Churn

The New Information Ecosystem

There’s a lot of nonsense flying around the news media these days-more every day, it seems. Ignore most of that dreck. Focus instead on the fundamental indicators of social health and safety and fulfillment, and ask yourself: what have all the policy changes implemented during the past 20 years really gotten us? Do you feel happier or freer or more optimistic? Perhaps the main function of the contemporary news media is to prevent those kinds of questions from being asked. The implications are simply too damning.

This won’t be an analytical piece, for one simple reason: I don’t know what’s going on here. I’m certain that there are secret agendas and hidden strategies at play, though. I’m equally sure that all those who assure me that this is not the case are either dupes or instruments of those secret agendas. The idea that the panoply of mega-organizations, algorithmic tools, and hidden financial incentives aren’t giving rise to cryptic relationships and schemes simply isn’t plausible at this point. After the clumsy machinations of the Harris campaign, the wholesale institutional capture by gender ideology, and the (since uncovered, but never accounted for) tech company-government-nonprofit-researcher alliance during the COVID years, it must be clear to all who are paying attention that our information ecosystem is a shadowy place, full of secrets and obstacles. It’s merely a question of which secrets, and which obstacles.

Have you noticed that the ‘media cycle’ has become increasingly shrill and myopic and distractable? Have you noticed that the growth of murkiness and quickly passing objects of horror and sensation are only rivalled by the lockstep formation of professional journalists? I don’t accuse them of actively trying to deceive us.

Freddie deBoer has correctly identified:

…a resultant rise in radical liberalism, the combination of elite Twitter and its status games, a slowly-decaying media industry, and a concerted effort by many journalists to turn their profession into straightforward liberal activism.

I suspect the truth of media dysfunction is more banal, less grandiose. I imagine something more like the operation of institutional incentives and editorial class biases (plus the silliness of a group of culturally self-important children playing endless status games) making it nearly impossible for them to report on any stories which have any bearing on the lives of average citizens. There are plenty of such stories to choose from. The conditions in public schools, the effects of criminal justice policy changes over the last half-decade, the growing sickness and psychological distress of Americans (anxiety, loneliness, gender dysphoria, addiction), the breakdown of the social fabric in many Western cities… I could go on, ad nauseum. None of these issues will get a hearing in the press. The press is no longer ‘the press’ that middle aged Americans became familiar with during our younger years. It’s now something else entirely.

The hard-hitting feature articles on offer from the UK News Website of the Year in 2024…

In Predictions for 2025, I wrote:

The adaptation of media and propaganda strategies by the ruling classes and their intelligence assets will increase in sophistication and subtlety. Expect to see operations sowing confusion in the heterodox space, generating spurious claims of ideological treason or criminal/sexual acts, and feeding fake conspiracy theories in order to discredit commentators and news analysts. There will be fake podcast appearances and unwitting co-option of heterodox figures (Peterson, Shawn Ryan, Rogan, etc.). I suspect that the NJ drone controversy might be an early indication of this sort of thing.

Since then I’ve heard a (purported) high-level FBI employee claim that the New Jersey drone panic was a concerted effort to distract media from Hunter Biden’s impending presidential pardon. I’m not sure if that’s true, but something strange is going on, whether it’s an organic result of the new media and information transmission dynamics, or symptoms of intelligence agency-tech company meddling, or something else.

While conspiracy theories obviously are sometimes true, it is equally obvious that conspirators don’t have anything like total control, so their efforts will always appear muddled and often hesitant, and sometimes counter-intuitive. The information ecosystem is becoming more fragmented, more democratic, and more skeptical, and we would expect to see the powerful react by pulling on their levers to try to maintain control. The tell for me is that, since the Twitter Files release, we’ve heard very little about concerted efforts to control the flow of information… yet we know those efforts must exist. They must be increasingly ambitious and increasingly frequent.

Horizontal Information Flow

It’s obvious that news about female pilots flipping planes and Letitia James allegedly committing fraud and British immigrants stabbing many dozens of people, in the face of a limp and impotent police response, is not helpful for the powerful. If migrant crime isn’t a helpful fact for elite narratives, how much less helpful is news of the widespread police response to British social media posts? The home visits and surveillance and arrests?

