Re:the subversion of democracy? (Score 2)

I can't agree with your statements regarding "Corporate America", not because there isn't some grain of truth in what you are stating, but rather because it fails to acknowledge the salience of corporate opinion and its influence on policy, culture, economics, and all areas in between, based on the interesting idiosyncracies of technological innovation in conjunction with an overwhelmed/apathetic populace -- one that often just wants to sign over its civil and commercial liberties in the name of convenience.

We are in an era paralleling the Industrial Revolution, where emergent qualities of growing technologies are just now being understood, often by a select few, and with a greater effect than previous methodologies.

One can look at this as an algorithmic paradigm, where understanding the key functions, the loop invariants and the cost of operations is tantamount to holding a gun to a person's head, albeit in a more passive-aggressive manner. It's not precisely Corporate America's fault, nor is it necessarily Big Government's fault; rather, it is any entity that understands the algorithmic nature of information dissimination, and control. Historically, this has been anthing from the "priest" classes in ancient Mayan and Inca cultures to the McCarthyist zealots who swayed public opinion in the mid 20th century, to the monolithic AOL-everywheres running greedy algorithms, all vying for "impressions" upon your cerebral cortex.

So why is "Corporate Republic" such a salient target of scrutiny and suspicion? One: because people don't remember the very-real scourge of "Big Government" in this age of globalization and liquid commerce. The paradigm has changed, and every new generation attaches its understanding to what it sees, decrying history as myth ("it couldn't have been THAT bad!" they say). And TWO: What is of interest NOW is the acceleration of these processes, through the advent of instantaneous communications, the distillation of information to its purest forms, and the plasticity of information (just about anything can be digitized, and almost anything can be changed from one data type to another, to use a programming analogy). Our Western reductionistic methods have indeed found the base of our existence, and it is information. And as any good Western society will tell you, the fastest route between two points is indeed a straight line.

Don't blame the actors, they're just doing their "job." It's one's lack of interest in the underlying processes, one's forfeiture of interest in lieu of convenient answers and mediocre content, that are causing forums like Suck and Salon to suffer, because there are far more people willing to trade their intelligence for a bit of convenience.

Now, if only somebody could figure out an algorithmic process (read: "business plan") to make it more enticing to actually THINK!

cheers