Day 0330

Reflecting on my interview experience and how the company infantalizes its employees with branding, toys, free snacks. A big caring crèche that you never need to leave or think beyond, the 'perks' of which are designed solely to increase your productivity to the company.

Enjoying Chomsky's assassination of the media, his dogged, exhausting case-study approach to expounding his theory of the propaganda model of media. Established power sets the terms of the debate, implicitly bounding what can be said and thought. If I were to design a modern state from scratch, I would ensure I had agents in the newspapers, Hollywood-equivalent, radio, who could influence the tenor of the messaging to the state's needs. The press can think itself is free, within the confines of permissable thought.

I'm slowly understanding just how much real-world power word-choice has. You can nudge, circumscribe and misdirect without conscious detection, by carefully choosing what you say, when. You can trigger a network of associated concepts in your audience's minds that they cannot help but activate when you use particular words, the bounds of the word's related signification spilling over into the interpretation of the rest of your argument. You can carefully control this pollution, and light up an interconnected series of unbidden nuances just by planting a poweful word in a particular place. Spin, propaganda, marketing; the moulding of new reality.