Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism

The New York Times is not an organization of people who came together to exercise their free speech rights. Its employees are there, primarily, to work. The product they sell is information/entertainment. This product does not change the goal which is to make money and does not change that it’s not an organization of people who came together to exercise their free speech rights.

It used to be the case that media had a special set of regulations regarding their ownership and how large they could be in terms of expansion. That is effectively no longer the case. The government, by the laws it enacted, has the authority to regulate media companies. Well, they used to. Society through it’s leaders gets to decide these things, for the most part. There are limits on what can legally be done by the government. Thanks to the Supreme Court that limit has been greatly expanded. The fact is that until recently few people held the belief that corporations should have the same free speech rights as humans.

Should Toyota, a foreign corporation with presence in the U.S., have the ability to influence American elections the way that a professional society of American doctors has? Allowing corporations to have the same free speech rights as humans is quite bad and will have long term bad consequences for the country.

Until Citizens United corporations didn’t have the same free speech rights as humans. This idea is a recent phenomenon. It’s unique, I believe, to the U.S. The U.S. is not the only “free” country in the world. This ought to suggest to you that perhaps something is strange with the notion of a corporation having the same free speech rights as a human.

I wish the protectors of corporate rights were as vigilant when it came to the rights of humans. But this isn’t the case in the U.S. so I’m in favor of companies not having speech limits in the U.S. for the same reason that I voted for Trump. The U.S. deserves the mess it is in. Let the road to serfdom be an easy one to navigate!

The New York Times has spent the last two years of its front page on a political campaign.

Leaving a country is a lot harder than selling some stock.

Journalists are important. My sardonic quip was not aimed at saying they aren't, but that they are suffering from a structural defect in how we currently implement news, leading to a quality control issue, manifesting as the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. If I'm aiming at any entity, it is probably a capitalism that has stalled its progress in the past near-half century at gradually obsoleting itself (which I hold should be prescriptively the real goal of capitalism).

Embedded as journalists are within a capitalist system, they must earn sufficient capital to live upon. Or find alternative means of support, like some form and/or degree of self-sufficiency. Really good journalists seem to be uber-networkers of a sort: they have a highly-honed networking skill cutting across many societal boundaries unlike most networkers, and seem to mostly not parley that network into a monetizing scheme to retain their impartiality. But that impartiality seems to come at a cost too steep for many to pay.

This leads to a vicious cycle. Structurally, the most proven way to currently get advertising income (primary business model supporting most journalism) is essentially create click bait content, or maintain some form of distribution monopoly (Elsevier-like, Bloomberg-tie-in-like, or Clear Channel in US radio) or distribution oligopoly (old newsprint companies). The Net is eroding the latter two delivery channels, driving more journalists towards facile coverage at best, crude exaggeration at the median, outright sensationalist falsehoods at worst.

This gives a short- to medium-term boost to advertising income, but erodes factual coverage, at the worst moment possible: just as civilizational complexity is accelerating. Long-term, I'm seeing the echo chamber tendency many have talked at length about here (I hypothesize as technology exposes more people to more of the Gell-Mann effect, more notice, and they start to turn inwards on news sources to defend themselves? dunno.). There are some nuggets of gold out there, but they're very difficult to find. Confounding this is good journalism with actionable information on complex topics is expensive as hell. Good journalism these days sometimes is mistaken as buy-side analysis, which doesn't help (capitalism is blind to many issues that buy-siders don't cover).

It also doesn't help that there are many instances where journalists actually analyzing an issue of great substance get their friends and families threatened (which costs even more money to defend against) and in many cases are outright killed [6], or like Assange, relentlessly persecuted by the resources of a nation-state or large corporate powers.

So the easy way out for many "news businesses" seems to reward low-effort, high-volume content, and as a byproduct we experience the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. Quipping about it is my exasperated, tongue-in-cheek response to what I perceive as a highly complex, interconnected set of problem spaces.

We've discussed the "good journalism" conundrum many times here on HN [1] [2] [3], and various aggregation platforms [4] [5] have been proposed, but the problem to me seems to be much larger than "journalists aren't paid enough", or "where has all the good journalism gone to". To even start on "the journalism problem", I suspect we have to admit the tough truth that the current status quo as envisioned, implemented, supported and championed by various elites around the world is simply not delivering progress for significant sectors of civilization. Aggregate measures are improving, but trotting that out is cold comfort for those affected. Sure, The Net might be great and snazzy, but in the meantime journalism as a profession appears to be slowly bleeding to death.

Don't look to me for any solutions though, I'm just an outside bystander missing the old, incisive writing in newsprint I grew up with and see in newspaper morgues at libraries, and I have zero interaction with journalism as a profession or business. I'm just stabbing in the dark here at what the problem even is, and welcome others who operate on the business side to shed some light.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5324429

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15786802

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18743272

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11343822

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15451602

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15489312

You don't have the freedom to shoot people with your shotgun.

Framing an argument for freedom as an argument for anarchy, as an excuse for curtailing freedom, is exactly what my comment was railing against in the first place.