How the Internets will transform us all into Nazis
In the grand tradition of Lee Siegel, it seems that Andrew Keen has discovered that the absolute worstest thing evar in the world is to let the Little People express their opinions by sending them over the Intert00bz. Indeed, giving people an online forum to share their views is the most certain way to bring about the return of the Nazis. No, that’s what he really thinks:
by Andrew Keen
On December 6, Barack Obama announced his intention to fund a massive public works program of somewhere between $400 and $700 billion which will create enough jobs to avert the economic catastrophe of the 1930s. But I fear that one element in Obama’s well-intentioned infrastructure plan—his goal of providing all Americans with broadband Internet access—might one day be seen as inadvertently laying the foundations for a return to fascism, the political catastrophe of the 1930’s.
In the Europe of the 1930s, representative democracy’s abject failure to confront the rage of mass unemployment and dislocation led to the rise of fascist organizations such as the Spanish Falangists, the German National Socialists, and the Romanian Iron Guard. What the interwar fascists provided—with their messianic leaders, their torchlight parades, their xenophobic propaganda—was a placebo to the hopelessness that had enveloped ordinary people’s lives.
The 1930s fascists were expert at using all the most technologically sophisticated communications technologies—the cinema, radio, newspapers, advertising—to spew their destructive, hate-filled message. What they excelled at was removing the the traditional middlemen like religion, media, and politics, and using these modern technologies of mass communications to speak with reassuring familiarity to the disorientated masses.
Imagine if today’s radically unregulated Internet, with its absence of fact checkers and editorial gatekeepers, had existed back then. Imagine that universal broadband had been available to enable the unemployed to read the latest conspiracy theories about the Great Crash on the blogosphere. Imagine the FDR-baiting, Hitler-loving Father Charles Coughlin, equipped with his “personalized” YouTube channel, able, at a click of a button, to distribute his racist message to the suffering masses. Or imagine a marketing genius like the Nazi chief propagandist Josef Goebbels managing a viral social network of anti-Semites which could coordinate local meet-ups to assault Jews and Communists.
The idea here is pretty basic: the Little People are far too dim to think on their own and reach their own conclusions, and they will inevitably turn into Nazis unless a class of Enlightened Beings oversees the information that they are allowed to consume.
Now, I don’t buy into the Ole Perfesser’s “Army of Davids” theory that we can replace the traditional media with the bed-wetting loonies who read his blog, but I also don’t think that people such as Keen should be allowed to appoint themselves the Grand Overseers of Our Enlightened Discourse, as he so obviously proposes doing. Some balance is needed, my friends. Continuing:
Now fast forward to the digital world of 2008 and what even the normally cheerful Economist has predicted will be a “long and deep recession”. Like in the 30s, we are faced with a systemic crisis not only to free market capitalism but also possibly to representative democracy. The 2008 economic meltdown is beginning to rival the 1929 Great Crash for its catastrophic impact on the lives of ordinary people. The United Nations has described today’s world economy as the “weakest since the ‘30s”. And 2009 promises to be worse, much much worse, with the U.N. predicting that the entire world economy will actually contract for the first time since those bygone days, and Princeton’s Nobel prizewinning economist Paul Krugman forecasting that American unemployment may rise to the “double digits”.
In the Thirties, mass unemployment lead to the catastrophe of fascism; in today’s crisis, I fear that it will lead to digital fascism.
And what would this dread face of digital fascism look like, you ask? Behold:
Even before the October crash, Americans had become ever-increasingly suspicious to all institutional forms of authority—from traditional political parties to mainstream media organizations to Wall Street executives, educators, and lawyers. As Harvard University’s Center for Public Leadership reported late last month, 80 percent of Americans believe there is a leadership crisis in the country. And that research was conducted in the fall—before AIG, before Lehmann Brothers, before the public humiliation of Detroit’s elites.
Gee whiz. I cannot imagine how the events of the past year could have made anyone skeptical of our nation’s governing and business elite. They’ve done such a bang-up job, after all.
The question is: In our democratized world of individual empowerment, how will the newly unemployed millions, the victims of the meltdown, react to their economic disempowerment? In a culture that prioritizes the personal, how will the masses vent their rage against a system that no longer personally works for them?
Even today, the Internet’s unholy synthesis of immediacy, intimacy and anonymity has created an online culture of insult and vulgarity.
No fuckin’ way! I didn’t know people would dare use profanity on the Internets!
Silicon Valley utopians argue that blaming the Internet for online hatred is like blaming Johannes Gutenberg, the 15th century inventor of the moveable type printing press, for Mein Kampf. And that’s true, of course.
You’ve just admitted that your original thesis has no basis in fact. Why, then, are you still trying to support it?
Yet given the way in which we know that the unfiltered Internet spreads corrosive lies and inflames prejudice, why would we want to give all Americans universal broadband access at the very moment when millions of them will be unemployed, disorientated and angry? Rather than spending billions of dollars in telecom technology, wouldn’t it be better to invest that money in local libraries and librarians, where their education could be supervised by accountable human beings.
This is truly unbelievable.
I sometimes roll my eyes when libertarians whine about “nannystate” rules, as if being barred from lighting up a cigar in a children’s hospital is the most grueling form of oppression known to man. But what Keen advocates here is a literal nannystate mentality: he thinks of people as children who must be guided by “responsible” elites to think and behave a certain way. The “responsible” way of thinking and behaving, not coincidentally, involves showing reverence and deference toward the enlightened elites. Call me crazy, but this sounds a lot more fascistic than some guy call another guy a n00b after getting his ass handed to him in a War Craft tournament.
