Showing posts with label popular media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label popular media. Show all posts

Thursday, May 18, 2023

When Do Conspiracy Theorists Make Sense?

Cory Doctorow's column in the May issue of LOCUS discusses what we'd probably think of as paranoid conspiracy theorists, vehemently protesting imaginary global plots against our lives and liberties, who in Britain are often informally labeled "swivel-eyed loons."

The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point

Of course, we do have to distinguish the paranoid looniness from valid concerns. As he says, we all want to "save the children." Most of us, however, want to save them from "real threats who never seem to face justice," while the swivel-eyed loons obsess about "imaginary threats," e.g., "adrenochrome-guzzling Satanists."

Some issues about which he suggests they have valid points:

Automated license-plate recorders, presently used in London, really can constitute "a form of pervasive location-tracking surveillance." That kind of power has been used in the past to target "disfavored minorities" and organizations regarded as suspicious.

While “'Climate lockdowns' are a product of a conspiracist’s fevered imagination," it's nevertheless true that COVID restrictions have sometimes served as a pretext "to control everyday people while rich people swanned around having a lovely time." The powerful were happy to promulgate regulations they didn't consider to apply to themselves.

The "post-ownership society" fearfully anticipated by some conspiracists has already begun to infiltrate the economy. Our Kindle books, music files, and other software don't really belong to us; we lease them from companies that can delete them at will.

What about the futuristic promise of a cashless society, when institutions such as credit card companies will be nearly all-powerful gatekeepers? "Access to financial services is a primary means of extralegal control over whole sectors of the economy."

Doctorow's article offers several other alarming examples.

However, he exaggerates about the demise of DVDs. Yes, we can still buy movies and TV programs (and music) in physical media that we permanently own; they aren't likely to disappear anytime soon. (The choice of renting DVDs from Netflix will go away later this year, though. Sigh.)

"We live in a fraught and perilous time," he reminds us, "and powerful people really do want to capitalize on this situation to enrich themselves at our expense." How can we enjoy the benefits of technologies such as those mentioned in his essay while avoiding their threats to our privacy and autonomy?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, December 24, 2020

Xmas Musings

I've just read a recent book about Dorothy Sayers, SUBVERSIVE, by Crystal Downing. One theme to which the author frequently alludes is the concept of living by an exchange model, an expectation of behaving certain ways to get equivalent value in return. For instance, Downing emphasizes that Sayers cautioned against the mind-set that doing good deeds guarantees one will "go to Heaven" or even enjoy prosperity in life. At the current season, this idea reminded me of Christmas gifts, naturally. We often speak of "exchanging presents" or having a gift exchange at an office party. Ideally, we'd give presents that reflect our awareness of what the recipient really wants, without any consideration of what we might receive from that person. In practice, our gift-giving is often constrained not only by what we can afford but by the anticipated size and monetary value of the present we expect the recipient to give us. If we spend a lot more in giving than the other person spends on us, we might feel miffed at the discrepancy or embarrassed at having put the other person in an awkward spot. Conversely, not spending enough on a gift may distress us because we fear the recipient will think we're stingy, or we might even feel guilty about not giving what we "should."

This subject reminds me of two short essays C. S. Lewis wrote about Christmas as celebrated in Britain in his time. You can read them here:

What Christmas Means to Me

Xmas and Christmas

In "What Christmas Means to Me" (a sappy title I seriously doubt Lewis chose himself), he distinguishes three things called "Christmas": The first is the religious festival. The second, a secular holiday devoted to merrymaking, "has complex historical connections with the first" and, in mid-twentieth-century England as in our contemporary culture, is joyfully celebrated by millions of people who don't practice Christianity in any other way. The third phenomenon, which Lewis says "is unfortunately everyone's business," he calls "the commercial racket." Note that this article was first published in 1957! Here's where the topic of gift exchange comes in. He laments the modern pressure to give presents or at least send cards to everybody we know, a custom he maintains "has been forced upon us by the shopkeepers." Not only is this obligation exhausting and a hindrance to the "ordinary and necessary shopping" we still can't avoid, "Most of it is involuntary." While I think "most" is an exaggeration, Lewis amusingly summarizes the hapless shopper's plight thus: "The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own."

"Xmas and Christmas," a witty piece of satire, bears the subtitle "A Lost Chapter from Herodotus." It purports to be the classical historian's report of strange winter customs in the fogbound island nation of Niatirb. The writer describes the sending of "Exmas-cards" bearing pictures that seem to have no discernible connection to the festival supposedly being celebrated, such as birds on prickly tree branches. There's a funny description of the citizens' reactions to receiving cards or gifts from anyone they haven't already gifted: "They beat their breasts and wail and utter curses against the sender; and, having sufficiently lamented their misfortune, they put on their boots again and go out into the fog and rain. . . ." Herodotus concludes that Exmas and "Crissmas" can't possibly be the same holiday, because surely millions of people wouldn't undergo those ordeals in honor of a God they don't believe in.

