This video is a critique of JT Chapman, the YouTuber behind the Second Thought Channel. It takes up Chapman's ideas on propaganda and places them in historic...

This video is a critique of JT Chapman, the YouTuber behind the Second Thought Channel. It takes up Chapman's ideas on propaganda and places them in historical context. How should we understand propaganda in the context of the current war on disinformation? Can there be anything more than propaganda when the government is attempting to censor "the whole of society"?

  • ssjmarx [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    lmao holy shit I'm at 7 minutes in and Lain is citing the Twitter files to argue that conservatives are censored on the internet. And JT should have known about it because he, someone who is definitely not a conservative, was intimidated by government agents?

    I'm waiting for the part where he talks about the state selectively protecting speech that favors the bourgeois and suppressing the speech that doesn't, but so far it seems that he just wants to defend the first amendment in purely idealistic terms.

    edit: Apparently all of the Iraq war propaganda doesn't matter because a small handful of articles critical of the Bush administration and breaking the story on Abu Graib were published. This proves that the media control of yesteryear was less powerful than the control exerted by social media companies because the article on the US blowing up the Nordstream Pipeline got solft censored by Facebook.

    I would agree that the modern US government has more control over the mainstream media than it did in generations past, but that doesn't exactly negate JT's point about checks notes the government having huge control over the media. It sounds like Lain wants to say that the media was free in the 2000s and it isn't free now that social media exists.

    edit2: okay I finished watching and he did built towards a cogent point, although it also ended up not being in conflict with JT's video at all, really. I guess he argues that surveillance isn't about selling things to people which I would disagree with, but his conclusion that surveillance is about social control isn't mutually exclusive with it either. Selling people things is a form of social control, is what I'm saying.

    The beginning of this video kinda primed me into thinking that he was taking a conflicting stance to JT's, but after watching it that's not really what happens at all. So what is the point of this video? I guess it's to throw some of Lain's own ideas out there and hopefully pull in some views from Second Thought's channel? I disagreed with almost all of the points he made in this video except the conclusion, I don't even know how that happens.