For another sneak preview of digital fascism, it’s worth looking at South Korea, another country with universal broadband infrastructure. In April, the new democratically elected South Korean President, Lee Myung Bak lifted a ban on imported American beef. This resulted in an eruption of anger on the Internet—first amongst teenage girls, then on the popular online portal Daum, and finally through teenage “citizen journalists” on blogs, videocasts, and social networks. The rumor spread that all the American beef was tainted with mad cow disease and an online petition for Lee’s impeachment got 1.3 million signatures in a week. And for an even more real-time example of digital fascism, take a look at the way in which this week’s raging anti government violence in Greece by the young and unemployed (already at over 9% in the Greek economy) has been coordinated by Facebook, Twitter and other viral digital networks.
Without the Internets, people would apparently be happy to be chronically unemployed.
Get outta here, ya maniac!!!
Wait, is he predicting the terrifying rise of some sort of .. right wing blogosphere?? I can’t even imagine such a thing!
Wait, is he predicting the terrifying rise of some sort of .. right wing blogosphere??
Yeah, except it sounds like he’s worried that they’ll start, you know, being effective at what they do instead of providing larf material for people like me.
Daaaaayumm! That’s pure gold, I tells ya!
Right. South Korea’s the budding police state.
An online petition got 1,300,000 signatures? Man the barricades!
“The 1930s fascists were expert at using all the most technologically sophisticated communications technologies—the cinema, radio, newspapers, advertising” ….
Unlike say, Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” pictures. Or the “Uncle Sam Wants You” posters. Or the “Lose Lips Sink Ships” posters.
So in other words, since the Fascists prospered by their quick, early adaptation of the relatively new communications technologies of the times, we reasonable, rational people of the 21st century should stop the spread of modern-day equivalents of Fascism by – um, NOT quickly adapting to the relatively new communications technologies of the times. And cluck our tongues instead.
As opposed to, say, Fox News.
As opposed to, say, Lou Dobbs. Or Fox News.
Um, he didn’t NEED a viral social network. He had the establishment media that you say we so badly need.
Imagine, on the other hand, that a coupla cell-phone pictures or videos of Auschwitz had made it onto YouTube.
Brad, muh boy, I remember when the Innertoobs was something that only th’ rich could afford, when dial-up modems clocked in at 2.4kbs.
Yep. That there was the golden age of innernets, when CompuServe and Prodigy vied for supremacy in shaping and molding our opinions. When white people could count on one hand the number of “negroes” running for President…
Or imagine a marketing genius like the Nazi chief propagandist Josef Goebbels managing a viral social network of anti-Semites which could coordinate local meet-ups to assault Jews and Communists.
Man, he really hates Townhall.com, doesn’t he?
“Loose” Lips rather.
when CompuServe and Prodigy vied for supremacy
HAHAHA I forgot about those two grateful defunct Internets access companies.
And this would be different from Coughlin’s radio program in what significant way, exactly? Poor little Andrew Keen, embittered dot-bomb casualty turned would-be Internet gadfly.
One of Franco’s top priorities, from the day he rose up against the republican government to the day he died, was to give Spaniards unfettered access to news and commentary from across the political spectrum and from all around the world.
HItler was actually famous for encouraging the German people to respectfully and frankly discuss the logic and wisdom of his decisions via online forums capable or reaching millions of people. It is well known that he even encouraged criticism of his military strategy in, say, Russia.
Disorientated? I’d rather that my gatekeepers of information know the actual roots of words.
For some reason, I keep thinking that fascists excelled not only at propaganda but at violently targeting their adversaries. And once in power, they silenced dissent against them.
That’s not the same as making a really angry or sarcastic web post.
I know it feels that way to the right wing, which, pace Goldbutt, believes that “Disagreeing With Me = Fatcysm”, but, really, it’s not the same.
And for an even more real-time example of digital fascism, take a look at the way in which this week’s raging anti government violence in Greece by the young and unemployed (already at over 9% in the Greek economy) has been coordinated by […] viral digital networks.
So “fascism” = anti-government activities from groups with actual grievances. Conversely, “anti-fascism” = throttling the flow of information to ensure that groups with actual grievances remain ignorant and unable to organise.
Is it time for the Orwell comparison yet?
Am I the only one who can’t stand it when GOoPers who demonstrate their love of McCarthy and HUAC indirectly in their rhetoric and sometimes even in their actual comments decry the spread of fascism in the 1930s?
It seems to me that the heroes of these GOoPers were all to ready to tar those who were “prematurely anti-fascist”.
Similarly, many in the “after 9/11, everything’s different” crowd have been all too willing to continue to tar, e.g. Clinton and the Democrats who were actually quite keen to fight terrorists before 9/11, over the objections of the GOoPers.
Shorter everything ever posted by any wingnut ever:
The government running your life is bad which is why you should let me do it for you. (Bonus Prager: Now lie back and think of England.)
It’s worth mentioning that the US only tests something like 1% of it’s beef, so we don’t really know how much of the supply is actually tainted with mad cow.
So Democracy can only survive if free speech is silenced and access to information is limited by government-approved gatekeepers? Neat.
