In my humble opinion, over 99.9% of Internet users are novices when it comes to evaluation of information sources. This is, for the most part, based on two things. First, my simple and straightforward observations with ordinary everyday people. Secondly (and more importantly) the obvious and glaring shortcomings of education systems worldwide, which neglected the immense significance of the Internet at the outset and which in the meantime have done little or nothing to close the gaps to catch up to the wild horses that have escaped the barns, let alone the runaway trains of the leading global companies with immense capital power to atomize mere mortals in a heartbeat. The information asymmetry has now become so enormous that the towering gargantuan enterprises — larger than the government institutions of most nations on Earth — cannot even see the number of mere ants they obliterate with every step they take.
This past week I saw an interview with a charlatan I won’t even name because that would be giving him too much credit. He talked ad nauseum about authority — even though he obviously had no authority himself. I don’t know why anyone pays any attention to people who claim to be masters of manipulation, but I guess I got suckered into paying attention to this huckster myself. Well, attention is a tall order — let me call what I did as allowing this guy to entertain me while I gradually dozed off. There are a vast number of talking heads online who are ready, willing and able to bore tired and uninspired [1] consumers to sleep by droning on and on about some nonsense that will tax a brain enough to push minds over the brink in a matter of minutes.
This is why such interviews performed on irrational media [2] will present their advertising messages early enough in the program to reach suckers before they have fully fallen asleep — but I digress.
Our charlatan of the hour proposed he could attain authority simply by modifying behavior. While I guess this may work with completely uneducated suckers, I have my reservations. I am not easily impressed by lab coats, security uniforms and such. Smooth talkers tend to make my hair stand on end. I find it much more reasonable to orient my trust towards more widely distributed networks of social order.
And that was indeed the clincher which gave away this fool once and for all. When his interviewer asked him how the irrational media consumers could learn more about his work, this pseudo-professor gave a proprietary Internet domain as his contact address. Proprietary domains are administered by private companies which have made a large capital investment in order to acquire the exclusive right to manage these domains, and thereby to reap profits by renting out the right to use such domains at exorbitant prices. Unlike generic domains, proprietary domains are not priced by the market forces of supply and demand. They are controlled like little fiefdoms under the influence of dictatorial rulers. Anyone signing up for such a rule of slavery is as inauthentic as a salesman driving up in a rented car, unpracticed and unlearned in the realms of free speech.
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