Google and Facebook as the dark force…
Silicon Valley should follow Google and create a $1bn journalism fund
of Publish.org
The Guardian
EXTRACT
Europe has assumed the role of digital media regulator in the apparent absence of a moral compass within these platforms that exert increasing influence over our lives.
ROBERT STEELE: Kudos to Matt McAlister, this article was overlooked and little-noticed in October 2015, but it merits a second look and much more appreciation. Anyone that can focus on the moral compass aspect of information is far far ahead of the Amazon and Google and Facebook and Twitter mandarins.The author's focus is on citizen-journalism, which is to say, honest authentic bottom-up journalism. As Robert James Beckett has pointed out, we are leaving the age of information and entering the age of virtue — ethics, truth, and value. Micah Sifry's The Big Disconnect picks up where Howard Rheingold left off in 1988 with his Tools for Thought — we still do not have the tools for sharing and sense-making, perhaps deliberately so — keep the people stupid but ramp up the Google mass surveillance machine so we can track their every move. The current information technology “power houses” are the bitter end of the scientific reductionism-top-down technical-financial control paradigm that ignores holistic analytics, true cost economics, or community-oriented open source everything engineering. Steve Keen, Professor at Kingston University London, compares the current state of economics to the shift in astronomy from a detailed, but wrong, geo-centric perspective to a helio-centric model. Keen concludes, “the economy is as poorly understood today as the Universe was in the days of Copernicus.” I totally agree with this, and it is a constant worry to me that the kum-ba-ya crowd is going to go to its death humming and hold hands instead of thinking and sharing information for public power and public purpose.
See Also:
The Future: Recent “Core” Work by Robert Steele
