from Hacker News

Covid-19 Revealed a United and Monolithic Media/Tech Complex

by wilsocr88 on 3/1/21, 1:24 PM with 1 comments

• by croissants on 3/1/21, 1:34 PM

  > Aspects of society that conventional wisdom holds to be outside or above the influence of tech and media, things like government, we suddenly realize are downstream from a single, monolithic technological communications machine that spans every screen and has its own biases.

  > Covid-19 revealed that the Media/Tech Complex is capable of acting as a single unified entity if necessary. That makes them more powerful than the Roman empire ever was.

  This article is long on ominous assertions about the incredible power of the "Media/Tech Complex" and short on actual evidence of that power. The main piece of evidence seems to be: look how they all said similar things at the beginning of the pandemic! But this seems like a weak example -- you may as well say getting a tornado warning on your phone and on the local TV news is evidence of the same thing.

  The claim that Media/Tech is "monolithic" is also pretty weird to me. There are popular articles from big media companies tut-tutting "Big Tech" every week. They don't seem to be good friends.