The Daily Discourse

The Daily Discourse is a meta level item, there is no actual presentation, news command center, or actual mastermind sitting behind a bank of monitors, with his fingers steepled together, coldly and impassively watching the flow of news and information. Everything in the Daily Discourse is pumped out through talking heads, cognet feeds, streaming news outlets, social media trends, and all of the rest. The CogNet is too large to be controlled like a symphony, but it can be goaded and corralled, and this is the purpose of the Daily Discourse.

Controlled Language: also known as political correctness, control of the language colors everything is it employed with. By choosing how to word questions and label factions, biases are established and thrown around. By controlling the language, terms can be removed, ideals can be blacklisted, and entire groups and organizations can be canonized or demonized with the same flick of a keyboard. Through the use of memetics, vocabularies and word choice are established and controlled.

Real world example, is a person Pro-Choice or Pro-Abortion? Technically they are the same thing, but the application of controlled language changes the context of the position.

Controlled Discourse: also known as controlling the conversation, the Daily Discourse emphasizes the topics that are contentious and should be discussed, while also pointing out which topics are dead. Anyone talking about a dead topic is out of touch, and will be labeled with the appropriate denier, -ist, or -phobic suffix as required. Thus, the discourse is controlled, so that the most heated topics are often of the least importance, while those deserving of scrutiny are passed over with nary a blink of an eye.

Real world example: an athlete refused to make a patriotic/nationalistic gesture, and there is an immediate firestorm. At the same general time, it is revealed that the Pentagon cannot account for $6.5 trillion dollars, or roughly 1/3 of the national debt. Nary a fart was heard. The discourse has been neatly and cleanly controlled.

Controlled Thought: the modern expression of the Thought Police is Controlled Thought. People aren't arrested for their thoughts, no one is mind reading, and those few that can will tell you how boring most people actually are. Rather, controlled thought is controlling how people express themselves. Popular ideas and approved thoughts will receive strong public support, while those ideas and thoughts that go against the consensus or daily discourse are subject to the Daily Hate. Thus, at the end of the discourse, those with unpopular or critical thoughts and ideas will keep them to themselves, and thus the public.

The Canaille Pulse is a metric of the general consensus of the public, established through polling, and aggregated data. By measuring the pulse, those in decision making roles can determine the trending topics among the masses of common folk, and their relative intensity. It is relatively easy to make a high intensity topic into a trending one by fanning it and making sure it spreads. Likewise, serious concerns that aren't dominated by emotional context are easier to push down. Concerns about the viability of negative interest rates and their impact on the solvency of the currency is a very major glaring problem, but it is in no means rooted in an emotional context. On the other hand, revealing a popular character on a television show as being gay evokes strong emotional responses, when ultimately it is a trivial matter. Rather than facing economic problems, the canaille pulse is throbbing over an emotion war between LGBT activists and supporters, and those they label (see controlled language) bigots, and homophobes.

The Daily Hate: Hate is a very human emotion, and a very strong one. There have been attempts to stamp out hate, but these are invariably doomed to fail because hatred is part of the human psyche. You hate your enemies, you hate things that prey on you, you had malady and disasters. In Brave New World, Oceania had the Two Minutes Hate, where the canaille focused their anger and hatred against the singular figure of Emmanuel Goldstein, the great enemy of the state and the people. In the Daily Discourse, there is no single figure of the Daily Hate. Rather, the focus of the Daily Hate changes from day to day. The focus of the Daily Hate is a person who has done something horrific, such as committing a mass murder, or a shooting spree, or a terrorist attack. It also includes people who have said and done things that are considered reprehensible or controversial, so much that it is thrown in the face of the canaille. Thus, the controlled discourse and controlled thought have created the target for the canaille vitriol. The masses shout out, they beat their chests, they post memes condemning the focus of the hate, they confess their support for whatever, creating echo chamber groups, support groups, and their own iconography. Their anger and hatred are spent, and like a rowdy sexual encounter, their spleen goes limp and they are sated.

There are too many to list, but Tom Brady cheated at sportsball, Colin Kaepernick didn't stand for the National Anthem, Ted Nugent supports guns, Casey Anthony, the female astronaut who drove cross country in adult diapers, anyone from the Westboro Baptist Church, the Tsarnaev brothers, Osama bin Laden (who played an effective Emmanuel Goldstein for what, a decade?) The veterinarian who shot the cat with a bow, the hunter who killed Cecil the Lion. Caitlyn Jenner, people who support this political candidate, people who oppose that political candidate, etc.

