Below, I’ve transcribed an excerpt from Eric Weinstein’s essay preceding Episode 39 of his excellent podcast, “The Portal.” His warnings reminded me of something I often heard when I attended national conventions of Free Press. At those conventions, it was often said that one of the biggest stories is how the press covers the news, but that the press rarely covers how it is covering the news.
Marshall McLuhan[‘s] famous five word adage, “the medium is the message” can be interpreted as saying that the vehicle of communications is actually likely to be the principal constituent of the payload it delivers . . .
In the news media business, many people think that there is always a search for the most eyeballs. Yet there also arose a concept called the “Friday News Dump,” which sought to find the spot in the week where people would give the least attention for the dissemination of bad news. Likewise, print media writers learn to hide their true underlying stories by “burying the lede” when the main story had to be told, but was not favorable to the paper’s way of thinking. This would sometimes be handled in what is internally called the “to be sure paragraph,” where the author too often effectively confesses the mitigating truth that they had hoped to avoid, at least until the penultimate paragraph many layers deep.
Well, what happens when you can actually calculate where your audience will stop reading, listening, feeling or thinking? Studies have suggested that just over half of all people spend 15 seconds or less reading an article while digitally grazing. Likewise, nearly three out of five link-sharers have not so much as clicked on the headline that they’re passing on. . . . This . . . creates a fantastic opportunity for those whose ethics are sufficiently flexible. A particular form of our five word law when applied to news media would be “the headline generates the story” or “the headline is the story.” Once this has been discovered, we see that, increasingly, the purpose of the article in our era is not to inform, but to minimally support the desired headline for wide dissemination.
Other forms of this principle are that, at least in the eyes of the weak and the dim, “the slogan is the platform,” “accusation generates its own conviction,” “the indignation is the reputation,” “swarms generate their own consensus,” “the messenger is the message” and “the aspiration is the implementation.” This also explains the underlying wisdom of the moronic phrase, “not a good look bro.” It is often a warning that you’re saying something in legacy reality without regard to the optical limits of the situation. Here the most important word may well be “bro.” It’s a corruption or shortening of brother, letting you know that you are now in an informal world where barely the first three letters will be read before the word becomes too cumbersome to complete.
In an attempt to sum up, then I will leave you with this. There is not only a market for your attention, but one for your inattention as well. Your smartphone may well put all the world’s information at your fingertips as is so often remarked upon. But unlike the fabled Library of Alexandria, it puts all the world’s disinformation, misinformation, noise and distraction, as well. And what our CEOs and technologists have learned is that your emotions are responsive to objects and not substance when there are cat and GoPro videos to be watched. Increasingly, there will be a war on anyone found to be attempting to traffic in higher recursion limits.
