Shadow Warrior | How Big Tech and mass media ‘manufacture consent’ to benefit special interest groups – Firstpost

One of the most fascinating facts about Western media is its talent for “manufacturing consent,” as linguist and activist Noam Chomsky puts it. Rather than being a “neutral” source of news, the mass media is an ideological apparatus that reflects and disseminates the views of powerful interests. It carries out propaganda in the interests of the privileged classes and state power they represent by relying on market forces, internalized assumptions (i.e. gaslighting), and self-censorship.

If all else fails, coercion remains, of course.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the clever turnarounds of companies like New York Timeswhen they turn on the spot, so to speak, and turn a former friend into an enemy practically overnight. That’s what happened with Manuel Noriega in Panama and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The narrative changed and they immediately became objects of hatred. It seems as if the elites no longer saw them as valuable.

The same thing happened to Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh. She was long celebrated as a role model, an Asian leader who was elected by popular vote and led her country to prosperity. But when she allegedly refused some demands from an unnamed Western country, she was promptly turned into a “dictator” and overthrown. This looks suspiciously like a planned regime change operation.

So what has changed in the recent past is not the motive but the means. Thanks to big tech companies, the media can build a narrative at high speed, and anyone who doesn’t play by the rules is summarily dismissed, made a non-person, erased and relegated to oblivion. A recent example is Richard Dawkins, a famous evolutionary biologist and atheist, whose Facebook account was deleted because he objected to an Algerian boxer with an XY chromosome participating in the Olympics as a woman. Dawkins has, in a sense, ceased to exist.

It works the other way around too. Kamala Harris, who was considered something of an embarrassment until a few weeks ago, has suddenly been named the “woman who wants to be president.” I bet she will win the majority of the votes.

YouTube, Twitter, Google, Wikipedia, Instagram, etc. are wonderful tools for mass brainwashing. Wikipedia, for example, has shady “editors” who may and often are proven to be highly biased and/or on the payroll of certain forces. They have an exceptionally high ability to create narratives. Through the miracle of “truth by repeated assertion,” their fabrications eventually become the accepted truth. Moreover, it is the content of social media, etc. that becomes the training data for generative AI and, unbeknownst to us, turns into the indisputable truth.

A recent article by Ashley Rindsberg, titled “How the Regime Took Over Wikipedia,” discusses how the online encyclopedia transformed from a decentralized source of knowledge into a “top-down machine for social activism and advocacy.” In other words, “woke.” This is pretty common knowledge, but what was striking was the role that Google (previous motto “Don’t be evil”) played in both funding Wikipedia and establishing it as the default source of “knowledge” on the Internet.

The bottom line is that epistemology is being weaponized and manipulated. Indians are avid consumers of the mush that social media and big language models spew out. There is only one drastic solution: emulate the Great Chinese Firewall, keep the Western Big Tech companies out and feverishly develop homegrown solutions. Otherwise, history will swallow India.

There’s an interesting side problem. Large language models run out of data to suck up. It turns out they turn into stammering idiots when that happens, and they’re forced to eat their own dog food, so to speak, by consuming synthetic data. They’re hallucinating on a massive scale. The solution is to find virgin sources of knowledge, so to speak, and lo and behold! There are Indian knowledge systems to plunder! Digestion, again.

The author has been a conservative columnist for over 25 years. His academic interest is innovation. The views expressed in the above article are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of Firstpost.