I subscribe to Matt Taibbi's new Substack column and I'm a proud supporter of his excellent investigative and opinion articles. Today he announced that his Substack presence will be far more expansive than these columns. I invite you to take a look at what he proposes and to join me in supporting excellent journalism. Here's an excerpt from today's announcement:
When I first switched over to Substack, I had a vague thought of expanding. Ideas included hiring younger reporters to contribute investigative features, adding a video or multimedia component, and finally, using Substack to create a magazine-like structure in which the longer articles would be buttressed by weekly or monthly columns, cartoons, Q&A sections, and other (hopefully) funny or interesting items.
Beginning this week, I’ll be introducing most of these elements through a new newsletter called TK Weekly (which will probably be more like a bi-weekly, but call that part of the joke). Subscribers will receive this regular editor’s note in addition to the essays and reported pieces already being published on this site.
I’m not at the stage of hiring full-time reporters yet, but I’ve begun bringing in outside help on a few projects here and there, with the aim of eventually making this a space for writers, researchers, cartoonists, etc., to contribute material that might not have a home in mainstream outlets.
I'm subscribed to Greenwald and Taibbi. I haven't felt this good about being a liberal in more than a decade.
I have serious difficulty dealing with people dying from Trump Derangement Syndrome, all convinced that I am a committed Trump supporter. I'm opposed to the Far Left which styles itself Progressive, and claims it's the same thing as liberal. It is fundamentally illiberal.
A friend is a committed Christian and committed Trump supporter. He sent me a message asking if I knew what 2020 divided by 666 was. I did the math in my head, knew the answer instantly. It's 3.0330. I replied that I had no idea that God was limited to Base 10. He's furious. Just assume for a second that there is a God. Why would he ever use Base 10? Binary or Base Eight is infinitely more sensible.
As you know, there are 10 kinds of people: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
I have been in the process of writing an article that I will title, "Everything Is Becoming Religion." This morning, while writing, I noticed that Glenn Greenwald has resigned from The Intercept, a news organization he co-founded. Here is an except from Greenwald's announcement:
The pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality that led to the bizarre spectacle of my being censored by my own media outlet are ones that are by no means unique to The Intercept. These are the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left political organization, academic institution, and newsroom. I began writing about politics fifteen years ago with the goal of combatting media propaganda and repression, and — regardless of the risks involved — simply cannot accept any situation, no matter how secure or lucrative, that forces me to submit my journalism and right of free expression to its suffocating constraints and dogmatic dictates.
Greenwald's resignation comes on the heels of his riveting three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan earlier this week. During that discussion, Greenwald (and Rogan) aimed Greenwald's criticisms at our most prominent legacy media outlets across the entire political spectrum. And now our social media overlords are actively getting into the game. Three hours is a lot of time, but I would urge you to watch every minute of this. It would be a small investment, given that this discussion offers an accurate diagnosis of America's Dys-information Pandemic and some moral clarity about what needs to happen going forward.
Our prominent legacy news outlets have become sad jokes with regard to many critical national issues. Our "news" is now pre-filtered to protect us from basic facts and it treats thinking as though it is a team sport, much like the dogma people are offered in churches. It treats us like we are babies, as though we aren't able to think for ourselves. Our prominent legacy media outlets have so thoroughly choked off meaningful non-partisan information and discussion that this has ripped open up a dangerous information chasm---many of us now inhabit only one of two mostly non-overlapping factual worlds. This has, in turn, led to two exceedingly disappointing choices for President of this Duopoly. If I needed to hire an employee for any type of job in any business, I would never hire either of these candidates and neither would you. But this is where we are, unable to talk with one another about this sad situation with nuance. In fact, too many of us have been convinced that we should hate each other for having differing opinions, even when we are mostly "on the same side of the aisle."
Somehow, there are many Americans who are still convinced that they can uncritically sit back and "turn on the news." What they will actually be exposed to, for the most part, is reporters who are afraid to ask the same basic questions on the job that they actually and instinctively do ask each other in private. Instead of informing us with a wide range of facts and opinions, they are driven to please their bosses and audience. This is not news. This is Not-News. This parallels the deep dysfunction driven by social media, an issue address in the excellent new documentary, "The Social Dilemma."
We now have a News-Industrial Complex that is driven by money and ideology instead of integrity and courage to engage with inconvenient facts. This system is designed to please you, to give you more of what your intuitive side, your System 1, craves. Once you have this epiphany about what is really going on, you will no longer be able to stop seeing it. If you continue watching the "news," you will increasingly think, "Garbage in, Garbage out." It will increasingly realize that prominent legacy news outlets are fucking with our brains to make money and steer elections. Once you have this epiphany, you will experience a greatly heightened annoyance at what passes for "news" Once a critical mass of people have this epiphany, this will be our first step in a long slow recovery.
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.
I recently watched the new documentary, "The Social Dilemma." which has inspired me to cut my usage of Facebook. Rather than simply scold myself to cut FB usage, I decided to create more detailed guidance for myself (and anyone else who finds this useful):
Facebook Safe-Usage Product Warnings
A. Use FB no more than 10 minutes per day (extra time allowed for posting content I create and for exchanging private messages). Set a timer. This limited use will function like the rule many people use for potato chips: Put a handful into a small bowl instead of gobbling them out from the full bag.
B. Before any FB session, remind myself that FB is a valuable and useful platform with serious hidden dangers. Thus, using FB is like using a dangerous consumer product where the manufacturer failed to attach necessary usage warnings.
C. Remind myself that FB has been meticulously designed as a highly-sophisticated manipulation engine. In the short run, FB is addictive. In the long run, FB encourages us to think like teams instead of as individuals and this it is ripping our communities apart.
D. Only use FB intentionally, never out of boredom, out of habit or thoughtlessly. Don’t use FB unless I’m using it consciously. Avoid using FB when I’m tired or fatigued, because these are times when I am especially prone to go down the FB rabbit hole.
E. Before using FB, always ask myself whether there is a better use of my time, such as directly reaching out to a friend or choosing my own next thought process.
F. Do not access FB from my phone.
G. Keep all FB notifications turned off, except for private messages.
H. Use FB for several defined purposes only. If I stray from these purposes, turn FB off.
1. Checking out what is up with people I know well.
2. Interacting with thoughtful people.
3. Reading and sharing interesting, inspiring and light-hearted posts.
4. Connecting with special-interest FB Groups that I have consciously chosen to join.
5. Keeping an eye on FB Events that I might want to attend.
6. Sharing my photography and articles I’ve written at Dangerous Intersection.
7. Sharing well-written articles that I have found outside of FB.
I. Whenever on FB, I should strive to use the same tone and degree of kindness that I use when communicating with someone in person.
J. My FB friends will mostly be feeding me a steady diet of articles that reenforce my existing opinions. Therefore, I need to remind myself to always look beyond FB to seek out diverse sources of information, including news sources that are not in my comfort zone.
K. Repeatedly remind myself that FB’s algorithms delude users into believing that those with differing opinions are idiots who we are entitled to treat rudely.
L. Whenever I sense that I am caught in a cycle of doom-scrolling, I should shut off FB.
M. Always vet articles for accuracy before sharing anything on FB.
N. Remind everyone I meet to watch the important new documentary: The Social Dilemma.
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