This is a long-ish article, as per usual for N Robinson, and I think people ITT are focusing only on the start. Yes free vs. subscription news media is an inter

This is a long-ish article, as per usual for N Robinson, and I think people ITT are focusing only on the start. Yes free vs. subscription news media is an interesting and important issue, but this article goes on to make a more wide-reaching and incisive criticism of how Capitalism structures the production and distribution of information or knowledge (Current Affairs is a socialist magazine). Information production is dominated by the super-rich and the state, and access to knowledge (not merely information) is carefully controlled for the benefit of and use by the highly educated, wealthy elite. An aspect that I often think about is how the vast majority of truly top-tier multimedia (books, articles, movies) has been created decades ago. A person could, for example, spend multiple lifetimes reading the amazing academic and artistic literature in the public domain. But such an existence is terribly unprofitable, so it's heavily discouraged in favour of a content-diet full of pop-culture ephemera. Alan Kay said about Pop Culture, that it "is all about identity and feeling like you're participating, It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future—it's living in the present." Such over-stimulating, disorienting, and fashionable multimedia, perhaps perfected by Buzzfeed, is making us energetic consumers, and idiots. Amused to death drinking from a firehose of 'free'.