Should-Read: Back in 2015, I thought "cognitive dictatorship" was simply ludicrous. I should have been paying more attention to Breitbart, Drudge, and Fox News. I should have been paying more attention to the Brexiteers. I should have remembered more of the history of the Late Stuart dynasty—the Popish Plot, the warming-pan, and so forth: Charlie Stross (2015): The Present in Deep History: "I'm more worried about what I used as a throw-away in 'Glasshouse' as 'cognitive dictatorships'...
...systems which impose dictated limits on the thinkable thoughts by control of information streams or actual direct brain interfaces. People inside a cognitive dictatorship wouldn't see it as bad; quite possibly they wouldn't even notice the limits on their freedom of cognition, it's just that some ideas would be repugnant or difficult to express semantically in a manner that could be transmitted to other people. Doesn't sound too bad? Consider if the suppressed ideas included abstractions like freedom, emotions reinforcing undesirable primate behavior patterns like love, or the idea that one shouldn't have to work at whatever one's employer deems appropriate in order to live...
Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni: "I'ma let you finish, but Ernest Gellner had this nailed in Plough, Sword, and Book twenty years ago..."
