Dumbing down complex social and political issues is a communication strategy that will always see populists and extremists as winners.

This is how we got here in the first place. The words "War on Terror" are the ultimate dumbing down of international politics.

This is so easy to counter ("NSA can prevent another 9/11", "Government can trace pedophiles" etcetera) by the other side it's laughable. This is just playing into their hands.

And this is how you get ordinary people to begin to understand why this is an issue and why they should be concerned. Sure, you could let them drink from the firehose, but the decisions they reach would be even more uniformed or as it is now, ignored.

You give simplified information and let the curious among the previously uninformed do their own research to reach some version of The Truth.

Is it a perfect solution? Not even close. But that's not the world we live in or are surrounded by.

John Oliver is not wrong when he says "We don't fundamentally understand it." Maybe you do. Maybe someone else does. I know firsthand that I vaguely understand parts of it.

The problem that Snowden revealed is going to take years, maybe decades, to fully digest and society is going to be everchanging during that time. Prepare to be eternally frustrated if you ever thought there was going to be quick and decisive action on our problems with internal spying.

("Internal spying" doesn't even begin to cover what he revealed. It is the simplest term I can come up with at the moment. That, in and of itself, reveals the hidden depths of this issue. What the hell do you even call it.)

Education is the primary battlefield. Fuck, education is the only relevant battlefield. And yes, it's a long drawn out battle which is fought over generations, not via soundbites on a comedy show.

The other side understands this, so they have put decades worth of effort into undermining the education of ordinary people.

We used to understand this, as education for the people used to be a primary goal of progressive politics. (And yes, this is about progressive versus conservative, it always has been, no matter how warped these things have become.)

What Oliver does is entertainment, nothing more. It doesn't change anything, not in the long run. And while we're rejoicing in the fact the Oliver scored a very, very minor victory, the other side is already working on the next step in keeping the people as uninformed and uneducated as possible.

(Also, the only reason shows like that of Oliver are such a big deal these days because they've pretty much managed to kill off any form of critical mainstream journalism that could inform and educate the people. The "success" of John Oliver is a symptom of our defeat.)

No, what Oliver does is propaganda, and propaganda often changes things in lasting ways. I understand and (to some extent) share your philosophical aversion to it, but ignoring its utility is wrong-headed, whether you agree or disagree with its message.

I think what you're talking about with the education system might also be propaganda, just not of the media variety. It's worth noting that historically successful propagandists used (and use) both varieties heavily.

Edit: Soften language a bit.

I could not disagree more. This 2 axial look at politics is very short sighted, the real battle is Authoritarian vs Libertarian not left vs right..

I personally am a Left libertarian, leaning towards Geolibertarianism and/or Agorism

There are people on the left that are very very Authoritarian that love programs like the NSA for different reasons than the Traditional Conservative Authoritarian reasons.

Edit: completely agree with your bigger point but wanted to know who you had in mind as the other side

I'll gladly pay the price of "eternal frustration" over having to sit back, wait it out, and not make a giant big stink out of it.

If "we the people only care about dickpics" is somehow an illustrative reason for the expectation of this taking decades (??) to fix, then that is on the American people, not on the nature of this problem. Sorry but that is yet another lie that is apparently fed to the slightly-more-informed: "but but it's really really difficult and going to take a long time"--how is that anything other than yet another call-to-inaction, but worded to appeal to a different target audience?

> What the hell do you even call it.

Corruption. Your politicians don't even seem to lose their jobs over it any more. And people talk about it as if it's a status quo, not some gross failure that needs to be eradicated swiftly and immediately.

See, non-American dickpics are perfectly fine to collect and may be useful intel or leverage or whatever in the future. I have no problem with that - collect all the information on people outside the US, be they friend or enemy or even frenemy, that is wanted or needed. Just don't go looking at or collecting American dickpics.

If you have a problem with that, you were born and live in the wrong country.

And dickpics is a useful illustration, because people can understand that. So, if they think "Shit, they can see my dickpics? What else can they get?" then the illustration will have done it's job and we can move on to the next step.

* by dickpics, I mean intelligence.

John Oliver didn't take away anyone's nuanced and detailed arguments against the surveillance state. He translated them for people who probably aren't going to understand or care otherwise, which only adds to the public discourse.

And using an example of a single document (the photo of John Oliver's genitals) to have Ed Snowden explain how each of the revealed NSA programs relates to it is just good communication and not an oversimplification at all.

Sure, the conclusion is laughably dumber than proposition 1). But I won't call it "dumbing down" unless some intentional oversimplification is involved to the point of making the argument flawed.

"War on Terror" managed to be the best headline material of all topics for years. No other topic in discourse was so crisp, so clear to communicate. As a result, the discourse became "Do we fight terror or not?". It masked all other topics.

If all we want to take away from this episode is a lesson on marketing, it's how to make yourself heard at all, when you're just starting out. So yeah, for startups it's indeed a good idea to claim extremist points. It can pay off to stir up some dust, and clear your point once it settles. This can get you much further than an honest but mellow statement.

No, this is actually an argument that can stand up to those arguments. All the technical and fundamental arguments of why privacy matters only apply vaguely and indirectly to the people. As Oliver says, people just don't care. Why do they care about another 9/11 or pedophiles? Because those things do affect them directly, as does the idea of the government having access to your dick picks.

If this argument were so easy to counter, why would this argument have such a clear dramatic influence on peoples opinions on governmental intelligence operations? Alternatively, which argument would you bring up that would easily counter "NSA can prevent another 9/11"? I don't think that's so easy.

Mob rule is dumb, unfortunately. It's the nature of the beast.

On the one hand, I applaud the brilliance of John Oliver for presenting the NSA affair in an immediately alarming way and attracting the attention of the average people.

On the other hand, people really have to think rationally and responsibly to tackle serious political issues. John Oliver is not going to work every time, and sometimes we don't have a John Oliver at all.

I am deeply depressed by the political ignorance of the common people in the US. I have always assumed that political ignorance stems from political oppression, which seems to be case in China (which is my home country). But now it seems to be a consequence of universal human stupidity instead.

So it doesn't seem surprising at all that people in modern democracies are ignorant of most of the politics. I think that many in tech, who are acutely aware of the significance of the NSA affair, care about it not because of politics, but because it's wrong and hurts people.

I cannot really argue against this pessimistic picture of democracy.

> I think that many in tech, who are acutely aware of the significance of the NSA affair, care about it not because of politics, but because it's wrong and hurts people.

Your definition of politics is very weird to me. Since preventing wrong things that happen on a big scale fits perfectly into my definition of political activities (think about the American civil rights movement).

> I cannot really argue against this pessimistic picture of democracy.

I on the other hand don't see a different way. It seems to me that if you really want to change something for the better, you need to steer clear of any kind of politics. It's like a swamp or quicksand; if you enter it, you'll get stuck there.

> Your definition of politics is very weird to me. Since preventing wrong things that happen on a big scale fits perfectly into my definition of political activities (think about the American civil rights movement).

My working definition of politics here is anything that involves politicians and especially political parties, because anything they touch immediately gets corrupted and turned into a way for said officials to safeguard their careers. You may say I'm cynical, but that's what I see all around, living in a democracy. I admit there may be a better word than "politics" for what I'm talking about, but I can't find it now.

You know how, if you question people about democracy enough, after a bit they'll usually admit that "okay it's not optimal, but it's the best we got / came up with so far".

That means you can fuck it up. It means you can do democracy badly. It means that just because it is technically a "democracy", doesn't mean it's working properly.

In Canada, I find people are typically more politically aware if not involved, as compared to the US where I live now.

While I agree with that, the limitation to that approach is that the rational part of the mind is not in control - it can at best guide emotion.

Daniel Kahneman has a great metaphor for this: think of the rational aspect of the mind as the rider of an elephant, and the emotional, intuitive part as this elephant[0]. Sure, under most circumstances the rider can guide the elephant, but the elephant can want different things than the rider. In a way the elephant is more important, because if it doesn't work along the rider is helpless. You need to get the elephants to calm down and get along before it's riders can even bother with having a conversation.

[0] Ignoring for a moment the issues with clear-cut boundaries like that, or the limitations of making sense of the mind in terms of two other minds.

EDIT: I left a comment earlier on reddit[1] that indirectly talks about this as well:

You have to realize he's not trying to reach out to people like you who already are aware of these issues and agree that something has to be done. He's trying to get the point across to people who are most likely to resist thinking about it, for all the wrong but understandable reasons.

Like with race, climate change, gender issues, religion, those who need this stuff to be explained to the most are also the most likely to resist, because they literally Can't Deal With It. It's called fragility[2]:

“a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include outward display of emotions such as anger, fear and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence and leaving the stress-inducing situation.”

Replace "racial" in that quote with any sensitive issue you want, like "gender", "political" or "religious". Everyone has this to some degree, and the first thing to do if you want to have a healthy debate is become aware of everyone's point of fragility and somehow circumvent it so we can have a reasonable discussion. Even more so when trying to reach out to the people who suffer from this the most. It is really important we keep trying to do that, no matter how frustrating it can get, because the ignorance of even a few affects everyone in society, especially in a democracy.

It's a real problem and John Oliver even lampshades it, calling Snowden the IT guy in the office you don't want to learn from. He may appear to be shooting Snowden down, but what he's doing is approaching this from point of view of the many people with this mindset. He's acknowledging their experience (not to be confused with viewpoint) as a valid one, and trying to give them a way to connect to the topic regardless, with jokes and dick pics.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/31lqjh/edward_sno...

[2] http://www.alternet.org/culture/why-white-people-freak-out-w...

The people who can see your dick pics don't know you. You're just a nameless, faceless penis to them, and the people who might be looking at your dick picks are a nameless, faceless mass you don't know and never will know. Your dick pics are a statistic in a database. In fact, "people" probably don't even see your dick pics. A computer takes them and stashes them in a database, and the amount of data stored is so huge that the chance of any specific NSA employee running into your dick while querying the database is infinitesimal. Besides, even if the NSA wasn't involved, your ISP could see your dick pics anyway, and if you used any kind of image host to send your dick pics, so can they.

I would be much more concerned if the NSA was handing the information to people I know, but they're not. People only care about privacy when it personally affects them. For example, I'm transgender. While I'm out and proud now, that wasn't the case back when I was still living as a guy. It didn't worry me that the NSA had this information on me in a database somewhere, but I would have been very, very worried if somebody I knew personally were to discover that I'm trans (before I was ready to tell them, anyway).

Nobody cares that the NSA can see their dick pics. People might care if their friends and family can see their dick pics.

Oh, but then you might say "but... but the NSA is going to blackmail politicians by threatening to reveal their dick pics if they don't do what the NSA says". That's possible, but you don't need mass electronic surveillance to do that. J. Edgar Hoover did it back in the '60s, and he didn't use either the Internet or mass surveillance to do that. No, he targeted people he wanted to blackmail, and he had his team do some good old-fashioned detective work to dig up blackmail material on them. That the NSA can hypothetically do the same thing with mass Internet surveillance doesn't change anything one iota.

As John Oliver explained to Edward Snowden in the interview, the average person doesn't care about 'bulk mass surveillance' or 'collection of metadata on personal phone calls' because they only vaguely understand these things and they scantly care about these things. What people do care about is if others know or could know about their embarrassing moments or their flaws.

Additionally they aren't literally trying to say they will use your dirty pictures to blackmail you, this is just an extreme example of what they used by John Oliver to make the issue more accessible. What they will do is if you or someone you know or someone who you know knows is involved in an NSA investigation (which we know can be so broad that you could be under suspicion even if you have never and will never commit a crime in your life), you can be subject to an investigation so invasive and with so little procedural oversight that you would once be called a conspiracy theorist for saying that this was even possible.

For more insight into just how invasive this can be just go back to the video and listen to the overview of the programs that snowden revealed, then watch a demo of Palantir showing the use cases of their software: https://www.youtube.com/user/Palantir/videos

Wouldn't it worry you if being trans was outlawed, either explicitly or in-practice, and this database were used to locate and target you? It's happened multiple times in this country, even in the past century, with much less convenience than it can be done now: communists, equal-rights activists and other activists, Japanese citizens during WWII, and so on. What if a new AIDS-like STD shows up, and in today's fear-mongering political climate the government chooses to round-up and isolate anyone who may be a carrier based on their lifestyle, instead of focusing on treating people who are actually infected?

These things aren't likely, but they're definitely possible, since similar things have happened before. That's why the mass collection of data "just in case" is something we should all be concerned about.

>That the NSA can hypothetically do the same thing with mass Internet surveillance doesn't change anything one iota.

The reality is that is is much easier to abuse these powers now than it was in Hoover's days. Think about it like this: Hoover was bootstrapping his blackmail, current leaders can do it with economies of scale.

So if the wrong person was elected or something happened to un-democratize our nation (don't think it can't happen) then there is a big juicy database that can be abused far far beyond anything anyone ever had in the history of census taking.

Which they can then blackmail you with should you ever decide to run for office or oppose them in any way. Much like how J. Edgar Hoover built secret files about politicians and celebrities which he allegedly used to influence them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover

"Oh, I would never send a sexually explicit photo. Sounds like this only affects perverts and liberals. Carry on, NSA!"

Of course neither of us really know, because only the NSA has the data :)

OK, maybe a mild chuckles.

Hopefully, not a grimace or a scowl.