Global Capital Dominates the World Wide Web, Brainwashing Consumers

The World Wide Web has become a powerful tool for global capital to brainwash consumers into buying their products. This was predicted by Marshall McLuhan in his observation that the essence of a medium itself served to generate a particular style of consumer. With the rise of distributed services such as UIDX and federated platforms, there are fewer requirements for maintenance, legal liability for content within the network, or capital expenditure for network scale. This means that without major forces preventing user sign-ups, these services will continue to trend towards unstoppable growth. This is concerning because it removes any barriers to growth that existed with existing filesharing services and makes it easier for global capital to dominate and manipulate users on the web. Without liability in hosting derived from lower cost set-up fees and difficulty in outsiders purging certain content, consumers can be easily brainwashed into buying products they don’t need or want. The implications of this are far reaching and could have serious consequences if left unchecked. Global capital has already been able to use its power to influence public opinion through targeted advertising campaigns and other tactics on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. If this trend continues unchecked, then we could see even more manipulation of consumers on the web as global capital takes advantage of its dominance over online services.