The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
Info Warfare Link Ext. Cards
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Info Warfare Link Ext. CardsThe impacts the aff attempt to avoid occur due to capitalismHorowitz 22 [Eli Horowitz, 6-26-2022, "Capitalism Is the Real Information War," MR Online, https://mronline.org/2022/06/26/capitalism-is-the-real-information-war/, DOA: 7-6-2022, SMarx, JTong] Looking Ahead: The Future of Capitalist Lies Resurgent labor unions can act as a partial solution to these problems—that is, assuming that workers do not believe the lies that companies tell about them. Still, the truly grim thing is that the problems exist—and are so deeply integrated into our way of life—in the first place. Let us be brutally honest: our economic system is so completely saturated with deceit that it is impossible to imagine a version of it that we could actually trust. The examples above are just the tiniest sliver of what we already know about capitalism’s assault on knowledge, and what we know is only a fraction of the whole truth. Even when we aren’t being actively lied to, misled, confused, or distracted, we have to struggle to find important information because capitalist investors go out of their way to hamstring the organizations that are supposed to keep us informed. In recent years, philosophers have begun to discuss what they call epistemic harms. As they see it, an epistemic harm is something that interferes with our ability to know or reason. Under capitalism, we suffer not just epistemic harms but epistemic aggression, that is, intentional, targeted acts of epistemic interference that are aimed at achieving dominance. Indeed, given how broadly and how routinely capitalist agents lie, we should all consider ourselves to be belligerents in an epistemic battle—or, to repurpose Alex Jones’s phrase, an information war. And it’s not getting better. As we develop more advanced forms of communication and more reliable knowledge about how humans form beliefs, capitalists race to invent new forms of deception. Corporate propagandists quickly learned to take advantage of influencers and streamers. Thanks to advances in information technology, scams are now automated, cons are data-driven, and profitable hoaxes spread algorithmically. As deepfakes proliferate and virtual worlds blend with the physical one, the potential for capitalistic dishonesty will only grow. Nor are capitalists satisfied with lying their way to the top of the digital world. They aim to expand their influence in the physical world by forming privately owned cities, replacing the public courts with their own private arbitration system, and perfecting the gatekeeping mechanisms that punish us for being anything other than productive, compliant subjects. If corporations can succeed in replacing public and community services with capitalist surrogates, they can redefine every part of our lives, changing the very meanings of the words and concepts that structure our reality. Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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