I don’t get it. Is Keen trying to gin up a conservative meme that the Internet has a liberal bias or something? I think O’Reilly already has the franchise on that.
I am the digital fascist keymaster!
Even scarier, imagine what damage FDR could have inflicted upon democracy, had he been equipped with his own “personalized” YouTube channel, and not restricted to his radio chats!!
Right. The answer to evil propaganda is good propaganda.
The Decentist answer has always been to whine about how unserious and vain it is to have opinions, and then they casually work their own into anything they do and pretend nobody will notice. So they answer evil propaganda with outrage interspersed with poor-quality, poor-taste propaganda.
More than anything, the Internet has lead to an expansion of public consciousness, an increase of public awareness, a growth in cynicism and a ready resource for the skeptical. The little girls and boys of Peoria no longer have to swallow NASA finding a missing day because of Moon-Jesus. (Of course, that Christianist fablery and social pressure are propaganda – let alone often enough predecessors to fascism, as was undeniably the case in Franco’s Spain and as is controversially but basically true of even famously impious Nazi Germany – is something Decentists like to fervently deny.)
It makes alternate sources of information available. I’m not of the belief that this is going to challenge a whole lot of people, but it’s probably a major reason that Katrina had the influence it did on moderate Republicans – nasty chain-letters aside, the public response was generally one of compassion and pity and the increasing narcissism and cynical apoplexy of any sources within spitting distance of the kulturkampf engine drove a lot of people away.
You know, you might not like it. You might not like that your children are sending their peers pictures of their genitals instead of doing what God intended and creating misbegotten children at an unhealthy age. But this is the fucking nature of humanity. Liars are going to lie, haters are going to hate, and people are going to go about their freaking business. Go ahead and try and stigmatize the Internet – leave your children in the dark, and work against state governments trying to give children whose parents lack the means that advantage – but taking film away from the Nazis left them everything from children’s books (‘The Poison Toadstool’, a Striecher vehicle) to story problems (‘The Jews are aliens in Germany. In 1933 the German Empire had 96,000,000 residents, including 800,000 Jews. What percentage of residents in Germany are aliens?’).
You’re just fucking afraid of computers because you’re a middle-aged twat with a stick up his ass. You’re John McCain born too late and too poor, and people with numbers in their names are more likely to be remembered by history than you. Don’t like it? Then fucking grow out of it.
A fascist uprising is inevitable if we have . . . universal broadband access? Seriously? How much is Verizon paying this prick?
Which sucks, because analog fascism has much better sound quality.
Thank fuck that Charles Coughlin had no actual way of speaking to vast masses of people via a universal medium. Otherwise could you imagine what would have happened?
And because he didn’t have that medium and I’ve never heard of him, I can only assume that he would have been HUGE on the YouTube. Maybe that crying-over-Brittany-kid huge.
Now, I don’t buy into the Ole Perfesser’s “Army of Davids” theory that we can replace the traditional media with the bed-wetting loonies who read his blog
Dry for THREE DAYS STRAIGHT. Count ’em.
I blame Marconi for Coughlin’s digital obscurity.
Which sucks, because analog fascism has much better sound quality. – Sophist FCD
I dunno. Supposedly DTV has good everything quality. But we can’t get DTV signals in my apartment. It is gonna suck once TV goes all digital and the master antenna on the roof of our apartment complex no longer is functional (’cause it only can receive an analog signal).
We’ll either have to scrape up the money to get cable or our TV will be useless.
I say it’s all a plot to make all of us in big cities get cable.
Lack of control over libraries = fascism?
BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA – I CAN’T TAKE IT ANY MORE – !!!!!!!!!! GETEMOFFME GETEMOFFME!!!!!!!!! LITTLE TINY FASCIST WITH THEIR POINY ELF-SHOES!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK SHEP FUCK MOE FUCK CURLY FUCK LARRY HITLER’S GOT HIS DICK STUCK IN THE CHICKEN !!!!!!!!!! I NEED A LIBRARIAN TO DISCIPLINE ME I’VE BEEN A NAUGHTY BOY PLEASE PUT YOUR HAIR UP IN A BUN AND WEAR THESE BIFOCALS I BOUGHT JUST FOR YOU !!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!! HURT ME MOMMY MAKE ME WRITE BAD OP-EDS!!!!!!!!
.
I’m pretty certain that picture should say, “Ich kann Käseburger haben?” Also, the word “Käseburger” isn’t very common, and Germans are much more likely to just use “Cheeseburger.”
Dry for THREE DAYS STRAIGHT. Count ‘em.
Bonus incentive: If you verify this claim—check the bed, count the days—you can call yourself a citizen journalist. Then Malkin can celebrate your work.
Like the Cristero Revolt?
Good thing that can only happen now, and not in 1928.
.
Didn’t this guy used to be on radio?
“There was also Mr. Treat, Chaser of Lost People, a poke at the prime-time Hummert detective series Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, which was also heard as Mr. Trace, Keener Than Most Persons.”
Oh, yeah, that was just Bob and Ray having a little fun.
Really if you wanted to make it a real question, you’d say “Kann ich Käseburger haben?” though the “Ich kann” order is acceptable if the question is rhetorical.
Yeah, I’m shamelessly showing off my limited college German knowledge, sue me.
I’m kinda disorentated, but is this another winger screed about how Obama’s idea to build out US internet infrastructure is the Worst Idea Evar?
