Media Freedom: Using Decentralization to Win the Social Struggle

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle” Sun Tzu

Money gives power to those who own it. You probably know that.

Among the types of power that money can give is the power of mass influence.

Billionaire Own the Media

Let’s take a look at a few newspapers:

• Jeff Bezos ($191.7 billion) owns the Washington Post

• Rupert Murdoch ($23.5 billion) owns the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal

• Patrick Soon-Shiong ($8.1 billion) owns the Los Angeles Times

I only gave you the name of three of them, but the list is long.

Billionaires buying newspapers and TV channels - this doesn’t happen only in the US.

In France, for example, Bernard Arnault owns Le Parisien, Xavier Niel owns Le Monde, the Dassault family owns Le Figaro, and Vincent Bolloré owns Canal + (which represents many of the most popular TV channels).

Now you might ask… why do billionaires buy newspapers?

Are they suddenly fascinated by journalism? Fuck no.

In the context of social conflict, where a better sharing of wealth would benefit everyone but the rich, the media are a tool to control the opinions of the masses.

When newspapers publish tens and tens of covers of a few presidential candidates, it can be seen as an attempt to influence the people.

Same when TV channels talk about some candidates more than others.

When the media talk about a candidate, more people will know about him and his chances to get to power swell. And as you might know, any advertising is good advertising, especially in the political field, so the media don’t necessarily have to say good things about their favorite to make him president.

Wasn’t Trump given a lot of exposure? What about Biden? They became president mostly because they were chosen by the media.

Take any bloke, overmediatize him, and you get a president.

I think that if Trump became president and untaxed the rich, it was because he was a Trojan horse sent by them, by his class, the class of the billionaires.

The rich decide who gets to the presidency. And they do it depending on their own economic interests.

Those who manage the media are chosen by the big bosses, aka the owners, aka the billionaires. We must not be surprised if the opinions and interests of the rich are often defended by the news, whether explicitly or implicitly because in a sense the rich are the news.

And that’s why we need decentralized, unowned media.

We need developers to build a new way of sharing political knowledge. We need to know about other candidates.

We need a free source of information, decentralized, mainstream, made by the people for the people, and accessible by anyone with the internet at hand.

Twitter will not work, as it is centralized. Facebook either. Instagram either. TikTok either.

We need a decentralized source of information, on which no algorithm would be influenced by a minority for their own interests.

This is the first step: being able to know your enemy, and who’s on your side.

In other words, taking back the control of information.

Only then we will be able to win other battles and get a better sharing of wealth.