The Low-trust Society

It is possible that the fragmented and confusing and inattentive style of ‘journalism’ (half AI production and corporate influence, and very little accountability for the truly powerful) today is merely a symptom of a new communication network coming into being. I would love to read some in-depth news articles about this development, but the media has proven totally unable to analyze or correct itself. Legacy media now seems to be mostly a tool for the powerful, who are still figuring out how to use it without damaging its credibility too badly. The fact that this game is being played more or less out in the open is an indictment of the institutional hypocrisy of our age. If institutions wanted to regain our trust they could start by accounting for ideological capture and corruption and the growth of bad incentives within their structures. They do want our trust, but there’s something they want even more: power. They seek the power to grow, and to evade accountability. That isn’t a theory. That is a contemporary fact.

Remember the furor last year about alien crafts and bodies supposedly being recovered and studied by the American government?

Remember the Tesla Cybertruck Explosion on Jan. 1, 2025? Remember how the perpetrator (a special forces operator) was found dead inside the truck, and the explosion was an amateur affair involving gas canisters and fireworks?

Remember how President Trump was almost shot by a mysterious young man in July of last year? How much have we learned about that individual’s motives or personal history?

Conversely: how many CRISIS moments has the media generated, in the past few months alone? Dozens, at this point. There’s no point in listing them. They’re everywhere.

Something very strange is going on, the outline of which is barely perceptible to us, I suspect.

What is increasingly clear is that the media is now a handmaiden of the powerful, which means ‘…of the bureaucratic state.’ It will dedicate itself to increasingly febrile and emotional pieces which are incomprehensible to all those with a different set of starting assumptions (all of those not in the elite class, to begin with).

Chris Bray

:

The actual claim in this extraordinary piece published on Tuesday is that government is a victim of its own success, having become so effective and capable that people are too pampered and feel entitled to more:

Or maybe the expectations of the global public have ceased to track with any realistic idea of government capacity. Contemplating the recent anti-incumbent turn, I have found myself returning to a conversation I had a while back with Ricardo Lagos, who was the president of Chile from 2000 to 2006. He told me that while in office, he had wooed a dissatisfied constituency by channeling substantial resources to a poor neighborhood in the outskirts of Santiago, Chile’s capital. “We built a housing complex and made sure that public services like water, electricity, and health were available and reliable,” he told me. And yet, when election time rolled around, the voters of that neighborhood turned away from Lagos and supported the opposition.

“I was flabbergasted,” he told me, “and decided to find out for myself what had happened. I met with a group of community leaders and was expressing my surprise and singling out the hundreds of houses we built when one of the neighbors told me, ‘Yes, Mr. President, we know what you did, but this is all about parking spaces. The houses are nice, but we don’t have any parking.’”

Lagos was stunned. Public housing in Chile had never included such middle-class trappings as parking. But his constituents were getting wealthier, and as they did, their expectations ran ahead of his government’s ability to deliver. This problem is not Chile’s alone. In many countries, expectations rise faster than government capacity, governments look hapless, and the resulting public discontent makes the countries harder to govern.

See, government works so well that it gives the peasants a bunch of stuff, and then the peasants get resentful, because their appetites expand. They want even more stuff, so they get mad at the people who gave them all the stuff, for not giving them endless extra stuff. That’s why people were mad at, say for example, Joe Biden. He was too damn good, and it made us petulant.

Not mentioned:

A twenty year war with the Taliban that ended with a Taliban victory.

Regime change in Iraq, Libya, and now Syria that led to serious violence and instability.

A federal government with just short of $37 trillion in debt, well above GDP.

The relentless growth of homelessness in the progressive bellwether state.

There's No Alternative

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The one over-arching mission of our policymakers and our narrative-formers and their pet journalists is to conceal and blur the policy failures all around us, and to reframe the true challenges of our civilization. It’s not declining birthrates - it’s manosphere content and misogyny. It’s not catastrophic levels of urban crime and social collapse in certain poor neighborhoods - it’s ‘underfunded’ homeless advocacy groups and imperiled university funding. It’s not a profound crisis of meaning and value, weighing particularly heavily upon the young - it’s resources for curriculum development and counseling and therapy, which are inadequate (despite being 10x greater, per capita, than they were 60 years ago).

Ignore the flashy events and the boasting and accusations. Ignore the alleged crimes and the political speeches. Focus on the basic fabric of American society, and your vision will clear (just a bit).

Ask yourself: if all of the wishes of bureaucrats and technocratic policymakers were suddenly fulfilled-if gun control and psychiatric medication and enforced gender parity in employment and a cumbersome process for each migrant deportation were the uniform reality across our national landscape-what kind of a country would we have? That’s a far more important question than any which can be informed by a president’s speech, or a single tweet. That’s the meat of the issue. All the rest is mostly distraction.

Remember that squirrel that was killed by bureaucrats?