Post by Editor in Chief on May 25, 2008 3:42:03 GMT
The first amendment was supposed to kill Big Brother.
That was the plan, anyhow. He wasn’t called Big Brother back then, of course. George Orwell hadn’t personified him, given him a name or that authoritative mustache yet. But the concept still existed, and that is what the founding fathers thought they were destroying, whether they called it King George, British Imperialism, or simply Government Tyranny.
They knew that Big Brother liked to control what people said, and thereby limit what people think and do. They knew Big Brother wanted us isolated from the truth, so that we wouldn’t recognize a lie when confronted one. They knew that the open exchange of ideas and information was the best safeguard against Big Brother. They didn’t know that Big Brother survived the first amendment’s inception, and that he watched and learned as he waited in the darkness.
His survival became apparent, eventually, but only when everyone was so frightened that they embraced Big Brother’s mustached offer of comfort, whatever the price. A world war started, and he took the property and liberty of his citizens that looked like the enemy. We applauded. A cold war ensued, and he took the jobs, reputations, and freedom of those who debated alternate forms of government. We cheered. A terrorist attack by a small group destroyed an icon of American capitalism, and Big Brother sliced deeply into our rights to privacy. We wept at his feet as we thanked him.
We’ve gotten back on track after these debacles, for the most part. We don’t inter the Japanese anymore, we don’t have congressional hearings about communist sympathizers, even if “communist” is still a four-letter word. We’re even starting to reject the invasions upon the American public contained within the USA PATRIOT Act. And we probably won’t make the same mistakes twice – for a while anyhow. But the message still remains, scrawled in bright green ink over the Bill of Rights: Big Brother lives.
And he watches, and he learns, and he waits.
In the peaceful interims between Big Brother’s exploits, we explore the Huxleyan excesses of our Brave New World. We discuss our sexuality on Oprah, we’re shamelessly driven by commercialism as we go buy some clothes to comfort ourselves or celebrate, we medicate ourselves into the bliss we can’t find without a prescription. We have a made a standard of luxury, and a habit of indulgence, and a religion of entitlement to all we can afford to acquire.
This new tyranny is much more insidious than the typical Orwellian tyranny. It seduces and distracts us with pleasure, and doesn’t try to take anything we might notice if it went missing. Most obviously, our culture of commercialism and indulgence takes our money, but we don’t mind since we get the goods in return. More discreetly, our Brave New World replaces reasoned political discourse with abstract commercial imagery, and trumps human rights with corporate rights.
These are the mottos of our Brave New World: All voiced opinions are created equal. All people are created equal. The first was never true. All people may be entitled to believe those opinions, but that doesn’t make them logical or reasonable or even meaningful. The second motto was true once, perhaps in the abstract. But that was before corporations became people by the decree of the Supreme Court. These mottos have resulted in corporate commercial speech being protected as much as political discourse.
And that is a big problem.
It’s a problem because the channels for speech are limited, especially if there’s to be anyone listening at the other end. There are a limited number of television channels, perhaps the most popular method for broadcasting speech, be it commercial, political, or otherwise. And there’s a far more limited number of corporations owning those channels, as well as most of the newspapers and magazines in the United States.
Once Upon a Time, it was cheap and easy to communicate ideas throughout an entire community. Of course, communities were much smaller, and technologies were simpler and cheaper. Today, the community is often the entire country, if not the world, and when there are only a handful of corporations controlling our access to the rest of the community, that access is easily choked off if it contains the wrong message.
But mostly it’s a problem because the gatekeepers to the channels of discourse are corporations and it is their very purpose to make money – as much as they can without breaking a law. In fact, if they do not make as much money as they can, they might be sued for violating their duties to their shareholders and held liable for those unattained profits. The speech aired by corporations is, therefore, the speech that is most profitable for those corporations.
There’s no room for political discourse in our Brave New World. The advertisers provide more income to entertainment corporations than We The Customers do. Advertiser interests therefore take precedence over what people want to hear about. If a media corporation has startling news about the dangers of Product X, it’s not going to air a story about it if the makers of Product X are also paying that corporation a lot of money to advertise Products A-W. Losing that sort of advertising money means a large financial loss for the corporation, in a game that is all about money.
A lot of people don’t view this commercial Huxleyan society as a real threat. They see it simply as a change in values of the American people and viewing public. We get meaningless fluff on television because that is what we want. We don’t redefine speech because we would be outraged if corporations weren’t people too. Our Brave New World is fine because it’s what the people want, and we democratically elect the people that regulate or don’t regulate the corporations that control discourse. In their opinions, allowing any government regulation of commercial communication would infringe on free speech without offering any protection from the actual threat of Big Brother, perhaps even making him stronger.
They’re entitled to their wrong opinions. But Big Brother has been watching. And Big Brother has been learning. He’s changed his face. He’s shaved the mustache. He’s changed his wardrobe to casual. He’s let his hair grow a bit longer. But he hasn’t lost site of his initial goal: to take control, to keep power.
And Big Brother is done waiting.
