THE CHRONIC CAMPAIGN, ENDLESS EMAILS, AND MONEY ALL THE TIME

 I am absolutely furious with the people running the Republican campaign organizations and the annoying WinRed that does the charges.  My mailbox is perpetually flooded with email several times a day. There are literally a dozen or more from Donald Trump alone. Then there is everyone else running for office because the congressional campaign committees gave out my email.  

I of course I  finally took steps to stop this by telling them remove me from their lists but then they simply shifted over to another mailing list and were back again. This goes on continuously even though the next election is still almost a year away, due to the permanent campaign we have to endure. Worse, some of the wording is downright offensive for failing to respond. They have also cried wolf too many times, always falsely claiming they are behind in fundraising. 

As a result I sometimes miss important mail like notices and bills, etc. because of the nonstop flood. What I am going to have to do is make a new mailbox just for bills and other important things. Mind you it’s no secret I have been a lifelong conservative, but I have had it with this. I just don’t know what they think they are accomplishing by annoying people this way. 

I’m even getting mail from the Democrats now due to a publication giving out my address! A good part of the reason for all of this is tunnel vision, that is more and more ubiquitous across the board in today’s society. By that I mean the organizations are now so laser-focused on particular objectives that the staff pull out all the stops to try and achieve them without any consideration of collateral consequences. The campaign people want to raise as much money as they can and nothing else much matters. 

The larger problem, of course, is money and the endless quest for it. Politicians spend an inordinate amount of time fundraising, and most of them hate it. Yet even those who most fervently claim to want campaign finance reform alway make sure to leave loopholes for themselves in any legislation that passes. The reality is it is almost impossible to get money out of the process as everyone is in on it, i.e. the pious media certainly does not want to lose all the money they collect in advertising. 

But what we can do, and what we desperately need to bring about is election reform. A good part of the problem would be mitigated if we limited the amount of time that campaigns can occur in, which would certainly spare us a lot of the cacophony of the endless campaign. Furthermore we need to get rid of primaries, which simply inordinately increase the resources needed to run for office. The idea that they are somehow more “democratic” is a delusion, given that few people vote in them, and those who do tend to be activists which simply pulls the parties to the extremes. The truth is the “party” is really comprised of the elected officials identifying with it, and they are the ones who should be nominating candidates. (I’ve written on this before with regard to the presidency but the idea hasn’t gotten any traction yet).

It does not, however, completely resolve the problem of money. It is not so much that it gives advantage to “the rich” since they are as varied in outlook as the rest of the population and the notion that they form a cohesive “class” is simply not reflected in reality. But there are wealthy individuals who, on a personal level, do get more access than they deserve because politicians are generally easily impressed by big money. So they get to hang around and mostly feed each others’ egos, go to Epstein’s island, etc. Then when it sometimes blows up they have to scramble to disassociate themselves from people they were intimately associated with. 

I will never forget how, years ago, I did a lot of work for a candidate for a top executive position because I took him seriously in his commitment to principle.  At the same time, from the opposite side, a billionaire I had some acquaintance with was doing everything possible to defeat this candidate, organizing and pouring funds into the incumbent’s campaign. My candidate won. But I cannot overstate the shock I felt when barely a few weeks into his term he had dinner with the same billionaire who had just worked against him so strongly. I have never trusted any of them since then and it wasn’t long before I completely walked away from all of that. Money trumps principle, and just about everything else, and these people are never going to change. Thus the only thing to do is to eliminate as much of the need for funds as possible starting with what I have outlined above. 

THE FADING PROMISE OF THE INTERNET

The early days of the Internet provided us with a marvelous tool to access libraries around the world, collaborate on projects, and have access to informational previously not easily available. The educational possibilities were endless and sites soon sprang up covering almost any imaginable interest. Email made it possible to communicate instantly with anyone anywhere. The Worldwide Web made it all even more accessible to the average person, and the promise was great. There would be a new birth of freedom and power would become decentralized.

But then came pornography (always an early presence with new technology) and baser subject matter as more and more people gained access, as well as predation, epitomized by hackers who were able to break into and compromise various sites which then required increased security. Internet chat became available and the groundwork was laid for social interaction. AOL provided an easily accessible organized framework, enabling millions of people to communicate and discover others to an extent that still hasn’t been realized by Facebook, which became ubiquitous much later on. At the turn of the century there were several search engines available and no one had yet heard of Google.  As the new century progressed the current incarnation of the Internet emerged, and it is deeply, perhaps irredeemably flawed. 

Today, despite billions of people being online, only a handful of sites get most of the traffic. Only two companies get more than half of all online advertising and that share is increasing as almost 90% of new revenue goes to Google and Facebook, leaving little for everyone else.

As indicated by the chart above this duopoly also gets 25% of all advertising (i.e. including, and at the expense of, newspapers, magazines, TV and radio) and that share is constantly  increasing as well, while the rest shrink. Indeed, for many, if not most people, they are the Internet. As a result the duopoly dominates most of the information on the Internet and have amassed an unprecedented amount of power that the “Robber Barons” of the past could never dream of. 

They are not handling it well. Facebook actively decides what information you get or don’t get, and  Google searches are skewed, yielding paid advertising first, so that you have to scroll down to get to what you are actually looking for. Barring some kind of change or intervention this is only going to get worse. Services are constantly monitoring us yet people have a depressing herd mentality in these things. 

There is even greater peril in other areas. We have a huge amount of personal exposure online. There are constant security threats and your information is simply not safe, and certainly not private. Every other day we read of an organization’s data being compromised, or  even worse, the government’s security being breached. The Internet in its present state is simply not safe. Reliance on the “Cloud” makes this even worse as we become increasingly dependent on being connected. But what happens if it goes down?

A few decades ago there was a vision of a future that had people telecommuting and working from home in the countryside, a small town or anywhere. But it didn’t happen. Instead  companies that allowed this are increasingly reversing themselves and bringing workers back into the office. 

Then there is the social cost, as millions of people have become addicted to social media, and the young are especially vulnerable to predators and character assassination that can have deathly consequences for those who are emotionally overwrought. Indeed some people have become so confused they believe the online world is reality, and if something is on the Internet it must be true, when in fact, it conveys a huge amount of misinformation. Never mind the enormous amount of time wasted online. 

Between emails, chat, and the sites you visit you leave a trail on the Internet that you might one day regret. 

Since people online want everything for free, there is an incalculable amount of theft of intellectual property and creative work, so that many of those that produce these things can no longer make a living. 

Our critical infrastructure is now so wired that we have enabled serious threats like a catastrophic attack on our electric grid, which would cause the collapse of our civilization. 

To fend off many of these perils you are required to maintain ever more complex and varied passwords for the sites you visit.  As things in your home become ever more “smart” via wifi you are that much more exposed. 

Thus, the online world is fraught with peril and must be used with a great deal of caution; hardly the future we expected. There may be a bright future somewhere, but this can't be it.