Beware of spike strips on the information superhighway
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Sept. 20, 2024 – Aps are ad platforms, plain and simple. Unless the likes of Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk foresee personal profit, they don’t disturb the peace of the information superhighway with the spike strips that make them rich while we, the people, keep crashing into one another at higher and higher speeds.
That we call those ad platforms social media is proof that the poets have abdicated their role as the namer of things, yielding their high station to the half-truth tellers of the marketplace. In the marketplace, there is one object – profit, and one law – let the buyer beware. That law is so old and familiar, some people call it by its first name: caveat emptor.
Where else but in the Consumer Economy, a contraption outlined in the “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System,” commissioned in 1971 by MAGA’s true papa, Richard M. Nixon, would you find society-shredding, device-born advertising platforms labeled Social Media?
For such a golden fleecing as they represent, shouldn’t we, at least, make them call their racket, Social Medea? (They still teach Greek mythology in school, don’t they?)
Paper-born newspapers and magazines also are ad platforms, but they stand still and do not interrupt us while we read what publishers, editors, and reporters have prepared for our entertainment and enlightenment today, or this week, or this month.
Half-truths are as likely to turn up on paper as online, but, since it is so much easier for them to be discovered, while they lay still and quiet on the kitchen table for days at a time, businesses that publish on paper are far less likely to risk their investments by pulling fleece over their reader’s eyes.