This article is brilliant. Do you think anyone on the left/center left will pick up this flag and build an army for it? If so, well, who and how and I hope they share their work on Bluesky so I can volunteer to help.
This might be outside the purview of this newsletter, but what can we do to make the market better, ie more supportive of journalism that is less sensationalist, possibly challenges their views, etc? Because there is some market out there for quality journalism, albeit small (if there was none, I don’t think quality journalism would exist) - so what makes some people fall into that market but the vast majority lean towards the crappy influencer journalism that’s dominant today?
First, just on an expectations-setting level, you're not fundamentally going to change human nature (until we get transhumanism, I guess). So on some level we have to start with an appreciation that we'll always be rolling boulders uphill. There will be crap, and loads of it, because the demand for it will always be there.
That said, I'm kind of a goldilocks institutionalist in that I want a lot more well regulated midsized entities (both in terms of our tech and our cultural institutions) halfway between the economic poles of concentration and decentralization. Entities that are big enough to somewhat structure and be more resistant to the worst excesses of consumer behavior, while not being so big or uncompetitive that they aren't generally responsive to what people want. Sometimes I think about the internet of 2005, where you had an openish web but also a gigantic number of well staffed and relatively economically stable news outlets producing quality stuff.
This article is brilliant. Do you think anyone on the left/center left will pick up this flag and build an army for it? If so, well, who and how and I hope they share their work on Bluesky so I can volunteer to help.
This might be outside the purview of this newsletter, but what can we do to make the market better, ie more supportive of journalism that is less sensationalist, possibly challenges their views, etc? Because there is some market out there for quality journalism, albeit small (if there was none, I don’t think quality journalism would exist) - so what makes some people fall into that market but the vast majority lean towards the crappy influencer journalism that’s dominant today?
First, just on an expectations-setting level, you're not fundamentally going to change human nature (until we get transhumanism, I guess). So on some level we have to start with an appreciation that we'll always be rolling boulders uphill. There will be crap, and loads of it, because the demand for it will always be there.
That said, I'm kind of a goldilocks institutionalist in that I want a lot more well regulated midsized entities (both in terms of our tech and our cultural institutions) halfway between the economic poles of concentration and decentralization. Entities that are big enough to somewhat structure and be more resistant to the worst excesses of consumer behavior, while not being so big or uncompetitive that they aren't generally responsive to what people want. Sometimes I think about the internet of 2005, where you had an openish web but also a gigantic number of well staffed and relatively economically stable news outlets producing quality stuff.