this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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The sudden spike coincides with the Citizens United and SpeechNow SCOTUS decisions.
It's been trending for some time. Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" describes a host of national policies that were intensely disliked when they began and only became normalized after years of mass media manipulation.
The Drug Wars, opposition to the Civil Rights and Women's Rights movements, most of our wars after WW2, our large scale claw backs of social spending and ballooning security state budgets, our habit of subsidizing sports stadiums and toxic waste sites, etc - all need regular continued media investment for fear of a popular turn.
SCOTUS widened the spigots for political spending in pursuit of these goals. But it's not like the WSJ or AM Radio or the cable news companies weren't already flush with propaganda before the CU decision. It's not like CU was necessary for the volume of social media manipulation, either.
No the decisions weren't necessary for all that, but for the one simple graph tracking campaign costs it was particularly salient.