[buscoquadnary]

> I think the single biggest vulnerability of the constitution, which they had no chance of predicting, is mass media and the way it changed the dynamics of politics.

I think these men were more aware of it than possibly anytime in history. One of the biggest reasons that the US was able to become independent was because of the ability of people to spread their ideas through the mass media of newspaper that had recently become something that pretty much anyone could get access to. Or would you argue men who saw the power of the word with Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" or made their arguments to the people through the nationally published "Federalist Papers" really were unaware of the power available when people could freely communicate ideas.

To pretend that mass media is a new phenomenon is to ignore that there have always been massive changes and shifts in society as media has evolved from the printing press to the radio each one marked a period of turbulence, and each time we have adapted and moved forward. To pretend that we are uniquely privileged in all of history as inherently understanding more than our forefathers merely because we can do it faster, is in my mind, the height of arrogance.

No person thinks they are the intellectual superior of Newton at physics just because we have relativity, I don't know many who would argue they'd surpass Turing as a Computer Scientist just because we have structured languages, I think we could assume that there is at least some wisdom in those who revolutionized (no pun intended) their field?

[machina_ex_deus]

It took me the trauma of 2020 to reconsider my own assumptions about the dynamics of these things.

It's one thing to see newspapers in 1776 and another thing entirely beyond human predictive ability to understand how decades and centuries can lead to inequality levels and power feedback loops with private media ownership.

I don't think I'm smarter, I think this is similar to code in that no matter how talented is the programmer, sometimes you just have to run it to see. It's not about anyone's superiority or foresight, it's about reality surprising even the smartest.

And I'd rather have a mediocre programmer able to dynamically debug than the most of talented programmer on earth writing static untested code.

I'm not on the side of censorship at all. I think free communication of ideas is good.

I'm just not sure if the 1776 revolution could have happened at all after decades of mind numbing propaganda by the British, after they would call their ideas populism daily and train people to associate it with it negatively. After the entire population was immunized against revolutionary ideas as fake news, conspiracy theories, terrorism, danger to pubic safety, misogyny, offensive. These things didn't happen back then. If the British had control over the newspapers and constantly spread propaganda that the cause was lost, how many would volunteer?