Surviving Capitalism (Not) : The Trust Project: Big Media and Silicon Valley’s Weaponized Algorithms Silence Dissent

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, June 8, 2019

The Trust Project: Big Media and Silicon Valley’s Weaponized Algorithms Silence Dissent

Click here to access article by Whitney Webb from MintPress News. (This post was by Caren, an activist from Titanic Lifeboat Academy. She kindly offered to write the introduction for me when my computer was not functioning yesterday. As you can see, it is much better than I could have done.)

Whitney Webb's exhaustive examination of intelligence agencies' infiltrating and dominating capitalist mainstream "news" is the latest effort to expose this symbiosis. From Carl Bernstein's 1977 Rolling Stone cover story, to Der Spiegel journalist Udo Ulfkotte's 2017 book which has been fully censored in the West, to William Arkin's ("Top Secret America") year-end email which Glenn Greenwald recapped January 3, 2019 in The Intercept, to the entire career and martyrdom of Julian Assange, valiant attempts have been made to alert a sleeping public to the fact that money/power will protect itself by controlling news, what passes for "truth" and "reality," and the behavior of the people who consume both. Webb's article focuses on their latest weapon designed to make thinking easier by doing it for you: a refined, Orwellian-titled Prop-or-Not upgrade called The Trust Project.