Yes, most newspapers are publishing anonymous quotes from government officials without scrutiny; quotes that are later found to have been completely bogus.
We live in an age of constant memetic warfare and a majority of our content distribution channels have been compromised.
I believe the kind of journalism you’re hinting at is practically dead in what many people are referring to when they say “the news.” It’s hard to determine if I agree with your stance though since you didn’t actually define what you meant by news organizations; mind listing a few of your favorite sources of news and trusted commentators? If they’re quite good, it’ll help people find reliable sources of descriptive accuracy!
But a meta point: Most commercial news rooms have become propoganda arms for The Party that churn out low effort AP ticker derivatives, social media gossip, and literal government propaganda from The Party whispered in their ear by an “anonymous source.” The “news rooms” appear devoid of any real journalistic integrity.
I think we are going to see an increasing trend of “true journalists” leaving the legacy news industry to places where they can build direct relationships with their audience, can own their own content distribution channels, and directly monetize those channels. I.E. Substack, YouTube, X, et. al.
> I think we are going to see an increasing trend of “true journalists” leaving the legacy news industry to places where they can build direct relationships with their audience, can own their own content distribution channels, and directly monetize those channels. I.E. Substack, YouTube, X, et. al.
Those independent channels seem far more amenable to "opinion-havers" than "true journalists" (though perhaps the "true journalists" transform into opinion-havers or secondhand-analysts when they change distribution platforms).
> ...churn out low effort AP ticker derivatives, social media gossip, and literal government propaganda from The Party whispered in their ear by an “anonymous source.”
That stuff is cheap. How do you expect someone moving to a place of fewer resources and less security to make a more expensive product?
> The “news rooms” appear devoid of any real journalistic integrity.
> That stuff is cheap. How do you expect someone moving to a place of fewer resources and less security to make a more expensive product?
Investigative journalism is really not that expensive. A lot of it boils down to needing a phone and money for gas. Rather than costs, the much bigger obstacle to good journalism is censorship, much of it coming from company leadership, which doesn't want a bad relationship with advertisers or the government.
> Investigative journalism is really not that expensive. A lot of it boils down to needing a phone and money for gas.
Come on. It investigative journalism takes a lot of time, and in the mean time, the journalist has bills to pay.
An opinion-haver or second-hand news analyst can build a Substack following by picking a theme and pumping out a blog post every couple days, but that's not practical for someone who might only be able put out a story every couple months on varying topics (based on whatever scoops they get).
I suspect the economics of investigative journalism work out better for an individual who is personally invested in their work.
Your scenario is the same for a news company. Investigative journalism takes time. And, in the meantime, you have HR departments, corporate rent, etc., you’re trying to build a media empire and your ROI is being compared against just investing in the S&P 500.
And I don’t think the economics of corporate news make sense. I suspect people buy these news rooms because their ROI comes from manufacturing consent (power and influence) - not monetizing investigative journalism.
> I suspect the economics of investigative journalism work out better for an individual who is personally invested in their work.
> Your scenario is the same for a news company. Investigative journalism takes time. And, in the meantime, you have HR departments, corporate rent, etc., you’re trying to build a media empire and your ROI is being compared against just investing in the S&P 500.
No. In the mean time, you have opinion-havers and other investigative journalists writing articles, maintaining a steady audience. An "individual [investigative journalist] who is personally invested in their work" wouldn't have the steady output to maintain one.
> And I don’t think the economics of corporate news make sense.
The point isn't that it's cheaper to do investigative journalism than opinion pieces. The point was whether it's easier to do IJ independently or as part of a big news corporation. And I firmly believe that big news corps are mostly actively against IJ, so that going independent is the only real way to practice it.
> The point was whether it's easier to do IJ independently or as part of a big news corporation....so that going independent is the only real way to practice it.
I think you're pushing a fantasy. I don't think "going independent" is really viable for a person unless they 1) have pre-existing fame, 2) independent wealth (or a patron), or 3) cut corners with the project in some way.
I believe it’s a mistake for liberal countries to rely on centralized content distribution platforms for consensus - that’s how you end up with consensus being for sale.
AI solves the 2-sigma problem when used correctly.
AI is extremely neurodegenerative when used incorrectly.
The people using it as a research assistant to discover quality sources they can dive into, and as a tutor while working through those resources, are getting smarter.
The people using it as an “oracle made from magic talking sand” are getting dumber.
To be fair, the same thing is true of the web in general, but not to the extreme I’ve been seeing with AI.
I’m predicting the bell curve of IQ is going to flatten quite a bit over the next decade, as people shift two sigma in both directions.
I suspect this is net good for the EV space at this point in history.
Tesla was a virtue signal brand from day one[1]. Their core insight came from Palo Alto et. al. You’d drive through the suburbs and many driveways had two vehicles: a [insert gas guzzling luxury vehicle] and a Prius. One vehicle to signal wealth/status - the other to signal environmental consciousness. But the eco vehicle was a compromise; compared to the jaguar it sat next to, it was a clunker.
