As one journalist put it, “It’s a strategy of power that keeps any opposition “constantly confused – “a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable “because it is indefinable.” Meanwhile, real power was elsewhere – hidden away behind the stage, exercised without anyone seeing it. And then the same thing seemed to start happening in the West.

Many of the facts that Trump asserted were also completely untrue. But Trump didn’t care. He and his audience knew that much of what he said bore little relationship to reality. This meant that Trump defeated journalism – because the journalists’ central belief was that their job was to expose lies and assert the truth. With Trump, this became irrelevant. Not surprisingly, Vladimir Putin admired this. The liberals were outraged by Trump. But they expressed their anger in cyberspace, so it had no effect – because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead, ironically, their waves of angry messages and tweets benefitted the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. One online analyst put it simply, “Angry people click more.” It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead, it was becoming a fuel that was feeding the new systems of power and making them ever more powerful.

via http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/02d9ed3c-d71b-4232-ae17-67da423b5df5