Attention Economy


Wednesday, January 16, 2019

Political Changes in Europe

Rhymes from Central Europe

Europe’s New Autocrats

A Warning from Europe: The Worst Is Yet to Come
Anne Applebaum notes:
“Polarization. Conspiracy theories. Attacks on the free press. An obsession with loyalty. Recent events in the United States follow a pattern Europeans know all too well.”

Lessons from History:
The Basic Problem of Democracy by WALTER LIPPMANN – Published in NOVEMBER 1919
“The world about which each man is supposed to have opinions has become so complicated as to defy his powers of understanding. What he knows of events that matter enormously to him, the purposes of governments, the aspirations of peoples, the struggle of classes, he knows at second, third, or fourth hand. He cannot go and see for himself. Even the things that are near to him have become too involved for his judgment. I know of no man, even among those who devote all of their time to watching public affairs, who can even pretend to keep track, at the same time, of his city government, his state government, Congress, the departments, the industrial situation, and the rest of the world. What men who make the study of politics a vocation cannot do, the man who has an hour a day for newspapers and talk cannot possibly hope to do. He must seize catchwords and headlines or nothing.”

Related:
Interview – Francis Fukuyama
Stanford Political Scientist Fukuyama notes:
“Another urgent area of concern, he suggests, is the need for politicians to address the ways that the internet has acted as an accelerator for identity politics, with social media allowing individuals to listen to people in just their own narrow group and not have any sense of national or wider conversations.
“The idea was for it to be a tool of democracy, to give people access to information and therefore to power,” he says. “But I think all of the editors and the ‘gatekeepers’ and the fact-checkers that characterise the old media were actually extremely useful – in simply slowing down the spread of false information and guaranteeing a certain minimum level of quality. All of that is gone now. So basically anything you see on the internet seems as good as anything else you see on the internet.””