In her astounding thread on Central Bank Digital Currencies Izabella Kaaminska had a few tweets on centralized databases and communications-and-control:
But concerns arise in the event such a system is usurped by a political control system you do not trust. As @HeidiTworek recounted in her book “News from Germany” it was the centralisation of the comms system under Weimar that enabled Goebbels’ propaganda https://t.co/dRnmxQt5u0
— Izabella Kaminska (@izakaminska) October 26, 2022
Which of course reminded me of something (duh) in this case the headline quote from Herr Goebbels as used in the Atlantic by the very same Heidi Tworek and dispatched to the link-vault a few years ago.
From The Atlantic, May 26, 2019:
A Lesson From 1930s Germany: Beware State Control of Social MediaRegulators should think carefully about the fallout from well-intentioned new rules and avoid the mistakes of the past.
“Our way of taking power and using it would have been inconceivable without the radio and the airplane,” Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels claimed in August 1933.
Such statements are often cited—the head of Disney, Bob Iger, recently said that Adolf Hitler would have loved social media—but frequently misinterpreted. Goebbels was not saying that the Nazis had used both new technologies, the airplane and the radio, to come to power. Rather, the airplane helped the Nazis take power. Radio helped them keep it.
The history of radio, and in particular how it was regulated in interwar Germany, is more relevant than ever: Five years ago, the question was whether we would regulate social media. Now the questions are how and when we will regulate them. As politicians and regulators in places as disparate as Berlin, Singapore, and Washington—even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg—consider how best to do so, we should think carefully about the fallout from well-intentioned new rules and avoid the mistakes of the past.
Airplanes played a vital role in Nazi election strategy in the last years of the democratic Weimar Republic. When Hitler campaigned to be president in 1932, he flew to multiple locations a day to give speeches to roaring crowds. Arriving by plane, Hitler strode on the tarmac like the epitome of a strong leader. Although he lost that campaign, he still capitalized on German admiration for aviation to make the Nazis appear exciting and modern.
Radio was different. Radio only became central to Nazi aims after Hitler was elected chancellor in January 1933, but Goebbels quickly exercised power over the medium, because the state already controlled its infrastructure and content....
....MUCH MORE
When I checked the link-vault to see what else we had from The Atlantic on Nazis this popped up:"Hitler and Hitlerism: A Man of Destiny"
That's from the May 1932 issue, a year before the Reichstag Fire Decree and the subsequent Enabling Act.
