As the burgeoning information age braces for the harrowing ride in applying for a learner’s permit jarring Pandora’s Box ajar, the spiritual essence of Johannes Guttenberg is left to ponder the curious societal deviation from a robust trajectory after only five and half centuries. Without caving into the arrogance and novelty in overstating the recent past, where humans tend to dispel logic in the waning moments of celebrating individuality, the weighted influence of the last twenty years is unprecedented when comparing the staggering level of innovation against the combined advances of humanity before the landmark year of 2000. The daunting prevalence of future shock inundation has definitely taken its toll on the psyche, if not the primal source code of DNA.
As Arthur C. Clark predicted that with the evolution of telecommunication into a direct interface with four of the five senses, taste will be a deliciously paradoxically and subjective challenge, mankind ushered in a new age by “transforming itself into one huge, gossiping family.”, and the ramifications of this enthralling horror in parsing fact from myth and emotion remains the immediate challenge as the “off” switch has been walled off by overengineering.
It is as no surprise that social media is at the intersection of necessity and controversy, as the ironies originating in Silicon Valley do not stop at producing machines that cannot be distinguished from magic in freeing individuals from trivialities, yet limit and police how these pristinely awe-inspiring mechanisms are utilized. Guttenberg could not envision the profound and liberating effects on seeding the future by providing the masses with the tools to forge critical thought, intellectual, and documenting imaging in freeing the world from the shackles of nepotism and the stifling prevalence of the church. The progress from free will infused with new found ability to effectively collaborated eventually resulted in quality of life and the contemporary crossroads where the future hangs on a precarious cleft as choices are being canceled for cause, and original thought tainted by connotations of elitism and mental fatigue.
The indelible pair of F***book and Twitter, like 50-year-old with a teenage mentality in belligerently making and breaking the rules, while accruing staggering sums of revenues that allow their tycoons to play a real-life game of Risk, and dictate culture through the brunt force of end-users measured by the billions, are at the forefront of an unrelenting stream of bizarre scenarios which are a microcosm of ambiguous and fluidic policy drafted in the boardrooms.
The latest victim of the wavering leadership and illogical rules, is news aggregator Politics for All, the purveyor of snide snippets, a formula that is vastly popular among Twitter followers. The venture founded by a 19-year-old was permanently banished from the platform for allegedly embellishing and promoting news stories to viral status that would typically fall under the radar of the algorithms and bots. An assortment of celebrities and internet phenoms amassed mainly in the UK, have posted countless messages of support for the vilified organization, a scenario that will not alter the ultimate decision of the social media outlet, but adds up to another brazenly tone deaf and boneheaded move by the tech realm. Censorship only applies to the recalcitrant digital deities when there exists an ideological conflict against the leftist tendencies that dominate the entire industry, a curious anachronism considering the level of income that techies demand.
Politics for All innovator Nick Moar, who is a product of the bizarrely disturbing paradox of social networks pawing their domains off as free speech, while encouraging the younger generations to castigate the establishment from a tenuous pedestal in creating a paradox, fired a retort back at Twitter in addressing the presence of the Taliban on the electronic community. Through he colleague he generated this beauty of a burn, “The fact Twitter will allow the Taliban on their platform but not a simple news aggregator is quite something. We will be appealing this decision.”
The web and app banned all political advertising in 2019, yet allows a myriad of news aggregators that spew politicized content.
Thanks to Twitter’s highly suspicious and ambiguous phone book of variable “Terms and Conditions”, those who face suspension have little recourse, and society regularly forgets that a publicly-traded private entity has the right to refuse service to an individual. While wedding cake bakers cannot legally overcome the counter-cultural movement challenging this precedent on a small business level, the tech hierarchy has limitless legal funds, and even the most adept attorneys were unable to restore Trump’s Twitter handle after the former President was placed in cyber purgatory, for allegedly inciting the rebels storm on the Capitol building.
To exacerbate matters, any competing social media business models that even lean to the right edge of the political aisle face difficulties in finding server space to host infrastructure, as retail behemoth Amazon has a monopoly through a tangled mass of conglomerates and subsidiaries. An anti-trust mess that the federal government is currently is currently investigating. While the trio of F***book, Instagram, and Twitter have a stranglehold on the vertical market, their leadership dictates the rules, and can choose to vaporize an end user or a business on a whim and without fear of reprisal.
With society addicted to the constant flow of information and interaction made possible through the convenience of the smartphone, the model for at least the near future has been set by the human-AI-human-AI cyclical decision tree. The notable deliberate absence of a live human call center in addressing disputes and bans only contributes to the overall shadiness of social media operating procedures in relentlessly harvesting data without reciprocating in offering an experience that is bereft of customer service, and with the existence of globalism turning the world into dynamics rivaling a family reunion as Clarke predicted, it is crucial that a semblance of checks and balances evolves to foster accountability.
As of right now the hive mind of the tech galaxy has no one or nothing to answer to in holding a regular and automated kangaroo court which is on the verge of being out of control.
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