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> you can’t just grow a Wikipedia link to manufacturing consent from the 80s as an explanation here. What a joke of a position.

Do you dispute the thesis of the book? Moral panics have always been used to sell both newspapers and bad laws.

> Maybe people have been hoodwinked by a media conspiracy or maybe they just don’t like what the kids are exposed to at a young age these days.

People have never liked what kids are exposed to. But it rather matters whether the proposed solution has more costs than effectiveness.

> Maybe search is dead but doesn’t know it yet.

Maybe some people who prefer the cathedral to the bazaar would prefer that. But ability of the public to discover anything outside of what the priests deign to tell them isn't something we should give up without a fight.



I dispute you’ve made any kind of connection between the two beyond your own feelings.

I put it to you, similarly without evidence, that your support for unfettered filth freedom is the result of a process of manufacturing consent now that American big tech dominates.


The trouble with that theory is that tech megacorps are a relatively recent development, whereas e.g. the court cases involving Larry Flynt were events from the 1970s and 80s and the likes of Hustler Magazine hardly had an outsized influence over the general media.

Meanwhile morals panics are at least as old as the Salem Witch Trials.


Megacorps, simultaniously impotent and trillion dollar companies.


The US government has a multi-trillion dollar annual budget -- they spend more money every year than the entire market cap of any given megacorp -- and they can't solve it either. Maybe it's a hard problem?




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