The mechanisms of that particular element tend to be described sufficiently by terms like "neoliberalism", "capitalism" etc.
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Straightforwardly put, it's the operating world model for the majority of the world, and its consequence is a kind of global colonialism.
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Secondly, McLuhan. You know, "the medium is the message". That guy. We live in a post-McLuhan world where the "medium" is now preeminent.
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Except -we- are now the medium, as we have become pseudo-informational beings spread across timelines and other sorts of online identities.
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This intersection is incomplete. Disconnect your twitter, your facebook and your social media, and you are yet human. Ordinary. Flesh.
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This is where we get to Huxley. Most modern social media companies operate on attempting different forms of chemical mind control.
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Storing, accessing, analyzing, buying and straight up stealing your personal information to find better ways to make money off you.
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Much of this is based on shoddy science, and thus ineffective, but it works just about well enough that it's profitable.
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It's popular to present this data mining and profiteering as the worst evil imaginable, and some people base their entire work on that.
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But the reality is it's small fry, globally speaking. It -is- dystopian, but not moreso than most operating principles in our societies.
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The real interesting thing, which is likely to mess a lot of stuff in our flimsy-but-operating world model up, is the emergence of cyberpunk
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"Low life, high tech" no longer just describes a fictional genre. It's reality. It's your Kenyan farmer with an iPhone.
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Information technology, robotics and (soon) cybernetics are about to do to reality what the fictional remoulding of cyberpunk did to sci-fi.
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