Control, Surveillance, & Feudalism in the digital age

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Based on a phenomenal book by Jakob Linaa Jenson: “ The medieval Internet”

https://books.google.com/url?client=ca-google-gppd&format=googleprint&num=0&id=01xtzQEACAAJ&q=https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/_/_%3Fean%3D9781839094132&usg=AFQjCNFfVMUuvVasbzyny83HOe-woq9rGQ

Transcript:
https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/54618977

Speaker 0 (0s): March day is just another man manic Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, what's going on, everybody. Welcome to the middle of October. Today is Monday episode. I hope you've got a great weekend. I hope you are enjoying yourself. I hope your family's healthy. I hope you're healthy. I hope you've got a smile on your face. You've got some to look forward to. Maybe even in this podcast, maybe you've been looking forward to this podcast all weekend that will bring a smile to my face. 

Wanted to continue today with the next series of power politics and poverty in the digital age. It's fascinating. I know a lot of you have seen the documentary, the social dilemma, and it talks a lot about some of the issues we're having with the internet, the way its changing our society, the way its changing and organizing new laws around itself. 

I found it fascinating and it had dovetailed nicely with a lot of different books. I've been reading most of which I have done reviews on or spoke about in the podcast. Let me tell you a little bit about some of those. And then I'm going to dive into the series, which is going to get into the metal internet and how we're kind of sliding backwards in a lot of areas. The first few first few books I read were Marshall. 

McLuhan's the global village, the medium in his message, his ideas on the printing press and how linear print has given way to linear thinking. I want a lot of ways, although it was a phenomenal invention, it narrowed our view of the world. I'm going to link in the show notes to an experiment that I did with a penny. And I can tell you a little bit about the penny experiment here. 

So take a penny, you set it on the table and you look down on it from an overhead point of view and you'll see a circle with some, you know, some etching on it, depending on how good your eyes are. You might see some letters in some numbers, but you will see a lot of detail and even some depth. You know, if you slowly squat down until your eyes are level with the table and you look at that penny, it will actually turn into a straight line if you get dead, even with it. 

And that is a good experiment to explain and visualize what linear print has done to our point of view. It's a really cool experiment. You can check out with a link in the show notes where you can try out with yourself. It's a highly recommended. It's really cool. The next set of books I was reading is by a Russian mathematician called Anatoli Flamingo. When you can follow along that series and the podcast it's called history of science or a fiction, I don't, I can't speak to the validity of the book. 

However, it's fascinating to read the amount of detail and the inconsistencies in which a history has been recorded. It brings up the George Orwell quote that he who controls the future. Control's the past, 

Speaker 1 (3m 56s): Right? 

Speaker 0 (3m 59s): And in order to control the past, you must control the present. Also it helps me understand that when people talk about truth, if you talk about truth or someone claims something to be true, you should ask yourself, is that true enough? Cause nothing's really ever true. Right, it's more of a opinion. So those are two books that kind of led me here. And as I dive down a little deeper, I wanted to share with you some new insights I got from this book. 

I'm currently reading called the medieval internet by Jacob Lena 

Speaker 1 (4m 37s): Jensen. 

Speaker 0 (4m 41s): The first is I'm going to repeat a couple of passages and then I will try to dive in and do a little breakdown and tell you my thoughts on it. Here's the first passage that I was reading is a paradox that the internet, the ultimate symbol of modernity transparency and enlightenment facilitates logics of enclosures, censorship and social control on the internet is used in the service of democracy and freedom movements around the world. But it is also used by dictatorships to clamp down on activists and opposition. 

It has used to preach the gospel of freedom and to liberate the suppressed and alienated at the same time, sworn enemies of modernity and education like ISIS, Al Qaeda and Boko Haram. They use it to advocate their viewpoints and achieve their goals, new medium technologies, liberate and educate, but they are also used to narrow our horizons, create information, bubbles and willfully are not make us more ignorant and less aware of worlds unfamiliar to our own. 

It's relatively new the internet. I mean, at least for most people. And I think everybody remembers the golden age of what, at least for me, when I began to learn about the internet, they had a America online and I'm sure most of you remember had that dial up, like pretty would have to do. You've got mail. You know what? It's like super long to get on the internet, but there was this sense of freedom. There was this sense of you have the ability to go and do whatever it is you wanted to do. 

And it was like a public school, a public sphere, like a, a town square where you could go say whatever you wanted to, they didn't have to be any consequences. And as it grew and matured, it's, it's become, obviously monetization has changed the rules and the landscape and human behavior has also changed it quite a bit in for me, you know, I've, I've become increasingly more skeptical towards the internet and its consequences. 

The digital technologies that they, they were meant to enhance social life, social skills and mutual corporate cooperation. It seems they have come to set us apart from each other. Like we might be together physically, but were not together mentally or separated by the geography on our screens and its kind of reel, but it's not real. It's a, there was a great quote that said social media is like playing bingo. 

You're all alone together. And that's exactly what it is. 

Speaker 2 (7m 41s): Right? Right. 

Speaker 0 (7m 43s): I'm often fascinated by the idea of the internet. There seems like its in some ways it seems as though the newness, the idea's coming upon us from the internet are new. There's this brand new idea of capitalism. It's a brand new idea of democracy. It's a brand new idea that has the ability to change is forever. However, you must be like Socrates and ask the question, is that true? 

Is it really true? Probably not. There's some people that say there's nothing new under the sun that you can't have a new idea, but you can only change the position of the words to God damn it. That's not right. You can't have a new idea, but you can rearrange ideas to come up with a different method. Does that make sense? 

I hope so. 

Speaker 2 (8m 49s): Right. 

Speaker 0 (8m 49s): Let me tell you what I mean by, by the internet. Maybe...