Gerhard Stoltz's Library tagged manipulation →  View Popular

The message, quite overly, is: if you are pissed, you are in a minority. The country has moved on. Things are getting better, get with the program.

The establishment of electoral representation, then, far from indicating a shift of power towards the poorer classes, is perhaps the surest sign that such a shift has not occurred. This is underlined by a consideration of the rulers who granted suffrage: Bismarck in Germany, Giolitti in Italy—where the extension of the vote served to shore up a weak and isolated political class—and, though not discussed here, Disraeli in Britain. All these figures seem to fit the Bonapartist pattern of a ‘strong leader’ supported by electoral consensus. They granted universal suffrage for—in Canfora’s sense—clearly undemocratic ends.

there was an implied principle that was a logical corollary of the division into spheres of influence. This ran as follows: elections will be held as soon as possible, to give representative governments to the countries involved; in any case, if the division into areas has any sense, the elections will be won by the parties that are sympathetic to the power with hegemony in that area.

For Canfora, majoritarianism not only produces skewed representation but introduces a further, political restriction of suffrage: instead of ‘one man, one vote’, it creates the categories of ‘useful’ versus ‘wasted’ votes, consigning the latter to oblivion. Ultimately, this leads to the atrophy of political forces outside a central, two-party consensus.

Some of these attack vectors use the Internet as a portal to access other devices on the global information grid. Though the technologies in question are not on the Internet their command and control functions are available through devices that are on the Internet. This is why those who say that cyber warfare does not represent a threat, does not have kinetic results, or can not see the risks have to be educated in a meaningful way.

In theory, the ultrasound technique could
work from up to about a meter away, he says. “The
farthest we’ve tried so far has been roughly 50
millimeters.”

Furthermore, what sort of psychological effects will this unlimited power of customization create? We are already experiencing a trend of cyberbalkanization. We tend to view information that already agrees with our viewpoints, and as our choice of media sources grows, intellectually isolated groups of people spring up who from birth have only been exposed to one ideological viewpoint.