The Daily Fear: While the Daily Hate tells people what they should be outraged by, the Daily Fear mongers to them the things that they should be afraid of. Less dominant than the Daily Hate, the Daily Fear doesn't change nearly as often, but it is much deeper rooted. At the root of the Daily Fear is support for the status quo, because the scariest thing in the world is change. If you do not support the status quo, those in power, very bad things will happen. If you challenge the status quo, and do not follow the advice of those in power, bad things will very specifically happen to you.

There was a Chicago politician who famously said Never let a Crisis go to waste. This is the purpose of the daily fear. Crowds of poor people rioting in another country, shooting guns and acting like savages. If they had the proper values and a status quo like you, they wouldn't be savages, shooting guns in the air. Your values are superior, just as long as you follow our guidelines for them. When there is an ethnic uprising, bolster the walls between ethnic groups, keep the population divided. When there is a clash between law enforcement and the canaille, foster the resentment, give the police more power and weapons, but make sure there are plenty of people with blue ribbons of support. When there is a terrorist attack, keep the people afraid of what that person stood for, and make sure they do not attempt to empathize with them. So long as the people are afraid, divided, and disempowered, they will not join forces and rise up against the status quo, no matter how offensive it becomes.

The Daily Lust: regardless of how advanced and progressive humanity becomes, at our core, we are still an animal, a highly advanced largely hairless primate with a really big head, permanent sex characteristics, and oversized genitalia. One of the most powerful human urges is desire, and this desire can be broken down into desire for sex, desire for food, and desire for shiny things.

Sex sells, and in the context of the Daily Discourse, celebrity sex, and sex scandals sell the best. Few things can as quickly dominate a news cycle like a celebrity wardrobe malfunction, hacked celebrity nudes, or leaked celebrity sex tapes. Before her horribly mediocre leaked sex tape Paris Hilton was a weathy heiress who had zero celebrity status. Now, everyone knows her name, buys her perfume, and so forth. 24 Celebrity nip slips you dont want to miss, celebrity sex tape leak you can't take your eyes off of, political figure sex scandal ruins term in office. Peens, breasts, and flashed panties everywhere! REPRODUCE

Food porn is a thing, ranging from slow motion high resolution pictures of a pizza being pulled apart, with cheese stringing between the slices to the pornographic presentation of cooking shows, complete with prep foreplay, sighs and ohs and ahs as everything comes together culminating in a garnish or sauce drizzle money shot. Guy Fieri isn't taking you on a tour of places you'll actually ever go, he's taking you on a country wide whorehouse tour, and you cringe at half of the things he shoves in his face, like watching a 50 year old frat boy go to town on a $50 hooker in rural Arkansas. Don't mind those jailhouse tats and that C-section scar, you should see the jawbone on this fancy lady. CONSUME

Most species are interested in shiny things, gold and jewels, flashing clothing, expensive things and status symbols. It is important to make sure the canaille know what the official status symbols are, otherwise they might make the mistake of trying to form their own opinions. The best gadget is a shiny new Apple phone plus whatever accessory goes with it. It's that simple. BUY

Incestuous Relationships

The Dailies all loop back around into each other, feeding on each other in an incestuous relationship. Rape and sexual violations blur between Daily Lust and Daily Hate, and the line between Daily Hate and Daily Fear is thin to begin with. Likewise there are areas where Fear and Lust bleed over into each other, creating a primordial soup of emotional response. Are you angry, afraid, or horny, if you are, then the Daily Discourse has done it's job.

Buy why? Emotions are controllable. The person who can make you angry controls you. The person who can arouse you controls you, and the person you are afraid of controls you. When all three of those people are all being pushed and nudged around by a consensus seeking apparatus, that apparatus controls you. Emotions aren't rooted in logic, or reason. They are instinctive and reflexive. Contentious topics trigger these emotions, and once an emotion has taken control, it takes a bit of work to get everyone calmed down and out of their lather. Mission accomplished.

This is possibly one of the most cynical submissions I have written because this for me, isn't fiction. It's what I see. In the US, the media is controlled by just six major interests, and most of these interests are in agreement with each other, they just want their slices of the pie. Social media jumps from scandal to scandal, outrage to outrage. The government jumps from crisis to crisis, and spews propaganda like a manure spreader. The print media, increasing dinosaur as it is, doesn't share the same news, but instead publications are altered, depending on where they are being shipped to. The canaille are guided, nudged, given the carrot and stick treatment, and everyone follows along.

Sheeple? Hardly. We are an intelligent species, but we are also a socially oriented species, and one that did not evolve from predators. When one person is upset, we either empathize with them, or are horribly awkward because for a variety of reasons, we didn't. I'm afraid of... most people are afraid of that too. I think this person is sexy as hell... most people will be generally agreeable. I really like the shiny new doodad... most people are going to agree.

And that is how we arrive at where we are now.

And in the Cosmic Era, this is turned up to 11.