I Want the "Rich Guys Internet"

Here's a quick outline of a "rich guys Internet", one where it costs money to participate but the payoff is a 10-fold improvement in the user experience.

That the Internet is now a toxic garbage dump is self-evident. Consider that Cloudflare Reports that Almost 7% of All Internet Traffic Is Malicious. This is akin to inflation, where the official 2.5% inflation rate has stripped us of at least 25% of the value of our wages--the cumulative impact is an order of magnitude greater than the headline number.

That 7% of malicious traffic--the toxic flood of spam, phishing, etc.--has degraded the user experience by 70%. Every user must expend sustained (and unpaid) effort--shadow work--to deal with the constant tyranny of hacks, patches, spam, phishing, SMS spam, changing passwords, etc., as well as the putrid sewage of intentionally harmful content.

Like fish slowly expiring in a toxic sea, we no longer even see what we're swimming in. Humans excel at habituating to the present, and so we've lost sight of how radically the Internet experience has changed in the past 25 years. We have lost track of how much of our time is now being squandered on shadow work to keep from being conned, defrauded, hacked, blackmailed, disrupted or poisoned on a daily basis.

This is the Internet's Garbage Time of History, and I want the "rich guys Internet", one stripped of all malicious traffic and garbage content. Impossible, you say? Not at all. Here's a quick outline of a "rich guys Internet", one where it costs money to participate but the payoff is a 10-fold improvement in the user experience.

The "rich guys Internet" (RGI) isn't intended to be a complete replacement of the Garbage Internet (GI); it's a secure compound for when we tire of the Garbage Internet. It's a second home that could be used as the primary residence should you choose.

1. No anonymity. Every participant has to have a verified human identity, the same procedure required to open a cryptocurrency trading account now: photo of the individual holding their passport, verified bank account, etc. Yes, yes, I can hear your screams: without anonymity, the black drones of the Globalists / Deep State will be hovering over my office within hours. Fine. You can keep your anonymous accounts in the GI (Garbage Internet). It's your choice.

And let's face it--if the black drones really want to find out who you are, that's no problem. Anonymity is nothing more than a thin veil. Our "protection" boils down to not being worth their attention.

Without anonymous accounts, there is no garbage. Nothing is allowed into the RGI (rich guys Internet) except traffic linked to a verified user. No more spam, phishing, etc. Any account linked to malicious traffic is immediately closed and the miscreant banned for life.

2. No data collection, none. No data collection is allowed. No trackers, cookies, nothing. Participants and content providers must agree to no data collection or they're excluded. In other words, no surveillance capitalism.

3. Organic search only, no "sponsored" anything. Search is search, not marketing in the guise of search. Search results are based solely on relevance, no gamed / paid placement. No ads on search results, either.

4. No ads anywhere. All ads are stripped from content.

5. Fees are paid to content providers for "clean" content. Any content provider who wants access to the RGI has to strip all content down to basic HTML. This reduces the potential for malicious leakage.

6. Encryption, triple firewalls, the works. The RGI is slower because the pipe from the Garbage Internet is narrow and it takes time to make sure nothing malicious is allowed in.

7. An RGI social media platform: no ads, no trolling, no algorithms, no garbage. Less "entertaining" perhaps, but if you want to be deranged, there's always the GI.

8. Secure email for users only. No ads, no spam, only messaging within the secure confines of the RGI.

9. High fees. You get what you pay for. Let's say it costs $50 a month. That's three fast-food meals or movie tickets or two lunches at a cafe. Is that unaffordable? Compared to what? How much is your shadow work time and mental health worth?

10. It's your choice. Nobody's forcing anyone to pay up to enjoy the benefits of the rich guys Internet.

So hey there billionaires. Instead of squandering hundreds of millions on yachts, why not spend a few bucks and set up a rich guys Internet that's semi-affordable to the masses?





New podcast: Is the Everything Bubble About to Pop? (37 min, 40 charts)

---

My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


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2024, A Year of No Significance

Looking back, 2024 may well be viewed as insignificant compared to what lies ahead.

