Thanks To The Internet, The Age Of The Smokescreen Is Quickly Coming To An End
It’s fucked up because, bit by bit, all the hypocrisy that has been carefully hidden and disguised is now being revealed for exactly what it is.
Things that people used to call conspiracy theories are now being proven to be actual events. The smoke that companies used to blow up everybody’s kilt is solidifying into stories that are nothing but bad news for these companies.
Corporations are being seen as sociopathic, exploiting their workers, in some cases to the point of suicide. Old school energy companies secretly funding ultra-conservative political candidates who will support their climate-altering, water-poisoning agendas are being unmasked. Car companies flat out lying to their customers about their emission standards and shoddy manufacturing are being found out and are now paying the price for their deception.
And the list goes on.
Nobody Can Hide Anymore
The all-seeing eye of the Internet is upon them.
Watching their every move. Making sure they are held accountable for all the bullshit they try and pull. Spreading the word like wildfire every time a company crosses the line or a politician does something stupid or greedy.
It’s all there every day. I see tons of it on Facebook alone and I only have 111 friends. I see it on LinkedIn too where I am much better connected. I’m even starting to see it on beBee where I am spending most of my social media time. And of course, it’s all over on Twitter, (which, in fact, might be the biggest bullshit producing machine ever invented.)
There are more news sites than you can shake a stick at, with more nosey people working for them and earning their keep by digging up dirt.
Sure, by the good old 80/20 Differential, only about 20% it is real, but when you consider the massive number of news stories that appear on line every day, 20% of that is still nothing to be sneezed at.
And the long-term effects of all this muckraking, will hopefully be seens the lynchpin for a new era of accountability.
This means that politicians and corporations alike will have to start developing strategies which emphasize their honesty and transparency.
I know that sounds like a bit of a bad joke right now, but it will happen, mainly because it has to.
The Other Side Of The Coin
Most of the news we get on line, as real journalists will tell you, is unsubstantiated, but that doesn’t mean that a good percentage of it isn’t true.
The real challenge here will be sorting out the wheat from the chaff. Because as writer Ryan Holiday points out in his great little book, Trust Me, I’m Lying, Internet-based news stories are often used as PR tools to poison the water or create a specific perception in whatever situation they relate to.
A good current example of this is that, according to many news sources as well as the FBI, NSA and National Defense Department in the US, we now can be pretty sure that the Russians are working hard to destabilize, not just the US political world, but anything they can, anywhere they can.
If this is true, they have developed they a hacking community that is the envy of the criminal world. And it will affect everyone sooner or later. If you don’t know someone who has had their computer taken over by some trojan horse full of spy and malware or had their email hacked or has been victimized by ransomware, you soon will. It's inevitable.
This is a war without conventional weapons, but the casualties and collateral damage are every bit as devastating.
The United States seems to be the principal recipient of this hacking. And there’s a very good reason for this. They are now and will be after the Trump inauguration, many times more vulnerable to cyber attacks than they have in the past.
The reason for this is very simple. The new President is functionally illiterate when it comes to anything more complex than sending out a tweet.
He is also mistrustful of his own security and intelligence agencies. And he has filled his cabinet with people who want to send the US back to about 1958.
If this hacking is allowed to continue unabated, that’s exactly what will happen.
Trump and his people, I believe, have no idea how to combat this, because they are basically Luddites. Trump himself seems to think that the Internet has some sort of on/off switch that you can simply flip and everything will be fine.
He is also more than willing to turn a blind eye to Russia these days for a couple of reasons.
1. He has a true bromance going with Russian President Valdimir Putin, which Putin is exploiting to the hilt. And 2. It's rumoured that Trump's company is in debt to Russia for more than half a billion dollars for failed real estate development ventures in Europe.
But like everything else in today’s world, his actions as well as the actions of his cabinet, the congress and the senate will be under careful scrutiny. And the hope is that at some point, the penny, or should I say, gold doubloon, drops in Trump’s head and he realizes that he is not the Emperor of America, but the chief civil servant and as such has a responsibility to 350 million more people than himself. (It could happen, LOL)
Yep…the Brave New World that visionaries like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell wrote about in the last century has become a reality.
The best we can hope for is that it’s able to keep the foxes from wiping out the entire henhouse.
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