How To Stand Up To A Dictator
If you’ve had a hard time understanding why people vote for Trump, this is one of the books you should read. The Sirensh’ Call by Chris Hayes and Superbloom by Nicholas Carr are the other important ones to read. It’s hard to be angry with anyone other than the tech elite and psychopathic or weak politicians after reading these books. We’ve all been so exploited and victimized in order that a handful wealthy of people could further stuff their already bloated bank accounts.
These books make it clear to me that we must do our best to stop blaming our fellow citizens and start advocating for the robust regulation of companies that have relied on surveillance capitalism as their business models. As citizens and human beings, our neurological vulnerabilities didn’t stand a chance against the technologies these companies deployed against us. I’d love nothing more than a tech regulation movement so successful that it drives exploitative social media companies into bankruptcy and irrelevancy. I feel certain that we can’t recover our democracy without addressing the social media plague upon our body politic first.
Social media has sometimes been compared to cigarettes, but I think that social media is actually far more destructive than cigarettes ever were. Like cigarettes, social media robs people of their lives and their health. In addition, social media destroys interpersonal relationships, social trust, and functional, democratic societies. Cigarrettes only gave individuals cancer. But social media gives us all cancer. It extracts the contents our private lives and thoughts in order to perfect user manipulation tactics. Then they sold this roadmap to your soul to autocratic propagandists and American enemies. We never stood a chance. Our political leaders enabled this theft of our privacy because campaign laws require corporate interests be given primacy over the interests of citizens.
We can turn it around simply by not being silent, by getting offline and reconnecting with our fellow citizens, by refusing to forfeit our hopes for a better future, and by refusing to become monsters in order to beat monsters. We’ve got to be better than the prison they built for us.