Tesla’s GTM strategy was that you could buy a vehicle, without compromise, from them to signal to your social circles how much you cared about the environment. And it worked.
They broke the oil cartels with a direct to consumer sales strategy and kicked off the EV market.
But now that market’s needs are well met. The eco virtue signal crowd has multiple vendors selling decent products to meet their buying preferences.
There is a fairly large untapped market though that won’t convert off of oil. That demographic overlaps well with the 2025 MAGA coalition. And, with Elon’s involvement in that coalition, Tesla EVs are now a new virtue signal for a new demographic.
You have people buying EVs that were rolling coal as recently as 2 years ago.
[1] The brand being built around eco virtue signaling is well documented in early interviews with original founders - a quick search will turn up many direct quotes talking about them driving through California suburbs doing market research and discovering exactly that.
It seems to me it was the Roadster that kick-started Tesla by making electric sexy and desirable - high performance and expensive rather than something low performance bought for ideological/eco reasons. The Tesla model S which followed wasn't cheap either, and also emphasized high performance with the dual motor and plaid options. These seem more like wealth signalling than virtue signalling.
Yes - the originals were luxury cars built for wealthy people to virtue signal environmental consciousness. They were meant to fit in next to the other luxury cars in those driveways - where the Prius did not.
Companies like Monster and Redbull are marketing companies that happen to sell energy drinks.
That is almost certainly not a meaningless demographic they pulled out of thin air. It might not be meaningful to you as a demographic. It might even be offensive to you as a demographic.
But, to the marketing company, that is a concrete “group of humans” that respond well to their product and advertising. It informs how they develop their ads, how they target them, which geographic markets they push hard in, what events they sponsor, etc.
When they define that demographic as the people they’re targeting, and allocate their capital towards targeting them, they see the highest returns they’ve been able to find so far.
I think there is a certain beauty in it. Making an effort to understand how the universe/world/society you were born into actually works, not how you’d like it to work, is kinda key to finding your ikigai I think.
Not just the internet but communities too. High trust societies are great to live in, digitally and physically. Leave the doors unlocked, leave keys in the ignition, leave valuables on the table when you walk away.
But high trust societies only work when the price of ongoing admission is not violating that trust.
When you accept/tolerate/expect the violation of trust the doors lock.
I actually do this somewhat frequently at my local game shop. Thousands of dollars' worth of Magic: The Gathering cards (because I bring multiple decks instead of just the one I'm playing) in my backpack left behind as I go to get some water or something.
> high trust societies only work when the price of ongoing admission is not violating that trust
Indeed, the reason I feel comfortable doing that is I know that nobody wants to be banned from going to that store (and they would be). In this context, the community is small enough that rumors would likely circulate at other local shops and they might also become a bit of a pariah at those other places they could play.
I went ahead and looked in my .vimrc and lo and behold there's a "security issue" in it:
if $USER != 'root' " Modelines let you specify format rules for a file within the file
set modeline modelines=5 " e.g. "// vim: tabstop=20 : shiftwidth=20" (or something actually reasonable)
else " They can be a security vulnerability (unlikely) so we don't enable for root
set nomodeline
endif
... so yeah... I guess there's some concepts worth being extra sensitive about... but even still, surely y'all can handle this stuff.
Copyright is but one pillar of intellectual property law.
I’d like to see an attempt by useful freedom respecting software projects to deploy patents to combat non-free reimplementations.
A GPL license that grants you rights to the backing patent as long as the software you develop with it is also released under the GPL license.
Use the library for closed source software? Copyright violation. Reimplement the software under another license? Patent violation. Create something slightly different and call it the same thing? Trademark violation.
Not sure of the rest of the world, but at least in the US, patenting “software” is a pretty murky subject legally (at least it feels that way when trying to do some basic research on it) Something that seems common among sources discussing it is that “Software Related Inventions” (eg, a computer that does XYZ) can be patentable, but software/code itself is not literally patentable. Seemingly, because we’re talking about libraries that would be pure software, not a product for sale based on it, you wouldn’t be able patent libraries like you’re talking about.
I’d provide links to some discourse of this, but honestly I think it’s better to search “can you patent software in the US” and do a brief read of various sources, because the terminology between them can seem somewhat counterfactual to eachother.
Copyright mostly protects big corps nowadays. That's because you need lawyers to enforce copyright, and if the other side has more money the battle may not be worth it.
On the other hand, Meta was found torrenting terabytes of books and for them it's a nothingburger. The rules are really meant for commoners.
I do think a lot of the discourse in this space can be summed up as: people are arguing about two non-overlapping segments of a distribution having no idea the other segment even exists; instead they just assume the other side is [hype/pessimistic].
Yes, most newspapers are publishing anonymous quotes from government officials without scrutiny; quotes that are later found to have been completely bogus.
We live in an age of constant memetic warfare and a majority of our content distribution channels have been compromised.