If you always remember that universities are medieval religious institutions and that those who choose to stay within the cloistered walls are there to pitch their dogma, you won't go too far wrong understanding what is going on in academe.
A fine rant from Locklin on Science:
The rise of the internet has a historical parallel in the invention of the printing press in the West. Moderns don’t think about this too much, but the printing press was cataclysmic to the powers that existed in Europe in 1450. It was the end of the medieval era, the end of the rule of Kings by force and Church by fear of the fires of hell, and the beginning of the devolution of power to …. people who controlled the printing press. This was recognized by the powers of the time and various attempts at censorship were made. Censorship before this era was trivial: the Church had a near monopoly on literate people and books and the powers that be employed the rest of the literate people to keep an eye on each other. After the printing press, all kinds of local elites grew up around distribution of information: Martin Luther probably would have been leader of some obscure sect like the Waldensians or other proto-protestant heretics who originated before the printing press. There probably wouldn’t have been a thirty years war, to say nothing of the eighty years war and the Dutch Republic (they were espanich before), no Switzerland, and the Pope might still have an army. The type of country we typically think of as “democratic” (aka pluralistic merchant Republics) came about from the Dutch Republic, which means the political organization most of the world pretends to use today took its shape in part because of the printing press.
Radio, film and television altered the media power structure, and indeed there were great wars and political upheavals around the time of their introduction. Radio, film and television also could be said to have brought about various totalizing systems such as Communism and Fascism; to say nothing of New Deal and Civil Rights America, neither of which is anything like a pluralistic merchant Republic in the Dutch style even if it continues to observe some of the old forms. The production of radio, film and television required great resources as printing operations did, thus the overall shape of political power didn’t change so much: it only became more centralized. Ultimately, propaganda needed a factory for production, and it needed the government to divvy up the signal needed to transmit it. Not coincidentally, around the time of broadcast propaganda, the old fashioned printing press distribution channels became more centralized and more thoroughly under control by centralizing tendencies. Publishing companies, for example, have limited distribution channels. The various newspapers became more and more obviously some oligarch’s propaganda channel as the weaker more local ones died out.
One of the things they managed to do with radio, film and especially television was reach the effectively illiterate (which even today is probably the majority in any country). These act as a great homogenizing force across vast geographic regions in ways which “educational” campaigns could not. Countries like France, for example, still had thousand year old linguistic regions with literatures, songs, traditions that were wiped out by radio and television (Occitan/Provencal, Burgundian/Oil, Breton, Catalan, Basque). Those people were French before, but after the radio, much more culturally homogeneous. This was a great loss for cultural diversity; Occitan poetry is widely considered some of the finest ever written. Television propaganda also eventually convinced the peasants that sending most women of child-bearing age to work (while halving men’s pay -nobody noticed because they were hypnotized by the TV machine) was liberation. Probably the greatest social upheaval in human history: it’s mostly a TV driven scam designed to keep down inflation for the owners.
The means of information dispersal is no longer the printing press or teevee machine, it’s the internet, specifically people’s ipotatoes. The governments of the world didn’t see the great danger for 20-30 years. By my reckoning, the affirmative action DMV-tier dipshits who run the US didn’t start worrying until Obama’s second term and is in complete hysterical melt down mode at this point as their various impostures have failed, one after the other. There are even state censors, though for whatever reason they’re not called that. Here’s a funny takedown of a particularly stupid one.
The present clerisy “expertocracy” has been in power roughly from the time of radio. These are people who take on the mantle of “science” and technology which in the time between radio and television was a real power in the world. It’s possible the “expertocrats” knew something back then, but probably not: the people who pushed science and technology forward generally weren’t “experts” -they were mostly gentleman amateurs and industrialists (early government programs like NIST and the FDA were also pretty useful). The “experts” were always parasitic middlemen whose authority came from certification and propaganda techniques in place in those days. They were trusted because science was doing some good at the time, but an awful lot of the stuff they came up with is now known to be bullshit and graft.
By now it’s clear there has been no major physical technological development since the ipotato, if that even counts, which it shouldn’t, but people keep telling me it’s the shizz. That’s 16 years: a technological eternity back in the early 20th century. It was also a fairly marginal “invention” which was more of a popularization of things in place for 10 years already. Since our clerisy hasn’t been able to deliver anything, it has invented new forms of “social progress” -most of which are luxury beliefs which deny reality. This is for dividing up the good seats in a narrowing social class: you can’t be one of the “clever people” unless you pay public allegiance to a bunch of transparently false things. Hence the popularity of ideologies such as postmodernism, whose basic premise is the truth is whatever power says is the truth: the philosophy of the bureaucratic slave. The problem with this plan is, the present clerisy still thinks it controls the radio broadcast towers and printing press distribution channels....
....MUCH MORE
