Some of you may have seen this, it's Alex Jones walking onto the set of The Young Turks while they're broadcasting at the RNC:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m-42A37zxM

Something about it doesn't add up to me. If someone genuinely has wandered onto your stage, you either kick them off (presumably there is some sort of security there who would easily do this) or you know he's trolling you and the last thing you should do is lose your cool. Cenk would have to have the emotional control of a 5-year-old for this to be real.

It seems much more likely that it's a coordinated ploy for attention.

The Level 1 story line of Alex Jones is that he's exposing the Illuminati (the elites, the bankers, the Bilderbergs, whoever). But the reality is probably that he's just a part of the show. If you're in this group of people who influence the world, and you know it's inevitable that people will wonder and talk about it, it becomes a good strategy to expose it yourself. 

If you don't expose it yourself, you don't control it. When you control it, you can present it with a goofy hat and lead people to slightly wrong conclusions. Since there's no way to stop the spread of information, their best protection is, paradoxically, to talk about even the things that oppose them. 

With his rage and hostility, Alex Jones has undoubtedly alienated people from ideas they may have otherwise been receptive to.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0kt4FHcMpFg/maxresdefault.jpg

Cenk Uygar is kind of like just the next wave of liberal. The cool uncle at a family bbq, he's a little more nuanced and interesting than the old grandparents, but at the end of the day he's a part of the same paradigm and not actually a threat to it. He's catching people who might otherwise drift away.

I mean, who knows, right? You never know what's in someone’s heart. But certainly the alternative media isn't somehow immune from being “managed” or influenced by whatever forces we realize influence the traditional media. 

Being on the internet might make it *tougher* to influence. But that isn't a game-changer. It's tougher to walk 10 miles than it is to walk 1 mile, but you'll still walk 10 miles if it's important to you.

The real change is Steemit, and it gives me goosebumps. This goes deeper than even what first meets the eye. What first meets the eye is that we have a social media platform that rewards those who contribute, rather than rewards only the centralized website owner. Amazing. That’s how it should be.

But more than that is that we have a market mechanism sorting out what deserves your attention. 

Suppose you tell a lie to a room full of people. You tell them Tom Brady got hit by a bus and won't be playing in the Superbowl. To whatever extent you're a good liar, you've manipulated public opinion about which team will win. You've manipulated the story line and the average discourse about the game. But you haven't confused a market mechanism. Since it takes only one person with the right information (and deep enough pockets) to correct an inefficiency in price, a betting market will sort through the noise and show you what's actually true. (This is why even an expert can't usually profit at sports betting, why index funds outperform money managers, etc.)

When the dust settles, we’ll realize the evolution from the internet to where we are now is exponentially different than the evolution from the old media to the internet. This is a change of mechanism, not merely a change of platform.

For the first time genuine expression has the legs it needs to empower it against the noise that would otherwise drown it out.