And he’s using South Korea, home to the best broadband in the world for most of the past decade? Where some 90% of households enjoy 49.5Mbps average download speeds?
And his argument is that the disillusioned masses will use the net to rise up, to walk on this government, to walk on this racist power structure and say ‘Stick ’em Up Motherfucker! We come for what’s ours’?
Really?
There’s something vaguely Godwinian about a German grammar trolling, dontcha think?
Even before the October crash, Americans had become ever-increasingly suspicious to all institutional forms of authority—from traditional political parties to mainstream media organizations to Wall Street executives, educators, and lawyers.
SO…Americans are suspicious of institutional authority. They are made at Wall Street and the government.
And the internets will help them channel this disillusionment into….fascism. An authoritarian and corporatist state.
Have I been hit in the head with a brick too much, or not enough, that I don’t understand this?
I will take his message to the personal level. From this day forward, I will forbid my four daughters from every seeing an opinion that is not in lock-step with my own. After all, the oldest will soon be a teenager, meaning she will certainly become hormoned, disoriented, and angry, especially with exposure to an unfiltered Internet that spreads corrosive lies and inflames prejudice against we appropriately strict parents. I will NOT let my Bubbettes form a fascist regime within my own household!
Thanks to you, Andy, I will not empower my disempowered progeny in an attempt to prevent authoritarian rule!
And thanks to you, Brad, for this wonderful find. It’s a life changer- for my daughters.
Also, cats are not capable of talking OR typing!
Really if you wanted to make it a real question, you’d say “Kann ich Käseburger haben?”
yes, but in LOLcats, questions are statements as in “I kin has cheezeburger?”.
Oh great! Now I’m grammartrolling in LOLcats!
Which sucks, because analog fascism has much better sound quality.
Well, it’s not so much sound quality as a kind of “warmth” which no one can actually define.
If laughter is the best medicine, that one article will keep me alive for another 100 years!
I thought that librarians were charter members of The Vast Left-Wing Media Conspiracy.™
What Nim ham hock said. If this nimrod is to be believed, because the population has become suspicious about institutional forms of authority and channels of information, they will be attracted to an ideology that’s all about absolute authority and tight control over all channels of information.
I am trying to rephrase the nimrod’s argument in a way that seems more absurd and poisonous than his own words, but such is the absolute quality of his absence of self-awareness that words are failing me. We’ll have to wait for Just Alison to come on line and encapsulate his irony-killing essence in a couple of choice Australian epithets.
the subtext to this column, is that Obama won the election in no small part due to a brilliant use of the internet/web to tap into the power of social networks.
Therefore Obama = digital democracy = liberal fascism.
Some Republicans have actually criticized early voting as being somehow anti-democratic because early voters tipped heavily towards Obama and Democrats.
Well, it’s not so much sound quality as a kind of “warmth” which no one can actually define.
Analog fascists pre-heat the ovens?
Analog fascists pre-heat the ovens?
Maybe that’s it. I remember having to let the old vacuum-tube TV “warm up” for a half hour before my stories came on, so it’s probably like that.
This reminds me of the anti-communist collaboration between the United States and Latin American military regimes during the Cold War, which might be shortened so: “In order to protect democracy, we must destroy it.”
Some Republicans have actually criticized early voting as being somehow anti-democratic because early voters tipped heavily towards Obama and Democrats.
Were these the same buffoons who were jeering that voting on Sunday (especially by black people) was against God’s will?
“Also, cats are not capable of talking OR typing!”
What the? Then my cat was lying to me about why he was standing on my keyboard?!
Anti-government violence by mostly anarchist organizations == fascism.
Gee, I know it’s confusing, but let me explain that real quick. Fascists have Black Shirts. We have Black Flags.
Good old-fashioned valve-technology fascism is also less vulnerable to EMP and ionising radiation.
It really is the case that none of these putzes has any idea what “fascism” actually is. Either that or they do and are pushing the Jonanist line, which is just as bad.
Oy.
I ALWAYS follow my hate filled internet posts with calls to arms. Every single time.
Or imagine a marketing genius like the Nazi chief propagandist Josef Goebbels managing a viral social network of anti-Semites
What, is Stormfront closed or something?
I also blame Guttenberg for Ann Althouse.
I would like to have a blog burning but I don’t think my monitor is flammable.
i txted che n he sed OMG rvlushn so we did it n now were hangin. U?
As someone who consorts with them on a daily basis, I’d just like to point out that Andrew Keen is way off base if he expects librarians to help him resist the rising tide of digital fascism. Apparently he’s unaware that modern public libraries are actively engaged in allowing anybody to use computers to get to the Internet, including people who can’t afford Internet access on their own.
Funding local libraries will only make things worse! Building out broadband infrastructure would at least restrict Internet access to people who have a fixed address.
Giving money to librarians would enable a Fifth Column to undermine society from within by allowing Internet access to the homeless!
Twitter = Kristalnacht?
He’s just the intellectual descendant of the 19th Cent. British writer who worried about the possibility of “Genghis Khan with a telegraph”–an opponent who could take the tools of technology and use them in an offensive operation.
He should read this novel.
Jonah Godlberg, author of Liberal Fascism, is opposed to early voting “on principle,” which means it, too, is fascistic.
Jonah Godlberg, author of Liberal Fascism, is opposed to early voting “on principle,” which means it, too, is fascistic.
Heh.
