its

Also sleep in a poorly ventilated room, in a tiny hammock, with 50 other men. Don’t worry, you’d probably sleep well because you’d be so exhausted from the crushing physical labour. You’d be eating simple, unflavoured bread / crackers that are so hard that they need to be dunked in water for several minutes so they don’t break your teeth. And, speaking of teeth, your new job does come with healthcare, but that’s mostly tooth pulling and limb amputations. Anything else and you just need to suck it up. No sick days either, you show up for your shifts, 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week. Sickness is probably pretty common. 50 men sleeping in the same crowded, airless room. No washing, no soap. Toilets are simply a plank with a hole above the ocean. No toilet paper either.

But, you do get to sing sea shanties.

Ok, and? What point are you trying to make? Capitalism bad? Great, what’s your workable alternative?

You’re still spending money because you employ the people doing the spreading. They could be doing other things, so even if they were slaves there’s an opportunity cost.

Yes, they’re different enough that the distinction matters.

Advertising is about selling things. The company buying an ad simply wants to sell their product or service. The advertiser simply wants to make money by showing an ad. An advertiser might accept an ad from Palantir one day and one from Amnesty International the next day. Or, in the case of Meta or Google, selling ads for both simultaneously.

Propaganda isn’t about making money. It’s a money-losing venture. The idea is to change people’s minds, typically by deceit. Some people might say that a piece about the dangers of drinking and driving is propaganda, I think most would say it’s an informational message.

There are cases where advertising and propaganda overlap. But, there are also many cases where they don’t. It’s very useful to have two distinct words to describe the two different phenomena.

Semicolon or question mark?

For me:

That’s not propaganda. That’s advertising. Google and Meta are ad companies.

That has always been the case, unless you were a farmer. If you’re a farmer today you can grow your own food. The difference is that we just don’t need as many farmers because technology has improved.

Google and Meta aren’t controlling propaganda. They’re just trying to make ad dollars.

Propaganda is something you lose money doing, because you’re spending money (or using influence) to change minds.

I wonder if there are other " genericized trademark" companies that have failed that spectacularly. You can still buy Frigidaire refrigerators. Vaccuuming is known as “hoovering” in the UK, and Hoover is still around.

It would be pretty interesting if “a GoPro” exists as a word for an action camera and the company / brand no longer exists.

At the beginning they weren’t “kinda crappy” because there really wasn’t anything else you could compare them to. Nobody else made a camera that you could strap to your chest, or your helmet, or your motorcycle while you did something action-ey. They had fully waterproof cases too, so you could take them underwater.

As a camera, they weren’t amazing. But, people weren’t using them to take wedding pictures. They were using them in situations where a normal camera would be too heavy, or wouldn’t stay attached, or wouldn’t survive.

There’s a reason they became a household name. They enabled people to do things that had never been done before, and they changed the way a lot of sports are shot.

They never had the power to say no to the government. The government was more restrained in telling them openly and in public what they should say. But, they mostly obeyed in advance, slanting all their stories in a way that was “patriotic” more than it was truthful.

Rogan says a lot of dumb shit, but I don’t think he’s a “free agent propagandist”. I don’t think he’s being paid to say that dumb stuff, at least not directly. I think it’s more that he either believes it or he thinks it makes for podcasts that people will download / stream. I don’t think that a Swedish media giant paid him a huge sum in order to spread propaganda, I think they did it because he had a huge audience and they thought that by making him exclusive to Spotify they could corner the market on podcasts. Luckily they were completely wrong.

The Russia Today / Tenet Media event did show that some right wing podcasters accepted money to knowingly or unknowingly launder Russian propaganda. But, these were much smaller podcasters than Joe Rogan. And, it shows that instead of the major 3 networks being forced to spread American propaganda, in the current media landscape there are so many smaller podcasters that not only can the US government not control the media, they can’t even prevent foreign countries from buying airtime.

IMO the whole podcast space is a free for all. There’s paid-for propaganda, but only some of it is American. Not all the top podcasts that Americans listen to are even American.

Interesting. For me it’s the opposite, I can’t see any difference in the fixed width font, but it’s different in the variable width one.

Fonts. Full of mysteries.

That’s not a problem unique to capitalism. If you think there’s something especially bad about capitalism, what is it?

So, you’re admitting capitalism is sustainable. That makes it unlike a system like communism which collapses into authoritarianism almost immediately.

If you think there’s a sustainable system that’s better than capitalism, what is it?

What do you mean?

2006-rabbit is somewhat right. It’s a lot easier to do propaganda over a handful of radio and TV stations than when anybody can host their own podcast.

Can you imagine the hellscape the USA would be in if media was just 3 major networks? Trump has already shown how willing he is to use his power to control what’s allowed on TV.

Is it really possible to adopt a different system that is less open to abuse? Are there real world examples, not just Star Trek?

Communism is great in theory, but in practice it doesn’t seem to allow for actual human nature. As a result, communist countries tend to quickly turn extremely authoritarian and are communist only in name. There are other systems that work for small, isolated communities, but they don’t seem to work when done on a country-sized scale.

Capitalism may suck, but capitalism in a democratic republic with a mix of socialist elements, especially as it’s done in northern Europe seems like a good compromise between something that is actually workable in the real world, and something that gives people at the bottom some agency. Of course, that system needs to be regulated or it collapses back towards authoritarianism and feudalism. Northern Europe seems to be doing a pretty good job of regulating their systems, whereas countries like the US are failing in a spectacular way.

But, if you can point to another system that has actually been tried and found to work in the real world, I’m happy to learn more.