For 200 years, since the Monroe Doctrine, Latin America has been ruled by an Iron Triangle of economic oligarchs, religious extremists, and militarists, backed by the veto of the U.S. government.
Democracy and liberty never stood a chance. Even when “leftists” took power, as in Cuba, Nicaragua, or Venezuela, they simply adapted the system. The party became the religion, and the party leaders the oligarchs. The military rules. Power flows from the barrel of a gun.
We teach our kids that America never adopted that system, but we did. In the American South, from 1876 until roughly the mid-1950s. The KKK was the military, the Southern Baptists were the religious, and local landowners were the oligarchs. Textile manufacturers moved south and adapted to it. It was the refusal of northern businesses to go along after World War II that led to its breakup.
It seems impossible, at a time when creativity is the gating factor to growth, where technology depends on free, empowered minds, that the Iron Triangle might take over America.
But it is in the process of doing so, mainly due to the indifference of technology.
This indifference is the product of laws passed in the 1990s that, in effect, made tech companies common carriers. Web sites cannot be held responsible for what is published on them for the same reason you can’t sue AT&T because of what I say on the phone. It’s ridiculous on its face. All you’d have to do in that case, to destroy AT&T, would be to have a bunch of people say asinine things, and sue AT&T for allowing them to be said.
This legal theory protects Facebook, Twitter, and Google, but it also binds them. They can’t get involved in political disputes. In practice they can’t get involved in disputes about what’s true.
The companies that control our media today, in other words, do not feel legally capable of taking responsibility for it. Objective truth, which once kept political discourse within some boundary, does not exist in today’s online media.
Which means it doesn’t exist at all.
This has given non-tech oligarchs an opening to create the Iron Triangle. Propaganda, spread by these oligarchs, has now reached deeply into our military, our police, and our leading religious institutions. Believers believe what they’re told, and don’t believe anyone outside the belief system. (That’s how religion works.)
It’s up to our big technology companies, now, to defend the concept of truth in the public square, and in the halls of government. An explosion is coming. How big it is, depends on what they do now.
