Too many people haven’t caught up with the fact that in days gone anything broadcast or published would be quickly traced back to the source, but nowadays the internet means that lies can be spread in seconds. When you add to that an egomaniac with enormous ressources who has come to believe in his own right to say what he wants without sanction, you have a problem. The less astute observer is likely to think, ‘they wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true, would they,’ but times have changed.
I wonder if Tim Berners-Lee still thinks that inventing the internet was a good idea.
Tim Berners-Lee did not invent the internet, rather the World Wide Web, just one set of protocols. Ironically it was meant to be decentrailised, but has become increasingly centralised, especially by the likes of Musk, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet... I do however miss the middle ages of the Internet (late 90s-mid 2000s)... Remember when Amazon was just a good place to buy books and CDs? Now it's a good place to buy very little, yet stocks everything. I can almost always find a better deal elsewhere if I take the time and haven't used them in years, anyway I digress...
I've never known a government though come under such an onslaught, it's almsot as if organised interests are against it. For that reason I'm glad I supported it, even if I've thus far been underwhelmed by actual policy output. I will not let them subvert our democracy, flawed though it is. The freebies scandal? Everything was declared and the vast majority if not all within the law. The fact they declared it seems to have given the right-wing media ammo, if it had been Johnson it'd have been done behind back doors. One rule for them, another rule for the rest of us. In particular the bile aimed at Angela Rayner gets my back up. She goes out in a cheap teal coloured dress and everyone bemoans how common she is and has no taste. She receives somehting smarter and declares it, it's corruption somehow. She buys something smart with her own money. She's an out of touch champagne socialist. Just what is she meant to do? It's almost as if for the working class, we shouldn't progress. We should know our place. That really grates with me.
Going off on a tangent, it's strange how monopoly capitalism, similar to that of the gilded age, has returned, together with all of the power that entails. We were told free market economics would bring more competition and place power back with the individual consumer. Yet see when Uber didn't get its way in London a few years ago, people rallied around the monopolist, who was able to deploy its PR machinery, rather than the officials they themselves had elected. Now people seem to willingly empower monopolies, those who control them and few seem to mind, despite it leading to worse service. I've not signed into ex-Twitter in a while now. I doubt I will interact with it again in any meaningful way. Frankly, the righties seem to live in a parallel universe, devoid of truth and made up soleley of newspaper headlines and throwaway quotes from the likes of Musk, Farage et al. There were once Conservatives, both large and small 'c', that I could respectfully disagree with, not all moderates. Now I struggle to find those I admire at all, at least in this country. I disagree with some of the things the new governemnt is doing and it could be better, but compared to the main alternative it's bloody marvellous.
What upsets me most is that the old solutions and values are now inadequate against various forces in the world (Russia, Trump, Billionaire tech bros, to name but a few), I fear it will be a long time before we return to a balanced economy, the global village, more liberty but combined with a degree of social justice etc. twenty or so years, after the Cold War were a golden age for people like me, for people who want to see people free, but nobody fall down too hard, and we didn't even seem to realise. Things weren't great, but they sure weren't this bad. Starmer can't do right for doing wrong. News quantity is greater than ever, but its quality worse and its ownership more concentrated than ever. Even the BBC has had to learn to operate on the terms of this enviromnent to maintain its credibility against a biased yardstick.
If my point about monopolies seems unrelated, it's that a few wealthy people now have such a disproportionate influence that I'm not sure democracy as we know it can survive. I think that, along with some poor early decision making and overpromising, are what is doing for Starmer. A democracy requires mass participation, mass access to knowledge to make informed decisions and by definition broadly equal influence. ie. one person, one vote. Whilst the formality of the latter may be maintained, the way in which that vote is influenced has changed dramatically. The mass media of old for all its paternalism, in particular broadcast media, maintained at least a reasonable degree of fairness between views which were seen as reasonable. Now that's gone. I'm beginning to see
@Gloster 's point in other words. The solution would probably be to break the tech monopolies at least in the sort to medium term, as well as restore some order to broadcast media. This means more freedom of speech, not less. It means everyone or almost everyone get a say, not just the media owners. No doubt the media owners will howl censorship, but I think the restoration of imparitality rules and their actual enforcement is important to democracy.
www.bbc.co.uk
www.telegraph.co.uk
