Welcome to this episode of the award winning best of a left podcast in which we shall learn

about some solutions to our social media problems, fake news, propaganda, hate in all forms,

spreading like wildfire through society.

Before we get started though, I just want to say we're taking it as granted today that

social media is designed to extract as much money out of its users as possible, even if

it means destroying your sleep schedule, your personal relationships and democracy

all to those ends.

Today we're not going to get deep into the problems and look more at solutions.

As we get started, I want to refresh in your mind something I said real recently on the show,

we were talking about political ages that span decades, not a democratic age or a Republican age,

not a democratic presidential period or a Republican presidential period, but I was talking about

the first gilded age period which was born, persisted, and then died over the course of several decades.

Then we had the FDR New Deal period, which of course was born during the FDR era and lasted

into the 70s. Right now I argue that we are living at the end of the Reagan libertarian political era.

And as I said, this spans political parties. This is something that maybe started with Reagan but was

absolutely perpetuated by George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and Barack Obama

in many ways, two different degrees. And this age of neoliberalism brings with it

an era of deregulation and specifically a lack of antitrust regulation. So that's what I want

to be thinking about as we begin the show and we start to hear about how we got to where we are.

Now onto the show clips today come from the takeaway, back talk on the media and your undivided attention.

And just a quick note on that one, long time listeners may recall the time well spent movement.

It was an advocacy movement trying to change the culture of Silicon Valley away from calculating

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