I can not say any more about the vast majority of mass media, both on the left and on the right. I am also linked with hundreds of people on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Medium. Without any doubt, there will be more social platforms emerging on the web over time.
My background is in 3D graphics and AI. When I started to work on wearable personal assistants, I realized that AI simply could not deliver on its lofty promises (see my Medium blog, AI, the Hoax of the Century) and I switched to neural science under the mentorship of Berkeley pioneer, Walter Freeman. He taught me that human brain is nothing like a computer and 100B+ neocortex neurons do not form AI like rigid “neural networks.” Rather, they form dynamic transient fields in multiple frequency bands, from Alpha to high Gamma, spreading through the brain at the speed of light. In my view, the resonance of large populations of cortex neurons is very much like the resonance of large populations of web users connected with fiber optics and communicating via Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat or Instagram. In both cases these resonant fields are an emerging self-contained phenomenon outside of the control of some “central regulator,” be it frontal lobe resident “executive process” in the brain or US based Federal Reserve in Internet economy. This is perhaps the explanation behind the bitcoin $10,000 price.
Just like my social networks above, person-to-person networks form relatively stable structures over time. But here is the kick: when the critical mass of people resonates with a message of the single user, like the fired Google employee James Damore, a fast transient fields form and spreads across the internet like a wildfire. These fields could be anything from a global music fad like Despacito to a political revolution like the 2011 Arab Spring. While these dynamic fields are fast and global, they are self-induced emergent phenomena which no single central regulator can cause or control.
Like George Soros, Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg are right to see the emergence of global society. They are wrong, however, to assume that they can control it with direct censorship, Google and Facebook created “fake news” filters (see my blog, The Truth, the Facts and “Fake News) and manipulation of search results. No single entity can control resonant and non-linear dynamics of billions of people interacting at the speed of light over the internet. A global world society does not need a central regulating mechanism to make it work, nor does it need a central world government. It exists in a chaotic but stable, far from equilibrium state, just like any complex energy exchanging living system. You can read more on this in blogs on my upcoming book project “The God of Scientism”.