If the new media is an inevitable byproduct of the digital era simply existing, which is how things look to me, it still makes sense to follow things back to the root cause. How many examples are there of successful media organizations that don't at some level run the same way as the one you're lambasting? Being owned and funded by a government or a multibillionaire to serve as their propaganda outlet are viable but have their own problems that might or might not be worse.
One reason people refuse vaccination is that they are worried the vaccines are secretly an attempt to sterilize undesirable segments of the population. For example, see what happened with the tetanus vaccine in Kenya in 2014.
It surprised me too, and it's unclear what their basis is for saying this.
This WHO page [1] on measles statistics claims a 60% increase for the Americas. Maybe the BBC interpreted a <100% increase as a decrease, or maybe I'm misinterpreting it, since I don't see the raw numbers.
Abolishing patents is radical enough to begin with, so why stop there? If everyone had UBI and free healthcare to cover the material costs of living, is it really so implausible that people who were interested in looking for apples that cured something would do so?
That aside, the obvious answer would be to publicly fund this kind of activity that we deem beneficial to society.
The most famous example is the DES S-boxes, where the NSA made a change that nobody else understood - until years later, when it was discovered that they had made the algorithm more secure against cryptanalysis techniques that had just been "discovered", but which had evidently been known to NSA long before.
To expand on the DES example, the S-boxes are essentially large 'random' lookup tables. The NSA took the S-boxes, and replaced them with their own tables. At the time, it was not clear if this was to protect against an unknown attack, or to introduce an unknown attack (which may involve knowing some secret key used to generate the S-boxes).
>blindly support the actions of whichever leader bears your label
No, rather than being the worst, that avoids saying pretty much anything of substance about the political world at all. If the leaders are well-chosen and accurately labeled, you've actually described the best system.
And what of it? The internet and cheap worldwide shipping/travel have made it easy to work around a lot of laws whose jurisdiction is limited by geography. A system where you can use gmail, google+, youtube, etc and be subject to Google "law" or use outlook.com, bing, etc and be subject to Microsoft "law" seems like the natural place to go from here. Google is even investing in walking robots and self-driving cars to use for enforcement already :D
Yep. When peoples' actions effortlessly cross national boundaries. laws that don't cross national boundaries quickly become irrelevant. First e-feudalism, then who knows what?
We're definitely entering e-feudalism. We need an e-revolution into e-democracy, whatever that looks like.
Probably select acceptance into online communities, while increasingly irrelevant nations worry about increasingly irrelevant tax revenue and your increasingly irrelevant physical location.
