Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
There's still time to help the rest of America break those bonds by explaining how profitable hate and fear are for these media and social media empires"
What's the difference between heroin and Fox "News"?
Starting in 1898, the Bayer company of Germany marketed diamorphine as an over-the-counter cough remedy and pain reliever under the brand name Heroin, taken from the German word for "heroic"; it took a generation to discover how addictive it was, leading to it being banned in the US in 1924 and around the world in the 1930s.
Heroin's power comes from its ability to reach below our level of conscious control and stimulate the body's natural opiate system, producing a sensation of pleasure and fulfillment that sweeps away everyday concerns, seemingly answering all of life's questions and problems.
More recently, the Sackler family introduced Oxycontin to the US, marketing it irresponsibly in a way that led to hundreds of thousands of American deaths.
The drug was developed around the same time heroin was in widespread use in the US and even Adolf Hitler became addicted to it, but Oxy only became a "blockbuster" product in the US when the Sackler's company, Purdue Pharma, began pushing it in 1995, falsely arguing it was less addictive than most other opiates.
Their reckless promotion of Oxycontin, however, made the family billions, which they continue to enjoy.
The parallels to media -- including social media -- are startling.
Mark Zuckerberg, now a billionaire, developed Facebook in 2004 as a product to rate women at Harvard, but with the development of an algorithm that would feed people more and more of what they wanted -- dopamine jolt after dopamine jolt -- the product became highly addictive (or at least habituating).
Zuckerberg's refusal to make the algorithm public or transparent has provoked charges that he's following in the billionaire Sackler family's footsteps, irresponsibly providing the public with a product that alters brains to crave more and more of it.
That same algorithmic model was later adopted by Twitter and Tik-Tok, among others, and has fueled a mental health and suicide crisis among American teens while making investors in those companies rich beyond the dreams of King Midas.
While social media's addictive nature mostly comes from the delivery system -- the algorithm could be likened to the syringe used with heroin -- the addictive nature of conventional media like hate-talk radio and Fox "News" is attributable to its content.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
