I'd like to make one thing really clear. Our fears on the data collected by large companies, speakers listening to us, "surveillance capitalism" and a whole tranche of the paranoid, is largely based on a complex million billion dollar ecosystem that doesn't know or care to know who we are, but is trying to sell us a more expensive and relevant shampoo, a new perfume we may like, to get us to enroll in an MBA etc. What's far more damaging about modern media is that the only way to make money in modern ad/click funded media is to stoke OUTRAGE. It's to create ever more compelling and simplistic narratives that feed envy, rage, jealousy, resentment, fear, or shock. Our animal like instincts are being biohacked. Our attention is weaponized. Pieces that moderate, articles that pay attention to facts, words which form bonds and bridge divides are unprofitable. This should be the greatest concern of the modern media environment and yet nobody seems to care. To pay for news with our sanity was the most expensive mistake we've ever made and explains a great deal of the modern societies' entrenchment, dividedness and high tension.
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