Have fun staying poor
*Is the moral of nihilist trolls the sign of our decline? *How the distribution model of the information ecosystem redraw the map of our civilization by changing our trending values and dividing us into new tribes.
The contest we’re seeing inside the pandemic information warfare is a unique opportunity. Many believe it is a collision between the old and the new world. Many believe it might be a generational conflict. The movie Don’t look up tries to show that it is our own cultural and cognitive problem that leads to the downfall. And some analysts rightly point out that this is a conflict injected and accelerated by military specialists who have betrayed Western democracies and serve their enemies.
For me, deep inside the boiling cauldron of pandemic lies and hateful roars, lies a much deeper conflict. It is a battle between two fundamental paradigms.
Between trust and distrust.
Trust, love, hope, those deeply Christian principles, are now the target of an unprecedented savage attack from the very people who have mouthfuls of words like Christianity, values and Judeo-Christian civilization.
Distrust of people, one might say, hatred of one’s fellow man, underlies the new cultural war and the draws battlefield front for modern-day billionaires who project their own egos, their experiences and their qualities into this war. The entire world seems greedy, corrupt, and the people in this world are just stupid and selfish idiots. To them.
Marshall McLuhan said money is media and media is the message.
The money became the display of the opinions and values of their owners. The dominant value of the new dirty money on which Silicon Valley’s modern information economy is built is selfishness.
With the dirty Russian money pouring out of the Soviet Union like from a broken dam thanks to Robert Maxwell, the West started unknowingly mirroring the Eastern values. The 1980s gave birth not only to Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell, but also to Milton Friedman, the prophet of Holy Greed.
The Russians had more gold and fewer principles than Catholic-raised Italians, which is why they soon took over the entire American underworld. They know just one commandment: Kill or get killed.
These values are highly toxic to any culture. They cannot be survived. If you look at any charity fundraiser after major natural disasters, you can see why. Cooperation pays more than selfishness.
Our civilization is not entirely evil or stupid. This is just a virtual projection of the values of organized crime in the legit economy. The artistic manifestation of their money is a destruction. Social media trolls who destroy truth, decency and respect with psychopathic glee are paid for it and encouraged to raise more for the cult of money and schadenfreude. There is nothing more lethal than this subversion of our values.
In his book Democracy in America, Allexis De Toqueville describes how transitioning immigrants competed in the knowledge of literature and oratory. Poverty was tolerated, but illiteracy was not. Being illiterate was a social faux pas.
The main meme of the current Bitcoin campaign (which is modeled and sold by Bannon and his people as a revolt of the technologically savvy against the old elites to destruct national currencies) is Have fun staying poor.
That’s why the dominant information distributor on this planet, Facebook, is set to have its distribution algorithm for what makes the most money: Hate and fear. Behold the new social contract! Money for hate.
What is the power of words in the world where someone else owns the entire distribution algorithms and shapes the values? Which values is the social media business pushing forward? Are they inherently Western, democratic, ours? Leftists blame the capitalism. But the capitalism itself got sick by eastern dirty money.
If we allow our adversaries undermine our unifying narrative and common values, the next US constitution may soon begin with the words “Have fun staying poor.”
