No.483702
theory background, skip if you wish
In the cold war the Soviets had a closed media ecosystem with state censors etc. The materialist reason for that is, that their media production could neither match the quantity of output nor the level of technical sophistication of western media production.
The functional aspect of Soviet censorship was doing protectionism. The repression of expression-freedom of soviet citizens was not functional, it likely hampered the development of the means of media production. It likely worked only because the boost from protectionism more than off-set the drag from repression of expression.
This is what most ideological analysis got wrong. What matters is the structures that transport the information and the type of social relations that create the interaction with people. The specifics of the information never mattered.
In feudalism the information structure was the church. The specifics of religious faith, didn't really matter for the functioning of feudalism. The change from feudalism to capitalism changed information from a indoctrinated believe, into a object that is consumed.
We lack any concept of what the socialist information structure could be like. We haven't really thought beyond changing the information content. When the printing presses automated writing, capitalists printed information on paper squares arranged as either news-papers or as books. Socialists only ever did the exact same paper-squares with different words on it. Same thing for every subsequent media technology. That's why socialists have always been on the back-foot. It's like if the bourgeoisie had tried to edit the ten commandments in the bible. Instead of replacing the church with modern media.
Now for the juicy bit
The west is ramping up attempts at censorship. Ranging from deleting content up to attacking the people that make it, as well as attacking capitalists that own means of dissemination. The West has/had a relatively open media ecosystem as well as very high production media quality, and that is the combined reason why it's media structures have absolutely dominated the world.
For unclear reasons they're now trying to throw out the winning strategy and close off the western media eco-system. If it succeeds the global audience would get alienated out of it, and then western media power will shrink from influencing ~4 billion to maybe a few hundred million, continuing on a downwards trajectory.
When (not if) the Chinese figure out they can get that kind of media power by switching their media eco-system to open and largely uncensored. They'll get all that media domination the west has/had. They'll be able to set the structural standards, people all over the world might even learn Chinese to consume Chinese culture, the way people all around the world now learn English to consume western culture.
The amount of soft-power this represents is enormous, it's hard to fathom why anybody would ever give that up.
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No.483704
They used to do this thing where they just get a bunch of bots and shills to create the illusion that everyone thinks a certain way.
It's sort of the thing that Noam talks about: the ruling class defines firmly what the boundaries of allowed discussion are, but everything within those boundaries is very open and allowed.
You can actually go on reddit and see the current state department meta of the day, based on how many out-of-place posts there are about something topical and political on an our of place subreddit like /r/pics.
We've seen this with the "Uyghur genocide" they invented, Covid19 "antivaxxers", Russian orcs and Ukraine, and most recently they are trying to gaslight everyone into thinking that the fascists don't currently hold office with "Trump personally bad".
But they're over-doing it. People are starting to realize this. Picrel is a thread on the front-page calling this out.
So two things:
>The materialist reason for that is, that their media production could neither match the quantity of output nor the level of technical sophistication of western media production.
Agreed 100% but also since bourgeoisie dictatorships have a ruling class they can tap into the long history of various ruling class tactics that were developped to control their population (ie Machiavellian type of shit shit). And since they are very aware of their class position they know that using blatant censorship and authoritarianism is not as good of a strategy as psyops type of shit like indoctrination by full control of media, spreading ideological over materialist thought and all the other ways of gaslighting and manufacturing consent that we're used to seeing.
Of course with media technologically developing like you said, it's becoming very difficult to hide the high crimes of capitalist states. And I actually firmly believe that tiktok is accelerating this greatly. It's the most popular social media app by miles. 70% of insta grams have a tiktok watermark. Even if tiktok is still censored to shit, and has obvious ties with the state department, it's very nature of face-to-face communication makes it much more difficult to manipulate talking points. Even in it's cucked version I think it is accelerating the pace at which westerner's are becoming disillusioned with the total propaganda apparatus they live inside of.
Which is exactly why they want to BAN tiktok in the US. Which actually in turn undermines this soft and subtle way they've been doing things in the past.