For my part, I’m really jazzed that early voting was so successful this year. I have been (and still am) a proponent of the idea that election day should be a holiday to increase poll accessibility, but the idea that there be an election week or more is even better. How about a big 4-day weekend of electoring? I wonder if that’s fascist enough.
Unlike, say, the suspension of habeas corpus or the posse comitatus regulations, you mean? Broadband by which “all americans” might find information on such practices which might in turn infuriate them enough to , in Mencken’s fortuitous phrase, “spit on their hands, hoist the Black Flag and go to cutting throats.” ??? Like that “fascism?” A “return to fascism”? When has it been banished?
The problem with digital fascism is that it’s so easily manipulated. Fortunately, we have forensics experts like TechDude and Polarik on the payroll to keep it real.
Out! Out, damn pixel !
The options are soft corporate authority or hard corporate authority.
Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.
Suit or Mao suit.
Spoilers will be destroyed.
Wait, Fascism, I’ve heard of it, what is it again?
“The political catastrophe of the 1930s”
Oh, right, thanks for reminding me.
Imagine the FDR-baiting, Hitler-loving Father Charles Coughlin, equipped with his “personalized” YouTube channel, able, at a click of a button, to distribute his racist message to the suffering masses.
Yes, it’s a good thing that we had the media gatekeepers — like CBS — there to ensure that Fr. Coughlin got his national airtime….
Dare we even mention that fascism is actually a movement of the early 1920s that was deliberately aimed at countering communism in the wake of the Russian Revolution?
Yeah, I didn’t think so.
Keen was on Colbert making an ass of himself a year and a half ago:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/91639/august-16-2007/andrew-keen
Mnemosyne – that article liek toatally proooves that Mussolini was a librul:
Mussolini did not ignore the plight of the working class, however, and he gained their support with stances such as those in The Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle, published in June 1919. In the manifesto he demanded, amongst other things, creation of a minimum wage, showing the same confidence in labor unions as was given to industry executives or public servants, voting rights for women, and the systemisation of public transport such as railways.
Therefore liberal = fascist QED!
Seriously, I think it shows just how far to the right we’ve wandered when people like Mussolini and Henry Ford seem like squishy pro-worker commiebots compared to today’s righties.
why would we want to give all Americans universal broadband access at the very moment when millions of them will be unemployed, disorientated (sic) and angry?
Ummm, so they could find jobs, maybe?
What, and stop depending on generous trickling-down of minimum-wage jobs from upper-bracket tax cuts? Surely you jest.
‘Even the Nazis didn’t put artists out of work.’
‘Tell that to Egon Schiele.’
Colbert is remarkably clever when he wants to be.
Apropos of this, you all should check out Clay Shirky’s interview in the CJR. http://www.cjr.org/overload/interview_with_clay_shirky_par.php
His points on luddism would seem to describe Keen pretty well, and the idea that Keen is motivated out of desire to control what he still can in the media landscape seems on target as well.
Sujal
Thanks, darrelplant.
I don’t often read an entire post with my jaw resting on my keyboard, but this one did it.
Who is this Keen, why is he so stupid, and who lets him near a computer?
Many of our pre-revolutionary war agitators and and activists were successful because they owned or had access to portable printing presses. When the King’s Army swooped in -sans warrants- they’d be gone, maybe leaving a few lead or brass letters spelling “FU King George!” on the basement floor. True story. Really. I read it on the internet.
Or imagine a marketing genius like the Nazi chief propagandist Josef Goebbels managing a viral social network of anti-Semites
Unconscious irony #16: Goebbels learned EVERYTHING he knew about propaganda from Eduoard Bernais, the ‘inventor’ and ‘father’ of Public Relations. Bernais signed on with W.Wilson to sell World War Wils…errrOne to a very unenthusiastic populace. He succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of his sponsors/bosses. How? By introducing explicitly Freudian sub-texts into the appeals for support and patriotism from the people. Bernais, you see, was Freud’s favorite nephew and frequent amenuensis when the old man was in the states. He imbibed deeply of Freud’s insights and purposefully installed stimuli to prompt desired reactions in the discourse of the war and the national mood about it. Bernais began the still-ongoing program of the Manufacture of Consent (his phrase) for the premeditated, conscious, agenda-driven, management-by-manipulation of the “people” by the elites.
In one way, though, Keen points to an important point, which is the issue of how to understand, and interpret the new relations that will inevitably emerge with complete immersion of public life in electronic mediation, which is addictive in the way that “soma” is in Huxley. The horizon between ‘television’ (with its immanent betrayal of autonomy for commercial uniformity) and ‘it’ –now the ostensible retreat of the individual, and the critical consciousness–is fast diminishing,unto vanishing.
It would be naive imho not to imagine that the interests which profit from compliance, passivity, and vicarity will not soon colonize–if they have not already–those media as they did with television in ways that ultimately disempower users. Call it a theory of digital hegemony…
How about a big 4-day weekend of electoring? I wonder if that’s fascist enough.
HUMPH!
What? Not a paid vacation!
It looks like someone got the “Replace Communist with Fascist” memo that circulated after Liberal Fascism’s publication. Here’s the same Keen in February 2006 calling Web 2.0 and Larry Lessig communistic.
Worth noting that, while Bernays’s Four Minute Men did succeed to some extent, the selling of the Lusitania was child’s play and the Creel Committee (which obeyed his every whim pretty faithfully) was roundly despised for its vigorous and tone-deaf devotion to open lying and censorship.
