Al Gore, who once boasted about inventing the Internet, is speaking out about what his brainchild has become.
“But in the United States and in Western countries and other nations that have adopted a form of representative democracy, that’s similar to the one innovated in the US, the shift from an information ecosystem based on print to one based on broadcasting and then moving on to the internet and to social media has disrupted the balances that used to exist that made representative democracy work much better,” Al Gore claimed.
“These centralized information systems tempt autocrats to control information,” he continued. “Hitler’s book, the Triumph of the Will implies a question triumph over what? One thing it triumphs over is the authority of knowledge.”
“Because a free self-governing people rely on a shared base of knowledge that serves as a basis for reasoning together collectively,” he went on. “But if you have social media that is dominated by algorithms that pull people down these rabbit holes that are a bit like picture plants, these algorithms, they are the digital equivalent of AR-15s.”They ought to be banned. They really ought to be banned.”
“It’s an abuse of the public forum,” he continued. “But when people are pulled down these rabbit holes, you know what’s at the bottom of the rabbit hole? That’s where the echo chamber is. And if you spend too much time in the echo chamber, what’s weaponized is another form of ai, not artificial intelligence. Artificial insanity. I’m serious. I’m serious.”
“Q Anon is just the best known version of artificial insanity, and these devices are the enemies of self-government, and they’re the enemies of democracy,” he continued. “We need reforms for both democracy and capitalism. Both sets of reforms are possible.”
Al Gore’s argument that the decentralization of Internet authority is a form of authoritarianism is akin to the Orwellian saying: ‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.’
American citizens have the right to formulate, debate, and drive public policy without self-interested politicians like Al Gore rigging the debate; such as, for example on climate change.
The federal government’s suppression and silencing of dissenting voices on the Internet, and particularly the challenging of the government, is the essence of authoritarianism. The centralized control of the Internet is the very antithesis of ‘democracy,’ no matter how many times it is redefined to fit an anti-democratic agenda.
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