On 2/25/2021 4:03 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
With the mainstream adoption of the Internet, in the early 2000s,
political campaigns were reinvented (data-driven, highly targeted like
advertisement). The early examples of this appear to be Tony Blair's
second campaign in the UK and Obama's first in the US. Then it became
the new norm, with increased sophistication. At the same time,
journalism responded to the exestential threat created by the Internet
by merging itself with the nascent ad-tech industry, pioneered by
Google. In this new attention economy, the one who engages people's
emotions the most wins. We are witnessing the race to the bottom that
this creates, with widespread hysteria and irrationality from both
sides of the political spectrum. I think that Trump and QAnon are
products of this, and so is brexit on this side of the Atlantic.
I think that this is not so different from the obesity crisis created
by fast food. Like with hyper-palatable food, we have not evolved for
an environment where we are constantly targeted by emotionally-charged
"news" that are fine-tuned by algorithms to be hyper-stimulating.
You should be pleased then with "Sleepy Joe" Biden, successor to "No
Drama" Obama.
Brent
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