Dumb Americans

I sometimes have a way of saying things that people find awkward or even inappropriate, and I have a hunch the title I have chosen here is at high risk of becoming one of those situations.

There is a lot to unpack here, and I don’t know if I will be able to unpack all of it in one post. I have addressed some of the issues involved before (see, for example, “There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute“), but I want to try to clarify one very sticky point right at the outset — that being the word “dumb”. This word actually has several meanings, and not only do I wish to accentuate the meaning known as the inability to express oneself [1], but I also wish to deviate from this meaning insofar as I am not particularly concerned about spoken language or interpersonal communication, but rather aim to draw attention to issues revolving around written language and very distinctly the written language used for communications “on the Internet” (see also “What is Publicacy + Why does it Matter?” for more about this issue).

Let me start off by stepping back and zooming out to more of a “bird’s eye” view. A few decades ago the web was abuzz with the term “disintermediation” — and I was somewhat skeptical of the way it was being bandied about. Around that time, I chose to focus on an alternative term (which was not widely recognized — and had perhaps even lost its original meaning): “remediary” [2].

As I have mentioned before, I intend to collect the articles I wrote in the “remediary” context and may release the collection as a sort of coffee-table publication (or maybe as a toilet accessory? :p ) at some point (if and when I ever get around to it).

In so-called “real life”, the world has moved on from the wild and crazy beginnings of the Internet. What do we see today as a result of the supposed processes of “disintermediation“? Have all media companies been successfully annihilated?

Hell, no! Quite the contrary! We now have supposedly new and improved media companies — and for the most part, what is supposedly particularly new and improved about them is that they are immensely more manipulative than the manipulative media of yore ever were.

So (for example) one of the simplest and most straightforward methods for figuring out which advertising and marketing campaigns are most active in any industry is to simply do a “Google” search for that industry’s most well-known buzzwords. The top 10 results are normally not only littered by hugely exorbitant marketing and advertising budgets — they are pretty much completely covered in them. [3]

While Google is definitely the worst culprit, it is by no means the only one. And just like the “Rest of the World” seeks to emulate Americans, so too all other brand names seek also to emulate the leader of the pack.

People’s inability to express their own ideas is indeed the very same problem as leading brands’ ability to manipulate these people. It is a global problem: worldwide, followers are following leaders — and they simply believe in them (see also “If Google is the Pope of the Internet, Then Who Are You & I?“).

[1] More narrowly, “mute”

[2] This was originally related to the term “remedy”, but I was in part re-introducing it as a matter of “re-mediation”, in the sense of re-organizing the process of mediation.

[3] Note that this is no accident. At the seminal “Press Day” to which Google invited all the so-called “leading” companies, Google’s VP of Engineering addressed the crowd with the explanatory example that “creditcards.com” would be removed from the results so that all the major brands of the day (for which he provided explicit examples) would be featured prominently in the so-called “Top 10” results. Today, over two decades later, we clearly see the results of this monetization model, yet most people probably do not remember (if they were ever even aware of) the fact that the business model is based on a very significant act of censorship. Most people even forget the multitude of anti-competitive legal battles the world’s leading manipulation engine is embroiled in time and again, simply because it regularly censors companies that dare to operate in its own industry (and which also refuse to be acquired by the world’s largest propaganda behemoth).