...Just ask Donald Trump. And just as with war, truth is often the first casualty.
Despite the outrage one ought to feel for deceptive campaigns like the one described by the article linked below, a larger issue is at play here: The very fact so much of which you are supposedly informed about is not at all for your benefit, which is the foundation for why commercialized information flow has become so toxic to our sense of shared narrative for meaning; that generalized give and take that allows a society to reach a consensus on not only what is important, but what is actually real or not.
Not only has our national conversation become fractured almost beyond imagination, it is rife with all of the disinformation agendas of countless points of self interest working at cross purposes to each other. Everybody's got an ax to grind just as everybody's got skin in a game that is far too often zero sum. Not only is this insanity for a Democracy, it is insanity pure and simple for coherent social organization of any kind. The center cannot hold because everyone has a selfish hold on their own brand of crazy.
And every year the cacophony of the unbelievable matrix of flow channels that saturate our perceptual existence gets more raucous, contradictory and, perhaps worst of all, more fed from a fountain of unrestricted id; a gushing torrent of every kind of fantasized excess the lower brain can produce, now that it is electrically adrenalized to keep pushing beyond any boundaries.
The current war of what qualifies a presidential candidate is a case in point. The things we see to sell us on ever more involving fantasies is another. And just wait till VR becomes a good deal more than clunky headsets. If you think mainlining on fantasies is big thing now, you've got a rude awakening coming; but of course, you won't awake. You'll be subsumed and churned into the whole unreal mix. Until it finally all collapses.
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