Outside of getting Americans to freak out about foreigners, Bernays’s success was pretty mixed. I think his legend is about one part each self-inflation, lefty paranoia, and the truth – outside of really, really easy stuff (including getting the hard-right Guatemalan military to destroy the civilian government) his real talent was for wooing state resources with a hypertrophied sense of his own power. A remarkable amount of taxpayer money and bureaucratic expertise went into fulfilling whatever goals he had sold himself to whatever client for; when that client was the government itself, his track record was pretty decidedly muddy.
I am against Jonah Godlberg on principle.
Also, X. Gilchrist: Waiting for the TV set to warm up so you could watch your “stories”? Don’t tell me: No air conditioning, only an oscillating fan, and you sprinkled the ironing with a rubber-stoppered Coke bottle.
What’s your point? This kind of democratization is EXACTLY what the rightwingers dread: and here’s a rightwinger talking about his dread.
I’ll say this for Keen, he is better than the Doughy Pantload at making his utterly nonsensical and JPS (just plain stupid) ruminations *sound* almost…. thoughtful, when they are deliberately obtuse. Or JPS.
Gee, imagine what Fascists could do if they had access to all the major media, backing by wealthy and powerful industrialists and financiers, and de facto or de jure control of several states. That might almost be equivalent to having your very own YouTube channel…
Pst, Woody, that’s “Edward L. Bernays,” at least in the spelling he published under. If you’re looking for his writing, you want to use this spelling.
I think this, from The Guardian piece on Keen in 2007, sums him up nicely:
Hey, the man needs an income. A web article like this is just his latest production.
Killed a bunch of miners and want to buff up your on-line profile? Run a major corporation and want to overthrow the democratically elected government?
Go with Bernays.com
this article lost me at the very, very beginning, where keen describes obama’s plan to create a bunch of jobs, thus averting the economic crisis the united states experienced in 1930’s…and then frets that creating a bunch of jobs and therefore averting america’s 30’s-era economic crisis will cause fascism in the u.s.
huh?
Don’t tell me: No air conditioning, only an oscillating fan, and you sprinkled the ironing with a rubber-stoppered Coke bottle.
LOLz! Actually, this describes the grandma I learned the “stories” usage from perfectly.
Writing “fuck” on the Internet is the Zyklon-B of blogofascism.
‘Even the Nazis didn’t put artists out of work.’
‘Tell that to Egon Schiele.’
Oh to live in Keen’s reality, where the Nazis did not persecute and ban anyone they regarded as a “degenerate artist”, and where Serious Opinions about censoring the Interducts are taken seriously even when they come from a notorious spammer.
No, wait, that second bit is part of our reality..
Egon Schiele is not such a good example, what with dying in the flu epidemic in 1919 or 1920 [can’t be arsed looking up the actual date]. A better case might be Emil Nolde who was banned not only from exhibiting, but actually from being in the proximity of oil paint.
I also blame Guttenberg for Ann Althouse.
I know Police Academy was bad, but don’t you think that’s a bit harsh?
Rather than spending billions of dollars in telecom technology, wouldn’t it be better to invest that money in local libraries and librarians, where their education could be supervised by accountable human beings.
Gosh, and you know what the local libraries would probably do with that investment? Digitize the collections so that they would be more widely available on the InterTOOBz!
No air conditioning, only an oscillating fan, and you sprinkled the ironing with a rubber-stoppered Coke bottle.
You had a bottle, MzNicky? My mom used to give me a mouthful of water and tell me to spit.
With his elitist attitude, his title ought to be “The Internet is Bad for You but Not for Me.”
Wow Ive never heard Rush Limbaugh refered to as “Father Coughlin” is that his drug codename or something?
This is the Andrew Keen who was all over the place a year or two ago complaining that the Internets allow regular people to be heard instead of limiting that right to those who are worthy.
Putz.
I like the idea of librarians being accountable for children gettin’ good learnin’ not evil interweb learnin’.
This means that bad librarians will be shipped off the re-education camps and the evil books can be used to heat the houses of the poor. Compassionate conservatives at their best.
Ironing, eh? Luxury, luxury. We had to flatten our clothes with hot rocks.
Every time there was a particularly egregious example of political hypocrisy, I remember me old mother complaining that “hot rockery is dead”.
Luxury. My great-grandfather would take me to the phlebotomist and after I had centrifuged out a quarter pint of my own plasma – by hand – I had to spread it as thin as I could with a knife crudely cut from a plastic spoon and use it and a lukewarm freshly-stolen brick to iron the only pair of moth-bitten long-johns to my name. And that was to press wrinkles into them!
Heh. Get there before Alec.
If Hitler, Bormann, Goering, Himmler etc. had all spent the 1930s eating Chee-tos and masturbating to plumper porn in their mothers’ basements, the world would be a better place.
I particularly like his description of the internet as lacking fact-checkers. On this thread alone, there’s corrections to Brad’s German, another correction to the corrections regarding LOLcats grammar, and a correction to Alec’s description of Bernais/Bernays, including a comment on the spelling.
The great thing about online discourse, as opposed to simply running one’s mouth at the bar or wherever, is the attention paid to factual details. If your facts aren’t straight, there’s no shortage of folks happy to correct you.
That’s simply not accurate, A.W. Merrick.
My inner voices told me to stop taking that Zionist medication, so I did, and what a difference!
