dang it . . . I can't write short things . . . Here's second half of my post that won't display fully above:
The story of how the vast majority of our fabled "Fourth Estate" got so corrupt and dysfunctional, while remaining (technically) private and presumably still subject to Schumpeter's rule of "creative destruction," is complex and ra…
dang it . . . I can't write short things . . . Here's second half of my post that won't display fully above:
The story of how the vast majority of our fabled "Fourth Estate" got so corrupt and dysfunctional, while remaining (technically) private and presumably still subject to Schumpeter's rule of "creative destruction," is complex and ranges over many decades. Personally, I suspect a lot of the decline stems from the stranglehold that government has had on education at all levels in this country, which has reduced the quality of most of it to that of "government cheese." If your commoners are unable to read proficiently, they won't be interested in high-quality sources of information. And if elites who replace the staff of the institutions with the best standards increasingly arrive brainwashed by a university system hostile to humble intellectual inquiry, well . . . there's your big unintended consequence that results from subsidizing the education of the citizens upon whom a democracy relies. Had Thomas Jefferson lived to see today, I wonder if he might have added some caveats to his bold assertions that education should be universal and free at basic levels, and funded by taxpayers. If the consumers don't directly pay for the product, they become the product. Big tech's social media "opiate for the masses" has demonstrated that.
Fortunately, the unavoidable mechanisms of basic economics retake territory in human relational networks, just as relentlessly and speedily (from an evolutionary perspective) as Mother Nature retakes a post-apocalyptic city with vegetation and strange new varieties of beast (a process depicted in our most perceptive works of speculative fiction). If a large enough swath of the citizenry come to realize that the establishment press has been blowing smoke up our collective asses, it becomes a market for something better and more trustworthy. That's a demand that this "new media" gradually (via incremental successes and instructive failures) is evolving to meet.
I recently listened to an interview with documentarian, Michael Nayna, which includes an account of how Substack began. It provides a glimpse into how the dinosaurs of the media world are getting out-competed by all these fast-moving and breeding little rodent-like warm blooded creatures. (see https://youtu.be/pjWq3NeKzD0?si=I2JmCNCd6aPXfmaZ ). It's a difficult process for us temporally-challenged mere mortals to perceive while we're in the thick of it, but I think -- Trump or no Trump -- that the writing was always on the wall for corporate parasites like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. No doubt it and other such clueless institutions will continue to flood the system with their "flat earth" dogma and "cargo cult" scientism for a while longer. But I think a demand for the truth will always nourish the upstarts into eventual dominance because curiosity is still instinctual even in the breasts of human beings who are reared in the most flawed of societies; and that yearning for something better will fuel further entrepreneurial efforts to displace the dinosaurs with something beautiful and good.
dang it . . . I can't write short things . . . Here's second half of my post that won't display fully above:
The story of how the vast majority of our fabled "Fourth Estate" got so corrupt and dysfunctional, while remaining (technically) private and presumably still subject to Schumpeter's rule of "creative destruction," is complex and ranges over many decades. Personally, I suspect a lot of the decline stems from the stranglehold that government has had on education at all levels in this country, which has reduced the quality of most of it to that of "government cheese." If your commoners are unable to read proficiently, they won't be interested in high-quality sources of information. And if elites who replace the staff of the institutions with the best standards increasingly arrive brainwashed by a university system hostile to humble intellectual inquiry, well . . . there's your big unintended consequence that results from subsidizing the education of the citizens upon whom a democracy relies. Had Thomas Jefferson lived to see today, I wonder if he might have added some caveats to his bold assertions that education should be universal and free at basic levels, and funded by taxpayers. If the consumers don't directly pay for the product, they become the product. Big tech's social media "opiate for the masses" has demonstrated that.
Fortunately, the unavoidable mechanisms of basic economics retake territory in human relational networks, just as relentlessly and speedily (from an evolutionary perspective) as Mother Nature retakes a post-apocalyptic city with vegetation and strange new varieties of beast (a process depicted in our most perceptive works of speculative fiction). If a large enough swath of the citizenry come to realize that the establishment press has been blowing smoke up our collective asses, it becomes a market for something better and more trustworthy. That's a demand that this "new media" gradually (via incremental successes and instructive failures) is evolving to meet.
I recently listened to an interview with documentarian, Michael Nayna, which includes an account of how Substack began. It provides a glimpse into how the dinosaurs of the media world are getting out-competed by all these fast-moving and breeding little rodent-like warm blooded creatures. (see https://youtu.be/pjWq3NeKzD0?si=I2JmCNCd6aPXfmaZ ). It's a difficult process for us temporally-challenged mere mortals to perceive while we're in the thick of it, but I think -- Trump or no Trump -- that the writing was always on the wall for corporate parasites like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. No doubt it and other such clueless institutions will continue to flood the system with their "flat earth" dogma and "cargo cult" scientism for a while longer. But I think a demand for the truth will always nourish the upstarts into eventual dominance because curiosity is still instinctual even in the breasts of human beings who are reared in the most flawed of societies; and that yearning for something better will fuel further entrepreneurial efforts to displace the dinosaurs with something beautiful and good.