The movie Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) is a pretty entertaining, but cheesy spy movie that completely subverts the typical Hollywood political point of view of the day. For example, it shows Obama colluding to cull the people of the world with a silicon Valley billionaire character played by Samuel L. Jackson.
The movie portrays an electronic device--a cell phone--that's used to drive people into a murderous rage. This is a trope of movies and TV shows like The Walking Dead, that Birdbox Netflix show and others.
What's the Internet today, social media specifically, if it's not that? In the movies the device instantly turns people into crazed murderers, while the Internet slowly divides people into a million little cliques and radicalizes some, not en masse, but in dribs and drabs.
I've often wondered if social media is really a mechanism for closing the feedback loop on propaganda. The weird stories and social issue du jour often seem calculated and promoted for the purposes of divide and conquer. Is it for a truly villainous purpose, and is there a master plan like promoting WWIII, or is the divisive and poisonous nature of social media just an aspect of human nature, and a side effect of the banal maneuvering of shitbird politicians like Hillary Clinton?
No comments:
Post a Comment