The Internet changes everything. Right? Bill Gates opined: “A fundamental new rule for business is that the Internet changes everything.” Another Information Age swami, Ray Kurzweil predicted the demise of the USSR in 1990 because Internet, fax machines and The Well in the Silicon Valley back then. Along came Internet 1.0, then Internet 2.0, oh my! It was The Age Of Aquarius finally. At last peace would rule the planets, or Earth at least. Kumbaya.
That old six degrees of separation would become three, maybe one. Everybody would talk to everybody with each having all the information they could handle from The Internet. Governments would become rational, helpful things, cause they would be online and transparency. Politicians would have to be honest and the old timey, totalitarian bad guys would lose all power, like the Bene Gesserit witches in Dune when Mahdi controls the Spice. Fremen everywhere.
The signs were all there, we didn’t see, blind. The Democrats controlled the news media and movies through wink-wink-nod-nod, we are just alike social cultural things, so the Republicans and conservatives latched on to The Internet and made it their own. The liberals and Dems couldn’t re-impose their Imaginarium “Fairness Doctrine” and that was that. The Tea Party coalesced around the warp speed news cycle created by The Internet and started telling their representatives exactly what they wanted them to do in no uncertain terms. Our creaky, archaic 18th Century representative government model thing only works if politicians control information, keep secrets from the represented. Say sayonara baby to that when everybody knows what is going on in government, A.K.A. transparency, and starts to make their own decisions in Omaha.
We all loved our little echo chambers full of them like us in the new social media cosmos, cause you know everybody’s favorite radio station is hearing their opinions come out of somebody else’s mouth.
Those old school dictators, yeah they had no intention of having a wild west, free and open Internet. Politicians were going to let unmanaged information get out there? Hahahahaha, tell me another one. They all learned really fast how to spin the new social media to their own ends at the same time the OSD’s were shutting it down and figuring out ways to hack it with false information. The secret spy guys and gals, tech companies, cops leapt to watch, learn, and listen to all those everybodies talking to each other, and hopefully separate them from more of their money too.
Then along came Trump, the genius who was thrilled by this information whirlpool. He knew where all the new fools were, and the old fools too, and just what they wanted to hear. He out-echoed the echo chamber and hosed fear and loathing on everything to get all those deaf bubbleheads, in all those echo chambers, all over the spectrum to orgasm on the emotional heroin he pumped into their veins using—The Internet. You know, The Internet that was going to save humanity from itself, cause the United Federation Of Planets to pop out of the transporter, and drive the Klingons and Romulans of our dark nature away for good.
Excepting we are the Borg, and Donald is our queen. We assimilate and destroy whatever we want whenever we want, thank you very much. The Internet is just another way to do the assimilating and destroying and Donald Trump proves it in spades. The first Internet President. Are we having fun yet? Sad. Assimilated.