Now I can hear the voices much better.
So, hey, everybody! Listen to what the voices are saying!
LISTEN TO ME!!!
Anybody who won’t listen is a ZIONIST!!!
You guys are all a bunch of ZIONISTS!!!!
I don’t know, Mortician, unless you’re talking about the fact that in Merrick’s post, “there’s” does not agree in person with “corrections”…
as opposed to simply running one’s mouth at the bar or wherever,
If you think that running one’s mouth at the bar excludes one from the danger of having one’s claims corrected, then you are frequenting the wrong bars.
Englishman (Surprise! Another one of these limey fucks who comes here for wingnut welfare!) Keen in an interview from 2007 (Thanks, S. Clyde!):
Not that there’s an attractive woman next door, but “steal our neighbor’s wife … w/ one click of our mouse?” That’s a new one on me, & if Mr. Keen would care to explain this further in his newsletter or spamming I’d be more than slightly interested.
Dime store psychology: This “steal your wife w/ one click” thing is not just a casual condemnation. One would almost have to assume (it would be irresponsible …) that he came to AmeriKKKa looking to steal money from us, once the Brits wised up to him, & one could just bet that he lost his wifey to the first Silicon Valley slickster that came along.
(mikey? What do you have to say for yourself?)
Also, Woody was the one who sussed out the connection to history’s favorite cousin of Freud. I simply maundered (as is my wont) about the spelling and left historiography being something of a cheap date for right-wing/corporatist self-aggrandizers. It’s worth getting used to that stupid and evil generally go together, and for every PBSUCCESS there’s dozens of fucking Desert Ones.
Dime store psychology: This “steal your wife w/ one click” thing is not just a casual condemnation
Indeed. This epidemic will be the second thing to be addressed by Barack Obama in his first SOTU address.
I’m a stickler for directly-heated triode, single-ended class-A fascism.
That “warmth” is really just a bunch of low-order harmonic distortion, but we like it. Either that, or the ovens are on again.
Ironing, eh? Luxury, luxury. We had to flatten our clothes with hot rocks.
lukewarm freshly-stolen brick to iron the only pair of moth-bitten long-johns to my name.
Rocks? Bricks? You were looky to ‘ave stones!
BAH!
I had to climb to the top of Kilauea, wait for a plume of lava-laden gas to erupt, hold my steel wool shorts out with my bare hands and then smash the globby mess onto the cinder cone and stamp it out in my bare feet!
And that was just to CLEAN my underwear!
Now we can steal our neighbor’s wife, his credit cards, indeed his entire identity,
Have I ranted lately about the iniquities of this whole ‘identity theft’ bullshit?
It’s a phrase dreamed up by banks and databases who cut too many corners and left themselves open to fraud. Understandably they would rather not own the problem or the losses themselves, and would prefer to redefine terms so that the problem belongs to the individuals whose names were used in the fraud… calling it “identity theft” sounds better than “multinational bank corporations being defrauded”.
Not so understandably, the phrase has been picked up by the media and by politicians who propose to tackle the banks’ fraud problem by placing more obligations on individuals to prove their actual identity.
As has already been pointed out, fascism arose as a governmental response to the revolutionary impulses and activities of people who were angry and disorienCRATERED by the economic conditions of the time. It was an actually an effort to suppress and control the masses (in part by co-opting their grievances) — masses who had become all weak-kneed and commie-ish and verklempt just because they couldn’t afford to eat.
Librarians controlling what their patrons can and cannot see (leaving aside the fact that such an idea is heresy in today’s Information Sciences) would be something a fascist government would love to institute right off the bat.
Keen’s grasp of history ain’t so keen.
“Even before the October crash, Americans had become ever-increasingly suspicious to all institutional forms of authority”
Um, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t fascism all about mindless, unquestioning obedience TO institutional forms of authority — as embodied in The Leader?
If the fuckhead wants to warn about dangerous political tendencies on the Internets, it would be nice if he could at least keep his totalitarian threats straight.
What the interwar fascists provided […] was a placebo to the hopelessness that had enveloped ordinary people’s lives.
I am shocked, shocked!! to encounter an annoying nimrod using ‘placebo’ without any idea what it means.
Well, clearly they’ll do it by adopting Fascism, an ideology named after the fasces, a bundle of birch rods that symbolizes individuals putting aside their own personal ideals to work in unity.
I hear Communism also came about through rampant individualism.
How does Keen get away with complaining about the internet giving voice to people who have no idea what they’re talking about when he himself is clearly one of those people?
Has he had no contact with history at all? When people are starving in the streets you can get a revolt in ANY society, no matter how much or how little that culture “prioritizes the personal”. Has Andrew Keen never heard the words “peasant revolt”?
It’s interesting to me how, for some people, everything they’re against stems from one singular ideology whose most important goal is to oppose the good. Keen doesn’t like Fascism, and he doesn’t like the intensely individualistic modern society, so, obviously intensely individual people will flock to fascism.
Alicublog has a post about a guy who claimed B.F. Skinner was a hero to the 70s counterculture.
It’s worryingly narcissistic when the only thing you can see about an opposing ideology is the fact that they oppose you.