This essay's description of the illustrations on "Exmas-cards," including "men in such garments as the Niatirbians believe that their ancestors wore two hundred years ago riding in coaches such as their ancestors used, or houses with snow on their roofs," highlights the way our images of a "traditional Christmas" often owe more to art, literature, and the media than to firsthand experience. Those idyllic snow scenes, for instance, and the songs about sleigh rides. If anyone in the modern U.S. goes on a sleigh ride around the holidays, it's most likely a staged event, not a spontaneous family outing. As for songs such as "Winter Wonderland," "Let It Snow," and "White Christmas" (rescued from banality only by its seldom-sung prologue, which frames the singer as a Los Angeles resident nostalgic for the northeast winters of his childhood), a considerable percentage of the American population sees white Christmases only in the movies. In the popular imagination, though, December is supposed to conform to the standard described by TV Tropes in this entry:

Dreaming of a White Christmas

As the page explains, "Unless a work of fiction takes place in a tropical or arid setting, or in the Southern Hemisphere, it will always snow in winter. . . . The snow will be there to look 'pretty'. It does not melt or turn slushy, nor is it ever coated with dirt or litter. It is never accompanied by freezing winds or icy rains." While our family lived in San Diego at some points during my husband's Navy career, we could tell when it was winter (aside from chilly nights and increased rain) because the distant hills turned green rather than brown. Growing up in Norfolk, Virginia, I seldom experienced snow in December as a child. We got it mainly in January. My late stepmother, a native of the coastal region of North Carolina, loved snow and always hoped for a white Christmas. Considering her birthplace, I doubt she ever saw snow at Christmas during her entire early life. Yet the ideal derived from fiction, movies, and songs shaped her vision of how the winter holidays were "supposed" to look.

Merry Christmas, white or green, to all who celebrate it!

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Sunday, January 10, 2016

Mediacracy

Did you know that the word "mediacracy" exists? It does, although the Blogger spell check, and the AOL spell check put red squiggly lines under it.

References were reluctantly revealed by a Google search, after helpful suggestions that I might really be looking for "mediocrity" or perhaps "mediocracy" (which latter, btw, contained politically biased suggestions that mediocracy referred to the most recent Republican administration.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediacracy
Mediacracy is a situation in government where the mass media effectively has control over the voting public.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mediacracy
Noun[edit]. mediacracy (countable and uncountable, plural mediacracies). Rule by the media; a situation in which the media dominates or controls the populace...
 
www.unwords.com/unword/mediacracy.html
Definition of mediacracy :. 1. (n.) Government, usually indirectly, by the popular media;
 
And there were three or four more sources. Apparently, great thinkers have been opining about the media controlling the voting public for several years. In former times, the great newspaper barons were allegedly thought to be potentially dangerous opinion makers and kingmakers.  

If newspaper barons interest you, there are some vigorous discussions of the part played in UK political elections using this search   However, I'm more interested in the types of social order that might inspire world building in a steam punk, cyber punk, science fiction, futuristic or fantasy novel. 
 
In a past blog post, I've opined about a Pharmacracy, and for a compendium of almost all the forms of government from acracy to xenocracy, go here:http://phrontistery.info/govern.html

I particularly like Stephen Crisomalis's term "kakistocracy" and the excessively polite explanation for a word surely derived from "poop". 

(See http://www.heptune.com/poopword.htmlhttp://www.heptune.com/poopword.html )  And, by the way, the top ten pages of a Google search led me to a Brazilian football player. I had to know the scatological synonym for "kaka" and search for "kaka + ...." in order to find the poop-word site.
 
It must be said, the phronitistery site's excellent list does not include "Pharmacracy", nor does it include "Mediacracy", but "pharma-" and "media-" may be of Latin origin, and "-cracy" is Greek.
 
 How did I get onto this train of thought? A confluence of blogs. One was a blog post by Chris Castle which discusses the power of Search, and asks how far, in theory, a search engine with a monopoly and flexible morals could influence an electorate.
 
One of many interesting speculations in the piece is what would happen if, for example, a search engine gave users the option to filter out the name of a political candidate that they disliked. Such as "Trump".  What if the Search engine imposed a filter without being asked... such as making rapid encounters with "kaka" of the excremental kind  hard to find?  Or the helpful attempts to direct me to "mediocrity" or "mediocracy".

Chris Castle's blog post also discusses the power of the media to influence pharmaceutical drug taking by a suggestible populace. Drug marketers create a drug, and then create a need (or the perception that there is a need), for what the drug does. A solution in search of a problem!
 
The next article was Philly Law Blog, ostensibly partly about the erosion of The First Amendment, or at least of free speech. (I usually follow the law blog for information on current doings relating to copyright matters.)
 

I googled The First Amendment: 
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
Perhaps the loophole is the word "Congress".  It seems that the press itself, also various universities, and a State department of education or two are able to abridge freedom of speech without the assistance of Congress.

As a writer and a logophile, I am bemused and offended by the continual banning of words, and dictionaries dropping words, and the touchy feely folks who tinker with politically incorrect words in the worlds' most important religious texts. There is quite a difference between forgiving "trespasses" and forgiving "debts"  for instance.
 
The final blog article was by Richard Russo for the Authors Guild, among other things comparing the permissionless innovativeness of Google to that of the scavenging seagulls in Finding Nemo.

https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/richard-russo-on-authors-guild-v-google/

Not only does the word mediacracy exist. Some might suspect that a mediacracy has been established, and we never noticed.
 
Rowena Cherry