Category: Media Page 2 of 9

On April 17, 2023

So, back when the DNC was hacked and documents were leaked showing that the DNC had been helping Clinton and kneecapping Sanders, I found it interesting that most of the media focused on “the Russians did it!” rather than on the content of the leak, which was, after all, in the public interest to know.

The same thing is going on with the Texeira documents. WSWS has a particularly good article on this:

While about 60 or so documents have been made public so far, US media outlets indicate they have access to far more. The Washington Post reported Thursday, “The Post also reviewed approximately 300 photos of classified documents, most of which have not been made public.”

And the Post and the other media outlets are responsible for maintaining this secrecy. They are not reporting information that undermines and contradicts the official line from the Pentagon, State Department and White House.

Rather, the Post is selectively releasing sections of the documents with an aim to facilitate US war propaganda. An article published Thursday by anti-China war propagandist Josh Rogin declared, “The most shocking intel leak reveals new Chinese military advances.”

None of this is particularly surprising if you were an adult who was paying attention during the Iraq War and especially the run-up to it. The media actively colluded with the state to promote the war and actively got rid of prominent journalists who had the gall to oppose it and call out the lies.

We already know that the documents reveal that US and NATO special forces are on the ground. People paying attention have been sure this was the case, but most people aren’t paying that close an attention, and the US government has never admitted it.

Information like this is the real story: NATO governments are taking actions which could be considered an act of war against a nation which, despite rhetoric, we are not at war with. No NATO country is at war with Russia and we want to keep it that way. Well, “we” do if we’re sane and don’t want to increase the odds of, y’know, an apocalypse.

Western media is mostly propaganda. When well done it’s not blatant. Some of the best is just the refusal to publish. The New York Times, during the 2004 election, knew that Bush had been spying on Americans in dragnet fashion: both illegal and likely to be unpopular. It held publication until after the election and explicitly said that it did so because it didn’t want to influence the election.

But, if the goal of the institution was to make sure that citizens know what they need to to make informed decisions, then that story should have been published during the election. “Bush has been mass-spying on Americans” is exactly what people need to know to decide if they want to vote for him.

The NY Times, of course, knew publishing the story w9uld have helped Kerry, so it wasn’t a neutral decision. It was a choice to (not) do something in order to help Bush win, even though journalism is supposed to be about revealing the truth because the public has a right to know.

In the same way, the Texeira documents being withheld almost certainly contain revelations that would hurt the current government support for continued help to Ukraine to fight Russia.

But that shouldn’t be, if the media actually believed its own propaganda about its purpose, the concern of the media. If the government is doing things it says it isn’t then the public should know, so the public can decide if it supports what the government is doing.

This isn’t complicated. Journalists have simply decided that they agree with the government about Ukraine vs. Russia and thus are almost certainly concealing information which would damage the government’s position.

That ain’t journalism. Orwell once wrote:

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want published; everything else is public relations.

We don’t have reporters. We have PR people pretending to be journalists. They might as well call themselves stenographers.

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The Decline Of Facebook (Meta)

On December 23, 2022

Back in August of this year Cheryl Sandberg stepped down as Chief Operating Officer of Meta, . I’d been keeping a lazy eye of Facebook and Meta for a while: the organization felt sick to me, not in terms of ethics, but in terms of health. Sandberg jumping was a sign: the most important insider other than the founder and CEO leaving.

Then, this week:

Industry icon John Carmack has announced that he's leaving META.

"We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort." https://t.co/xl1FQkFYuE

— IGN (@IGN) December 17, 2022

Facebook is going down, is my guess. There’s irony to this, Facebook built it’s HQ where Sun Microsystem’s HQ was and Sandberg and Zuckerberg were fond of saying that they did so to remind people that Facebook would have to stay on the ball or go down.

Facebooks new virtual world is crap and is doing abysmal numbers. Their audience growth is anemic, and they’ve had some periods of negative growth in the last couple years, though it’s minor. Young people aren’t interested in Facebook. Their VR goggles are excellent, but not showing a profit.