That 2024 could be a year of no significance does not compute given that what's being touted as the most important election in American history is 2024's landmark event, but in the focus of the longer lens of history, it may not matter as much as we expect.

If the election wasn't enough, the all-time stock market highs are the cherries on top.

The issue here isn't the people or the politics or the policies; it's the system itself reaching its limits, having exhausted all potential for the scale of change needed to stave off collapse. To better understand this historical context, we turn to Ray Huang's meticulous study of Chinese history, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline:

"The year 1587 may seem to be insignificant; nevertheless, it is evident by that time the limit for the Ming dynasty had already been reached. It no longer mattered whether the ruler was conscientious or irresponsible, whether his chief counselor was enterprising or conformist, whether the generals were resourceful or incompetent, whether the civil officials were honest or corrupt, or whether the leading thinkers were radicals or conservatives--in the end they all failed to reach fulfillment."

In other words, it no longer matters who's nominally in charge, or the policies being put in place: the system has lost the capacity to adapt radically enough to surmount the novel challenges it now faces. That the Ming Dynasty--and many other imperial regimes throughout history--faced the same limits is unsurprising when we recall that humanity is still running Wetware 1.0, the operating system that enabled our emergence as a unique species around 200,000 years ago. We are hard-wired to reach a point of hubristic, delusional faith in our own godlike powers which invites Nemesis. We're there, but we don't yet realize it.

There are several key dynamics at work in this systemic exhaustion of the capacity to adapt radically enough to matter. One is self-interest: everyone getting a slice of the pie--from those receiving SNAP food stamps to billionaires evading taxes--has a stake in maintaining the status quo, and so nobody wants to risk upsetting the apple cart for fear that the change might reduce or eliminate their slice of the pie.

The net result is everyone will resist any reform radical enough to actually address the overlapping crises which threaten the status quo, which is every radical reform.



Here is Huang's summary of this same dynamic in 1587: "The bureaucratic rule of the empire had reached such an advanced stage that all the hidden needs and wants of thousands of individuals, along with their personal aspirations, were irreversibly linked to the gigantic status quo; now even an urgently needed technical reform could not be overtly attempted to disturb the delicate balance."

This delicate balance is currently maintained by borrowing as many trillions of dollars as needed to satisfy every constituency, from SNAP recipients to billionaires. That this is unsustainable is taboo, of course, but beneath the surface, the impossibility of maintaining this delicate balance is the core driver of the extreme political polarization that makes radical reform impossible: given that the delicate balance is unsustainable, the challenge now is to settle who wins and who loses, a battle that evaporates any middle ground and amplifies polarization.

This is the heart of Huang's study of Ming decline: the systems in place are limited by their structure such that any reform that will be acceptable to the system's dependents will leave the system--that requires radical reform to avoid collapse--completely untouched. "Innovations" and "reforms" can only be superficial and for show.

Given the limits of the system's structures and its destabilizing, unsustainable excesses, the entire system has only one option: decline to the point that a seemingly modest crisis disrupts the last shreds of coherence and the resulting nonlinear dynamics collapse the system.

That the status quo has reached the greased slide down the backside of the S-Curve is also taboo.



This quote from Michael Grant's succinct book The Fall of the Roman Empire strikes me as the keystone insight into western Rome's collapse: the elite's complacent belief in Rome's eternal success and their inability to recognize the novel challenges they faced.

"There was no room at all, in these ways of thinking, for the novel, apocalyptic situation which had now arisen, a situation which needed solutions as radical as itself. His whole attitude is a complacent acceptance of things as they are, without a single new idea.

This acceptance was accompanied by greatly excessive optimism about the present and future. Even when the end was only sixty years away, and the Empire was already crumbling fast, Rutilius continued to address the spirit of Rome with the same supreme assurance.

This blind adherence to the ideas of the past ranks high among the principal causes of the downfall of Rome. If you were sufficiently lulled by these traditional fictions, there was no call to take any practical first-aid measures at all."

