Electric Josh

Friday, June 07, 2002

Everyone should read this Salon article: media consolidation is one of those things that scares the hell out of me, but nobody ever talks about much---and why would they?; who's ever heard of this problem?---media consolidation isn't exactly something that TV and radio stations are dying to tell people about. Yet Congress and the FCC continue to deregulate media-related industries in order to allow such consolidation... From Part 5 of the series:

The scenario is not new. In 1981, Congress quietly eased restrictions on savings and loan houses, allowing them to invest their federally insured deposits however they pleased, even in, say, junk bonds. In the mid-1990s, the SEC softened rules that had prevented accounting firms from consulting for their auditing clients. Aside from a few stray government watchdogs, a handful of Beltway bureaucrats, and a clutch of corporate lawyers, those obscure but radical experiments in deregulation went unnoticed -- until it was too late.

Isaac Asimov wrote in the Foundation trilogy about a group of mathematicians ("the Foundation") who were able to make statistically correct predictions of future societal behavior; Asimov's word for it was psychohistory, but it sounds essentially like sociological statistical mechanics. Now if I were to try to develop such math in real life (for promoting some economically or philanthropically motivated notion of "stability"), the first thing I'd try to do is to get everyone thinking the same simple thoughts, because it would simplify the math. Not that I think there's some conspiracy to take over the globe by dumbing everyone down and making people want to vote some particular group into power, but why make it easy for someone to try?

This kind of consolidation puts a lot of power over public thought in the hands of a very small number of people, which makes independent thought that much harder for people. Independent thought is a good thing, right? #

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I absolutely must put a bunch of these fantastic pavers somewhere around my house. Sweet! Like a Schmuzzle Puzzle, only really really hard to move the pieces around without smashing your digits to bloody stumps. #