Tech and Liberty
It's quite funny how stereotypical American Ben's blog is. The most important idea that is made explicit in the post (but not justified) is that of the marketplate of ideas, or that 'connecting people' (Zuckerberg) provides meaning, and that speech and an increase in information is a means to mount resistance against the powers that be.<p>one alternative view was presented by Baudrillard in 1985, talking about the 'uncertainty of reality'.<p>><i>"[It] results not from the lack of information but from information itself and even from an excess of information. It is information itself which produces uncertainty, and so this uncertainty, unlike the traditional uncertainty which could always be resolved, is irreparable. … Overinformed, it [the masses] develops ingrowing obesity. For everything which loses its scene (like the obese body) becomes for that very reason ob-scene.<p>The silence of the masses is also in a sense obscene. For the masses are also made of this useless hyper-information which claims to enlighten them, when all it does is clutter up the space of the representable and annul itself in a silent equivalence. And we cannot do much against this obscene circularity of the masses and of information. The two phenomena fit one another: the masses have no opinion and information does not inform them"</i><p>His point being that it is not a lack of discourse but precisely our constant rehashed and fractured discourse and feedback loops between what is real and representations of the real that make either indistinguishable from another. Viewed through this lens speech is not liberation, it's merely participating and destabilizing truth and feeding the very system that it is supposed to criticize. Autocratic lone empires without resistance always fall down, real systems of control allow for their antagonists to persist within them, without of course ever accomplishing anything other than simulating resistance. Think of the Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial.