flâneur

It’s Always the Other Side That’s Been Brainwashed | The New Yorker

newyorker.com · 3,556 words · saved by 1 readers

What talk of brainwashing helps us not to talk about.

Save this story Save this story It wasn’t so long ago that respectable psychologists didn’t really talk about “brainwashing.” The term had the slightly kitschy flavor of other Cold War embarrassments— C.I.A. spy cats and Reds-under-the-bed paranoia . But Google’s indispensable Ngram Viewer, which analyzes how frequently phrases appear in printed texts, confirms that the past two decades have seen an uptick in the word’s usage. What’s bringing brainwashing back? One potential answer is the rise of technologies suspected of having mind-controlling powers, chief among them social media . Another

saved by

related reading