Big Brother has a brave new friend: the corporations that control American media. It’s already been established that money talks when it comes to those who own the airwaves. It should also be well known that politics and money are well-acquainted with each other. Political candidates and parties are largely funded by contributions from large corporations and other special interests.
The presumption is that those corporations have something to gain from those contributions. The politicians will claim that those corporations (who are people too, after all) are simply backing the candidate that best represents their interests. The skeptics that walk among us might wonder if that money helps ensure that the candidate doesn’t have a change of heart mid-term and act against those corporate interests. The blatantly paranoid might even suspect that the corporation is outright buying the future assistance of the political candidate or party, contingent on success on election day.
That assistance would have to be somewhat subtle of course. Perhaps helping the industry in general, instead of the contributing corporations specifically. Maybe relaxing the regulations that prevent an industry from forming monopolies. Maybe passing a law that says apples cannot be maligned near harvest time. Maybe decreasing funding to public access television.
And Big Brother wants to collect what he’s owed.
Why wouldn’t he? Sure, the money at campaign time was oh so helpful, but what have the corporations done for him lately? Look at how much money he’s helped them save or earn! And think of how much he can continue to help his corporate sponsors if they continue to help him. They can’t give him more money now of course, after elections are over and Big Brother is safely ensconced in office. But there are other ways certain industries can lend him a helping hand.
The media corporations can do for Big Brother what the first amendment prevents him from doing for himself. They can reject or remove the television shows that portray the government so negatively that outright treason by the main characters is sensible to the viewers. They can honor Big Brother’s request that no coffins carrying American soldiers are viewed from our homes, lined up in their neat rows. They can nod agreeably when Big Brother politely requests that the foreign children inevitably orphaned and maimed by our own attacks are not discussed in the news, and instead focus on a single heartwarming case where the damage was clearly caused by the child’s countrymen and generously healed by ours.
The media corporations lose little by censoring themselves on the government’s behalf. Their very limited competition is making the same moves, and the wants of the audience are largely irrelevant, when it’s advertisers filling the media corporations’ pockets, and the government decides how big those pockets can get. And after all the self-censoring done on behalf of their own wide-reaching interests and those of their advertisers, will adding a couple of items from Big Brother’s agenda to their list really do any harm?
Not to them. But here, perhaps, is where the embracers and permittors of a Huxleyan tyranny can see the danger that results from letting those entertainers run unchecked. Big Brother no longer needs to wait for crisis and fear. He has seen a brave new way to control his citizens. Whether he has yet embraced the opportunity is likely, though open to debate: politicians and corporations would hardly confess to such favors being offered to each other. But the opportunity has emerged.
And Big Brother has seen it.
And Big Brother has evolved.
And Big Brother still wants control.
That was the plan, anyhow. He wasn’t called Big Brother back then, of course. George Orwell hadn’t personified him, given him a name or that authoritative mustache yet. But the concept still existed, and that is what the founding fathers thought they were destroying, whether they called it King George, British Imperialism, or simply Government Tyranny.
They knew that Big Brother liked to control what people said, and thereby limit what people think and do. They knew Big Brother wanted us isolated from the truth, so that we wouldn’t recognize a lie when confronted one. They knew that the open exchange of ideas and information was the best safeguard against Big Brother. They didn’t know that Big Brother survived the first amendment’s inception, and that he watched and learned as he waited in the darkness.
His survival became apparent, eventually, but only when everyone was so frightened that they embraced Big Brother’s mustached offer of comfort, whatever the price. A world war started, and he took the property and liberty of his citizens that looked like the enemy. We applauded. A cold war ensued, and he took the jobs, reputations, and freedom of those who debated alternate forms of government. We cheered. A terrorist attack by a small group destroyed an icon of American capitalism, and Big Brother sliced deeply into our rights to privacy. We wept at his feet as we thanked him.
We’ve gotten back on track after these debacles, for the most part. We don’t inter the Japanese anymore, we don’t have congressional hearings about communist sympathizers, even if “communist” is still a four-letter word. We’re even starting to reject the invasions upon the American public contained within the USA PATRIOT Act. And we probably won’t make the same mistakes twice – for a while anyhow. But the message still remains, scrawled in bright green ink over the Bill of Rights: Big Brother lives.
And he watches, and he learns, and he waits.
In the peaceful interims between Big Brother’s exploits, we explore the Huxleyan excesses of our Brave New World. We discuss our sexuality on Oprah, we’re shamelessly driven by commercialism as we go buy some clothes to comfort ourselves or celebrate, we medicate ourselves into the bliss we can’t find without a prescription. We have a made a standard of luxury, and a habit of indulgence, and a religion of entitlement to all we can afford to acquire.
This new tyranny is much more insidious than the typical Orwellian tyranny. It seduces and distracts us with pleasure, and doesn’t try to take anything we might notice if it went missing. Most obviously, our culture of commercialism and indulgence takes our money, but we don’t mind since we get the goods in return. More discreetly, our Brave New World replaces reasoned political discourse with abstract commercial imagery, and trumps human rights with corporate rights.
