PragerU recently lit up Silicon Valley by blasting some of its more than 200 banned YouTube videos on an LED and speaker equipped truck in front of Google and YouTube’s headquarters. The day before, U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz and his conservative colleagues marched into a Democratic impeachment strategy session masquerading as a congressional hearing but closed to non-committee member Republicans.
Look for stunts like this by Republicans and conservatives to become more frequent. Real news today only gets media time if it is damaging to Republicans or conservatives. Stunts get exposure, however, because they are something everyone can understand – both the big name media personalities and their infantile fan base.
The PragerU LED stunt actually illustrates something most of us have forgotten: There are life, ideas and thought offline and apart from the internet. Several years ago, Jonah Berger wrote “Contagious: Why Things Catch On.” In it, he made the claim, backed by considerable academic research, that (if memory serves) less than 5% of human interactions that share information take place on the internet. A lot of sharing takes place around the water cooler at work.
Most of us who spend too much time on the Internet and social media in particular have “assumed” that nearly all significant human interaction now takes place online. Witness Trump’s rallies. He never made that assumption. Yes, there are digital battles raging across the internet, but they are only a small part of the wider war for America’s future. Kudos to PragerU and the Republicans in the House for opening up a new front in the war. It’s long overdue!
The social media giants got their start with a big lie: It’s free! We were never the customer, we were always the product – and we don’t even know how much money they make off of us. These behemoths harvest every interaction you have on their platforms (which are legally prohibited from exercising editorial control) and sell the intimate details of your life – and those you interact with – to researchers, artificial intelligence labs, advertisers, government agencies and political parties. And who knows who else?
When big tech is not busy censoring your conversations and selling what makes you, you, they are building the perfect environment to ensnare children into building fake profiles and living in a perpetual fantasy world that will preclude their functioning in the real world they were once upon a time educated to deal with. This is not a trivial complaint: it is producing profoundly unhappy and damaged childhood psyches from which many children will never recover.
If Satan had wanted to create the ideal culture for producing militantly materialistic people, focused on the world’s toys that they don’t already have and somebody else does have, he could not have developed a better set of tools. Not only do users become hierarchical in their relationships through this environment, they become spiritually dead to God, thus cutting off the only One able to heal them from the darkness they have embraced. Halloween somehow seems like a perfect time to remember this.
Behind Enemy Lines: Supernatural Meddling. But you may want to start with Volume One, Reconnaissance.