I think it’s clear that if we let the people have unrestricted telephone calls, that they will more or less immediately undermine all social order. Therefore the government should be restricting access to telephones, not promoting it.
ftfy
Everything is about WWII to these guys, as if they have never heard of anything that happened before 1933. No tyrant is compared to Edward II, no insurgent is called another Vercingetorix. It seems as though they were homeschooled by a high-school dropout. Oh wait…
Maybe somebody should tell him that schools are where people are educated. Libraries are open to all, and completely unrestricted for adults (unless the wingnuts get their way). Librarians do not teach, nor are the books in there any guarantee for relationship to reality. I’m sure I saw Coulter and O’Reilly in the last one I visited.
Imagine if today’s radically unregulated Internet, with its absence of fact checkers and editorial gatekeepers, had existed back then
I imagine we’d have a lot of laughs at Hitler and his drooling followers. Then we’d be killed.
“Steal a wife?” In the same breath as credit cards? My curiosity at how he imagines this works, logisitcally, makes me way more charitable than I should be at this peculiar manifestation of sexism.
Waiting for the TV set to warm up so you could watch your “stories”? Don’t tell me: No air conditioning, only an oscillating fan, and you sprinkled the ironing with a rubber-stoppered Coke bottle.
True story: TVs were full of tubes that would occasionally burn out but there was no easy way to see which one was dead. So we would take all the tubes out and cart them over to the drug store where he had a tube tester. Plug in your tube, flip a switch, and if the red light came on then the tube was OK. I liked the machine because it had lots of knobs and dials and my friends and I would pretend it was the controls of a space ship.
And I didn’t get an air conditioner in my bedroom until I was in high school and
..and? …and?
Librarians do not teach, nor are the books in there any guarantee for relationship to reality.
In my experience, this is equally true of teachers and textbooks.
Stealing wives is for rank beginners. I used the WWW to steal my neighbour’s field, AND his manservant, AND his maidservant, his ox, AND his ass.
…coveting not enough for you, then?
I stand corrected, which is central to my point.
So wait: a bunch of people expressing their opinions to their gubmint is fascism? Just so’s I know. I’d hate to mess things up. I mean, holy St Bartholomew on a stick, how did this knobbesticke survive to adulthood being that stupid? Sheesh, my cats know better than that. My fucking washing machine knows better than that.
As a slightly less foam-flecked addendum, South Korea is definitely the biz for technology – I went there for a telecommunications conference about 5 years ago, and they were way ahead of us. Teensy-tiny mobile phones about the size of a credit card, that worked out in the bush and in the tunnels and just everywhere without the odd squealing and dropouts that plague Oz phones even now.
But we’s got democracy, so we’re better.
I was walking down the street in Tokyo with my cute new Japanese girlfriend who I still didn’t know much about (except that she was cute and Japanese) when a black van blaring some speech in Japanese from a series of loudspeakers on the roof drove by.
“What’s the deal with those guys?” I asked.
She shook her head slowly. “Fucking fascists.”
I think I’m in love.
disorientated is perfectly good UK English, I’m afraid. And since he’s an Englisher it’s probably the one thing in his post it’s unfair to criticise him for…
Yes, because everybody knows, a sure sign of fascism is the ability to rapidly mobilize resistance to authority.
Rick Massimo, that was a perfect comment.
http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/15921.html#comment-764972
For another sneak preview of digital fascism, it’s worth looking at South Korea, another country with universal broadband infrastructure.
For a look into what we should do, on the other hand, look to China. Democracy-ho!
>> why would we want to give all Americans universal broadband access at the very moment when millions of them will be unemployed, disorientated and angry
for the porn, for the porn…
>>an online petition for…impeachment got 1.3 million signatures
wow, you can suggest impeaching a political leader on teh internets? stunning…
http://www.obamaimpeachment.org/
http://www.impeach-barack-obama.com/
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=13200515790
>> before the public humiliation of Detroit’s elites.
PS, why’d you have to bring the Lions into this?
I had to climb to the top of Kilauea, wait for a plume of lava-laden gas to erupt, hold my steel wool shorts out with my bare hands and then smash the globby mess onto the cinder cone and stamp it out in my bare feet!
And that was just to CLEAN my underwear!
You mean you actually had underwear? Lucky bastard…
Is this idiot an example of the “professionals” who will lead the way? What a stupid man. Increasingly people are looking to the blogs for actual news, including original research. The newspapers and national media are mostly obsessed with nonsense that affects almost nobody — this missing blonde, that zany dog, this 90-year-old who crashed into the 7-11 window, that incompetent bank robber. Of course, you can find all that on the blogs too. But the best of the blogs offer much more in-depth coverage and downright common sense than the mainstream. Guys like Keen have been allowed to slide by a media culture that doesn’t want reality or depth or reason. He’s terrified the gravy train will end for him, which it will.
Well speaking just for myself you understand I hope they rise up and hang the fuckers that brought this on, from meat hooks or at least the nearest lamp post.
Speaking of the “boys who cry facism,” it seems there’s now hope for Jonah Goldberg’s military career. First, he was too old and the Army raised its recruiting age. Then he said he was too fat. The army wants to help him out.
Oh, and I meant to point out that Jonah might have missed this bit of good news. Perhaps you’ll help me make sure he doesn’t?
JonahNRO@aol.com
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Real question: “Kann ich einen Cheeseburger (Käseburger) haben?” – Can I have a cheeseburger?
Rhetorical question: “Ich kann einen Cheeseburger haben?” – I can have / get a cheeseburger?
While the rhetorical question doesn’t make too much sense, I think.