These are the mottos of our Brave New World: All voiced opinions are created equal. All people are created equal. The first was never true. All people may be entitled to believe those opinions, but that doesn’t make them logical or reasonable or even meaningful. The second motto was true once, perhaps in the abstract. But that was before corporations became people by the decree of the Supreme Court. These mottos have resulted in corporate commercial speech being protected as much as political discourse.
And that is a big problem.
It’s a problem because the channels for speech are limited, especially if there’s to be anyone listening at the other end. There are a limited number of television channels, perhaps the most popular method for broadcasting speech, be it commercial, political, or otherwise. And there’s a far more limited number of corporations owning those channels, as well as most of the newspapers and magazines in the United States.
Once Upon a Time, it was cheap and easy to communicate ideas throughout an entire community. Of course, communities were much smaller, and technologies were simpler and cheaper. Today, the community is often the entire country, if not the world, and when there are only a handful of corporations controlling our access to the rest of the community, that access is easily choked off if it contains the wrong message.
But mostly it’s a problem because the gatekeepers to the channels of discourse are corporations and it is their very purpose to make money – as much as they can without breaking a law. In fact, if they do not make as much money as they can, they might be sued for violating their duties to their shareholders and held liable for those unattained profits. The speech aired by corporations is, therefore, the speech that is most profitable for those corporations.
There’s no room for political discourse in our Brave New World. The advertisers provide more income to entertainment corporations than We The Customers do. Advertiser interests therefore take precedence over what people want to hear about. If a media corporation has startling news about the dangers of Product X, it’s not going to air a story about it if the makers of Product X are also paying that corporation a lot of money to advertise Products A-W. Losing that sort of advertising money means a large financial loss for the corporation, in a game that is all about money.
A lot of people don’t view this commercial Huxleyan society as a real threat. They see it simply as a change in values of the American people and viewing public. We get meaningless fluff on television because that is what we want. We don’t redefine speech because we would be outraged if corporations weren’t people too. Our Brave New World is fine because it’s what the people want, and we democratically elect the people that regulate or don’t regulate the corporations that control discourse. In their opinions, allowing any government regulation of commercial communication would infringe on free speech without offering any protection from the actual threat of Big Brother, perhaps even making him stronger.
They’re entitled to their wrong opinions. But Big Brother has been watching. And Big Brother has been learning. He’s changed his face. He’s shaved the mustache. He’s changed his wardrobe to casual. He’s let his hair grow a bit longer. But he hasn’t lost site of his initial goal: to take control, to keep power.
And Big Brother is done waiting.
Big Brother has a brave new friend: the corporations that control American media. It’s already been established that money talks when it comes to those who own the airwaves. It should also be well known that politics and money are well-acquainted with each other. Political candidates and parties are largely funded by contributions from large corporations and other special interests.
The presumption is that those corporations have something to gain from those contributions. The politicians will claim that those corporations (who are people too, after all) are simply backing the candidate that best represents their interests. The skeptics that walk among us might wonder if that money helps ensure that the candidate doesn’t have a change of heart mid-term and act against those corporate interests. The blatantly paranoid might even suspect that the corporation is outright buying the future assistance of the political candidate or party, contingent on success on election day.
That assistance would have to be somewhat subtle of course. Perhaps helping the industry in general, instead of the contributing corporations specifically. Maybe relaxing the regulations that prevent an industry from forming monopolies. Maybe passing a law that says apples cannot be maligned near harvest time. Maybe decreasing funding to public access television.
And Big Brother wants to collect what he’s owed.
Why wouldn’t he? Sure, the money at campaign time was oh so helpful, but what have the corporations done for him lately? Look at how much money he’s helped them save or earn! And think of how much he can continue to help his corporate sponsors if they continue to help him. They can’t give him more money now of course, after elections are over and Big Brother is safely ensconced in office. But there are other ways certain industries can lend him a helping hand.
The media corporations can do for Big Brother what the first amendment prevents him from doing for himself. They can reject or remove the television shows that portray the government so negatively that outright treason by the main characters is sensible to the viewers. They can honor Big Brother’s request that no coffins carrying American soldiers are viewed from our homes, lined up in their neat rows. They can nod agreeably when Big Brother politely requests that the foreign children inevitably orphaned and maimed by our own attacks are not discussed in the news, and instead focus on a single heartwarming case where the damage was clearly caused by the child’s countrymen and generously healed by ours.
The media corporations lose little by censoring themselves on the government’s behalf. Their very limited competition is making the same moves, and the wants of the audience are largely irrelevant, when it’s advertisers filling the media corporations’ pockets, and the government decides how big those pockets can get. And after all the self-censoring done on behalf of their own wide-reaching interests and those of their advertisers, will adding a couple of items from Big Brother’s agenda to their list really do any harm?
Not to them. But here, perhaps, is where the embracers and permittors of a Huxleyan tyranny can see the danger that results from letting those entertainers run unchecked. Big Brother no longer needs to wait for crisis and fear. He has seen a brave new way to control his citizens. Whether he has yet embraced the opportunity is likely, though open to debate: politicians and corporations would hardly confess to such favors being offered to each other. But the opportunity has emerged.
And Big Brother has seen it.
And Big Brother has evolved.
And Big Brother still wants control.