Every social internet company (this includes Google search) which manages to get large enough numbers to achieve audience capture; where you have to be there because everyone is there; starts excessive fiddling with their algo.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

In Google’s first years its search results really were excellent. But once almost everyone used Google, they started fiddling the algo to increase revenue as much as possible, rather than optimizing for good search (so far, they’re fine, but it’ll be what brings them down.) Social media does the same thing with their algos — instead of just showing people the content they signed up for by following someone, they start boosting some content, de-emphazising other content and shoving content in front of users faces they didn’t ask for, and not just some advertising.

This degrades the utility of joining them: you aren’t actually getting the feed you signed up for: content from the people and orgs you explicitly said you wanted to see, in chronological order.

Everyone does this. They start of mostly clean, like twitter, then they optimize and tweak until they damage the experience. By optimizing for profit “now” they damage their profit potential going forward.

This isn’t necessarily a huge problem for the decision makers: Sandberg and Zuckerberg, absent profound stupidity or civilization collapse, are never not going to be rich.

But it is how companies destroy themselves. Something similar happened to General Electric when Jack Welch decided to optimize for short term profit over long term and gutted the most important industrial producer in America. He was praised to the heavens for it at the time and died rich in 2020, but he also turned GE into a second tier company after it was one of the 10 most important companies in America for about a century.

Every time a company tries to optimize profits over providing a good service or product a price is paid. Make into your corporate culture to do so, and you gut the firm.

Facebook had some real utility (finding people you had lost contact with and staying in contact), but it doesn’t even really offer that any more because of the crud load-up.

No one will really miss it. Some other place will offer what it used to. Or maybe it’ll stagger along for a few decades, a shadow of its former self.

But it’s in grave danger now, and it’s simple to tell, because the people in the know who can leave, are.

Why Twitter Has Been Marvelous

On November 23, 2022

I try not to write about topics about which a lot of other people have said what I’d say, or, indeed, written it better than I would. Musk’s takeover of Twitter is one of those topics. There have been plenty of excellent articles about what it means and about how Musk could really screw up Twitter by destroying the feeling of safety which advertisers require and by misunderstanding that the users are the product, not the customers.

I’ve been on Twitter since August of 2008 (@iwelsh). I visit it almost every day, and for many years, I spent a lot of time there. Nowadays, it probably takes up 30 to 45 minutes of my day. My account isn’t huge; I have something like over four thousand followers, and I follow about thirteen-hundred. (Following too many people is a sign of disrespect and twitter-gaming, because it means you don’t actually read them.)

For me, Twitter takes the place of the email lists I was on in the 2000s and which collapsed near the end of the decade. “Townhouse,” which some people may have heard of, was one, but only one of them. Emails on these lists would often include links to articles of interest and discussion of important topics of the day.

Each list would have a primary topic; I was on lists that focused on domestic US politics, foreign affairs, the tech industry, and so on. The lists acted as both a filter and a way to read people discussing topics in which I was interested — often, very well-informed and smart people. Because the lists were semi-private, there was some additional value: People could be frank.

These lists collapsed near the end of the decade, in part because of a series of leaks. A lot of the value was that it was “off the record.”

Twitter, frankly, isn’t quite as good for quality of discussion about controversial topics, simply because it is public. You can’t “let your hair down” and everything you say can and probably will be used against you. But it is still a venue where everyone talks about everything, and if you curate who you follow, you can still connect with people interested in specific topics discuss them and share article links and so on.

I don’t just follow political types; I follow book-twitter, archeology-twitter, a bunch of artists, a fair chunk of the crypto-crowd, some pagans and hermeticists, classicists, and so on.

A lot of what passes in my Twitter-stream is chuff, especially from the political junkies, but a lot is smart and interesting and seeing what the people I have chosen to follow think is worth talking about is useful in itself.

Twitter is a curated experience, and if Musk doesn’t fuck it up (his idea of not showing non-blue checks content would destroy its value — most of the best accounts I follow don’t have a blue check), it will remain useful because you choose who you follow. It’s just that simple. Turn the timeline to chronological so the algo doesn’t go all Facebook on you, and it’s much like early Facebook was before Zuckerberg screwed it up by trying to over-monetize it.

A timeline on Twitter is just people you chose to follow talking or re-tweeting something they like someone else wrote.

And frankly, at it’s base, that’s marvelous. If you don’t like your Twitter feed, well, you chose it, and you can change it.

This can easily be fucked up, of course. Facebook screwed this up with algos instead of just giving you a chronological timeline of people you chose to follow; Twitter has gone some way down that road, but it can still be made to work. Musk may screw that up, and if he does, I’ll leave. If he doesn’t, I’ll stay.

How Standard Media Skews Public Understanding

On July 12, 2022

I recently had a long conversation with a fellow Canadian about current events, especially Covid and the economy. He read a lot of newspapers: he’s well informed by normal standards.

But over the course of the conversation I realized he was terribly informed.

For Covid, he was convinced both that China had only controlled Covid thru very long lockdowns and that they were lying about results. In particular, he remembered Shanghai well, but didn’t realize Shanghai was an exception. Most Chinese cities have locked down much less over the course of Covid than we have.

When I mentioned that other countries had much lower rates than us, he dismissed that as well. He thought travel bans and quarantines were completely pointless, when they have worked very well for those countries which implemented them. Western Australia’s travel ban kept Covid low there for ages, and New Zealand had a wave almost immediately after as they released restrictions.

He believed that not doing zero-Covid style policies was better for the economy and that China’s economy was in free fall. It has issues, to be sure, but it also has a 2% inflation rate, among other advantages.

He was convinced governments could not just find money to support people in lockdowns, believing money comes from taxes (it doesn’t, most money is created of thin air, this is something the MMT people are right about.)

He believed that vaccines are the most effective anti-Covid measure. They aren’t: China has worse vaccines than us and much better performance, and Covid variants have optimized for vaccine and natural immunity evasion. BA.5 in particular laughs at immunity, whether natural or vaccine.

In general he felt that the economy must be prioritized, and that is done best by keeping it open at all times. There was no acknowledgment of long Covid as a factor, or of the fact that each infection increases the odds of long term health damage to victims.

There was a sense of hopelessness about Covid being international, and that it would just keep going forever as a result, without knowledge of us restricting vaccines for much of the world, not doing travel bans or quarantine properly and not supporting other countries to do the right things (not that we are ourselves.)

He wouldn’t acknowledge that if shutdowns are to be done, they should be done at the point where numbers start going into exponential growth, even though there aren’t a lot of cases then, instead of waiting for hospital ICUs to be overwhelmed, and that by doing so we’d actually have shorter lockdowns and a lot less deaths and disabled and sick people.

This isn’t a badly read guy; he knew about the things the media has covered at length.

And this is the problem with propaganda; it creates a world view among its victims that is simply incorrect, and if you don’t actually know what’s going on you can’t make good decisions or support good decision at the political level.

What I see is that the West, in most cases, is creating circumstances where 15-20%, or more, of our population will wind up disabled in some way. Repeated Covid infections are going to gut us: our society cannot run with that many people with long term health damage.

But the media’s coverage has been of the “what we’re doing is the best way and everyone else is doing it badly.” It’s not that there aren’t exceptions, but that’s the general tone and message, along with a huge push for vaccines at the cost of other measures like masking, quarantines, travel bans, and proper indoor ventilation which actually, in some combination, work better.

One could call this “learned helplessness.” My conversation partner was convinced that everything reasonable had been tried, that zero-Covid policies hadn’t worked where tried and that doing them was tyrannical, bad for the economy and worse than what we had done.

Nothing could be done, so Covid would remain chronic, with wave after wave.

In a sense he’s right, except that so far we have refused to do what works, so Covid will keep going.

