What Are They Scared of You Knowing?
TEDx removes a seemingly uncontroversial James Corbett talk from their site. Seemingly... until you realize what he really said.
Here’s my bullet points from James Corbett’s talk (given in 2014). Point to the controversial part:
The pen (or word) is mightier than the sword. Ideas worth spreading are what change the world, not swords, or guns or bombs.
The internet puts the world at your (literal) fingertips.
On the internet, you can find things you don’t usually hear about, like propaganda theorist Edward Bernays, or Operation Northwoods (a US-planned false flag attack), or the secret origins of the Federal Reserve.
The media does not report these things.
But communication technology puts information in the hands of everyone, not just the elites, thus changes the way we see the world.
Most communication tech is enormously expensive to own and operate so only a few can send the message. By 1983 just 50 companies owned 90% of mass media. By 2014, that number shrunk to just five corporations deciding the information that everyone needs to know—an information bottleneck.
Poll after poll shows trust in television and newspapers dropping as internet usage increases. People are discovering what they don’t know.
The internet is supplanting traditional media, blowing the bottleneck open.
For the first time in human history the average person has just as much of a voice as the wealthiest members of society.
Okay.
Is any of that content shocking to you?
Everyone, today, knows all of this to be true.
Do you know anyone, grandma included, that doesn’t believe “the internet is supplanting traditional media”?
There’s an information revolution, in case you haven’t heard.
In 2023, all of this is uncontroversial to the point of being trite. There’s not a bullet point above that most people today wouldn’t respond to with: “Umm… no shit, James.”
So why did TEDx remove this talk? What mind-blowing insight, amongst this information obvious to an average five-year-old, are they worried you will suddenly know?
Well, to you and I, the answer is obvious. We know what James is really saying in this talk: We have the power now, you elite dickbags.
And you’re in deep doo-doo.
Of course, James’s next point (which, given his smarts, he probably suspected at the time, but didn’t voice) might have been:
But the elite dickbags are not going to take this sitting down.
Another thing now obvious to most of us in 2023: they’re not fucking around.
We are now chest-deep in an information counter-revolution. They’re trying to close that bottleneck again.
But, at this point, they might as well be herding mosquitoes.
The only way they can do it is to get the public (and big tech companies) to police themselves—to convince them that certain purveyors of information are “dangerous”.
Meaning, you and me, of course. This conversation, the one we’re having right now, is the “dangerous content” they’re trying to silence.
They’re not wrong. It’s dangerous all right… to the wealthy elites. And they know it.
As Kathleen Devanny insightfully put it in a recent post:
The world is radically changing because of us - not them. They are reacting to us. It’s not the other way round. It’s why are they moving quickly and getting so sloppy - because THEY know, we are on the move.
But they also know the public can be neuralyzed.
People can be made, in a matter of weeks, to forget an entire lifetime’s worth of beliefs about infectious disease, for example—to start wearing magic cloths on their faces, or following arrows on the grocery store floor as if the “virus” could be directionally-confounded, or to confuse it by sitting.
The same people who now fervently believe this crap in 2023 are the people who would have laughed in your uncovered face for suggesting it prior to 2020.
Just so with all that obvious-to-anyone content in James’s talk—they’re trying memory-hole it.
They’re trying to make you forget everything you know about all that power you possess at your fingertips.
They want James’s observations to vanish from the public mind. And to install a new belief into the public mindset: The Only Good Information is State-Approved Information. Everything else is “dangerous”.
They’re digging holes in the sand, declaring everything outside the hole as misinformation, and asking us, ever so nicely, if we wouldn’t mind placing our heads inside them.
They’re handing us state-approved blindfolds and and saying, don’t worry, we’ll tell you what you’re seeing from now on.
The medium is no longer the message. Now, the message is:
All your medium are belong to us.
(And if it doesn’t originate with us, it’s Bad Scary Bad.)
(Repeat until true.)
But, as you can see, despite TEDx’s valiant attempt to keep James’s dangerous observations about an information revolution (GASP!) out of our minds, strangely… there it still resides.
Hmm, curious that.
So it goes with any attempts at censorship:
It does not succeed in silencing the thing you want silenced.
It draws attention to that thing, reminding us of it, and hardening the belief in it.
It signals to everyone what you, the would-be silencer, are afraid of.
This is what makes censorship so stupidly, moronically, hilariously futile.
It causes not silence about your intended target, but conversation.
TEDx can memory-hole all of the true content it wants. And we will notice it, and share it, and talk about it.
Our response to the attempted neuralyzation is laughter. (And perhaps a middle finger.)
And that’s what we have to keep doing, friends.
Keep talking, keep sharing, keep laughing at their hole-in-the-sand invitations.
It’s what the elites are afraid of. They’re advertising as much.
Keep being the thing they fear.
And before long, their fears may prove well-founded.
Buy the writer a cup o’ the magic go-go juice:
Well said, James, and completely agree. (Thanks for shout-out.)
That memory hole thing, has been disconcerting to witness. I suspect some kind of tech (combined with simple fear) explains it.
Still as you note, it's really futile in the end. They can not put their grubby hands around the planet, and it's already outside their control. New world emerging right alongside the old, coming down.
Yes lets laugh at them and tell them to fully fuck off.
Very interesting! Thanks for posting this. Orwell never would have guessed how easy it would be to shove things down the memory hole in the internet age.