ATMs and Debit Payments Go Down In Canada

On July 8, 2022

So, I’m not sure if it’s all ATMs, but I know Interac (our debit) is down. This is also apparently affecting 911 (emergency) calls.

Canada has three providers of phone and internet, everyone else is either niche (satellite) or actually uses their networks. They are Bell, Telus and Rogers.

Rogers is down, with no ETA to being back up. I found out when I tried to call Canada’s tax people (the Canada Revenue Agency) and got “no network”.

The short term point here is to always keep some cash. I’ve got $25 in my pocket, which is less than it should be but at least I can buy some food and so on.

Cashless societies are bad. Not just because it’s easy for the infrastructure to go down for technical reasons or due to some disaster or war or terrorism, but because they are inherently totalitarian. The government or corporations can freeze people out of the economy any time they want. PayPal, Visa and Mastercard have done this repeatedly (many years ago it was Wikileaks, since it’s been people with the wrong political views.)

I didn’t much like the Trucker protests in Ottawa, Canada, but they should have been dealt with by the police, not by freezing people’s bank accounts. That’s tyranny. It was done, I’m fairly sure, because the Ottawa police were sympathetic to the truckers and politicians didn’t think they’d obey orders.

Likewise, many folks who use things like bitcoin don’t understand blockchain technology: it’s inherently totalitarian and its traceable. It’s a LOT harder to trace cash. If you want anonymity, cash is still king. Any society which removes cash is doing so for two reasons:

So they can track much more, micromanage what people spend and shut people and organizations they don’t approve out of the economy easily; and,
So that middlemen (corps, governments if they want to) can take a cut off everything.

I believe we should pay our taxes, but it’s not an absolute value. Black and especially gray markets exist for a reason, and it’s not always a bad thing. In particular, in many countries, including the US and Canada, you can’t always get a bank account. The cash economy allows those who can’t to survive; it allows those shut out to survive, and gray and black markets put a check on government power to say “absolutely not” to people things really want or need.

That’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

The more we love to e-cash only, the more our societies, intrinsically, are vulnerable to shocks, to authoritarianism and to rentierism.

Cash is worth keeping and I would go so far as to make it illegal for most businesses to not accept cash. Cash is, in a certain sense, freedom. In another deeper sense money based societies are anti-freedom, but that’s another argument and for another time. If we use money, we need cash that can’t go down and which isn’t inherently authoritarian.

Books and TV and Movies Are Mind Control

On June 27, 2022

I read a lot. I’ve read many thousands of books.

Books are mind control, quite literally.

The words in a book are mean to make you experience certain emotions, imagine scenes, and understand certain themes, including moral and ethical ones. A book is a small world with rules, and if you read enough books with the same rules, you learn the rules.

All of this is also true of audio and audiovisual media; they are intended to make you think certain thoughts and feel certain emotions. They, especially audiovisual media like TV, leave less room for visualization and the use of your own imagination (and are both more and less powerful because of it, doing the work invests you more, but fine control is lost).

Every time you read something (including this essay) you’re putting your mind; your consciousness, under the control of someone else.

They may have your best interests at heart (does Fox, MSNBC, Disney, or Ayn Rand?) and they may not, and even if they mean the best, well, what they think is best may not be, or may not, be for you.

This isn’t exactly a revelation. We know advertising works, we know propaganda works, we know media changes how people think of and view the world, and how they feel about it.

But I’ll suggest (trying to change your view) that you see it as mind control. It’s not necessarily bad, and in most cases you’re consenting to it, but you are letting someone else control your mind.

If you’re consuming media, including mine, and it’s making you into a person you don’t want to be, then the best thing to do is stop consuming that source of media, and in general, you should consider very carefully who you let control your mind.

Consider why they are doing so. Don’t assume it doesn’t matter — and for God’s sake, don’t think you’re immune, because you aren’t.

Media is mind control. It’s conditioning, and you need to know who’s controlling your mind, and who’s making you into what, and why, and who that benefits.

Does it benefit you?

The Free, Diverse Internet In America Is Coming To An End

On January 27, 2021