Everyone getting a slice of pie is confident that the current crises are no different than the spots of bother that were mere bumps in the road of the past 70 years. That "this time is different" does not compute because nobody is willing to face the reality that radical reforms are the only way forward, but such reforms will demand enormous sacrifices and impose innately high risks on every participant.

Rather than face that unsavory option, we await our seating at a fantasy banquet where AI fixes all problems and we get to continue gorging ourselves at the table of plenty. That the real-world banquet of consequences is about to served is taboo.

Looking back, 2024 may well be viewed as insignificant compared to what lies ahead.

New podcast: Is the Everything Bubble About to Pop? (37 min, 40 charts)

---

My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


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The Impossible Dream: 70 Million Boomers Retire in Style

The younger generations expecting to inherit the immense wealth piled up by Boomers in home equity and stocks may be in for a shock.

I've reached the point in life where I see a sharp line dividing the adult populace: there are those of us who are old enough to retire who are taking care of very elderly parents / family members at home, and then there's everyone else.

Instead of life getting easier as we age, it gets harder--much harder , as we no longer have the same energy we had in our 40s and 50s.

This article captures what life is like for those of us fulfilling parents' wishes to live out their final years at home: The Crushing Financial Burden of Aging at Home: Families face soaring costs and mounting pressures in taking care of their loved ones. 'I never feel truly free.' (WSJ.com)

In my case, we spent the last 8 years taking care of my mother-in-law, the last 6 years of her life here at our home. (She passed away at 92 last year.) So from ages 62 to 70, we had two jobs: caregiving and our self-employed paid work. In those years, we managed one vacation--not exactly the ideal retirement scenario.

Many others have it much worse: they're caring for an elderly, ill parent or spouse by themselves, with limited financial resources. Those who opt to pay for 24/7 home care for parents or spouses with dementia or Alzheimer's are paying $240,000 a year--a sum that will consume the entire wealth of most families in a few years:

Here are excerpts from the article:

"Americans want to grow old in their own homes. But pursuing that dream has gotten harder, and is putting huge financial and emotional strains on families.

In Nebraska, Christine Salhany spends about $240,000 a year for 24-hour in-home care for her husband who has Alzheimer's. In Illinois, Carolyn Brugioni's dad exhausted his savings and took out a home-equity line-of-credit to pay for home healthcare.

Traci Lamb closed her business to take care of her mom in Florida. And in California, Cheryl Orr delayed retirement to help pay for care and home modifications for her wife, who has dementia.

Soaring costs of in-home care, medical advances that extend lives but require ongoing help, and the growing ranks of older baby boomers are creating new pressures. Spouses, adult children and siblings are putting their lives on hold to care for relatives, wrestling with sleep deprivation and constant worry. Families are draining savings to hire help, pay for medical care, and modify homes.

More than 11,000 people in the U.S. are turning 65 every day and the vast majority--77% of Americans age 50 and older according to an AARP survey--want to live as long as possible in their current home.

Those needing round-the-clock in-home care can expect a median cost of about $290,000, which is more than double the annual median cost of a private room in a nursing home facility and four times the annual median cost of a private room in assisted living, according to Genworth."

The drain on caregivers isn't just financial--it's physical and emotional:

"I have to be very vigilant. I never feel truly free," says Christine. That is a feeling expressed by many. Four in 10 family caregivers rarely or never feel relaxed, according to a 2023 AARP survey. Dementia care is among the most taxing, physically, financially and emotionally."

For those families opting to place a parent or spouse in an institutional care facility, the cost is around $13,000 a month and up. Assisted living and private care homes generally cost between $6,000 and $9,000 a month.

How many families have the means to pay these rates for years?

My Mom is 95 and has lived in an assisted living/care facility that she bought into 18 years ago with the proceeds from selling her house. The monthly fees have consumed her own inheritance from her parents, who passed away in the late 1980s.

My siblings and I are relieved that there are still funds to pay for our Mom's care. That there is no inheritance doesn't matter; what matters is that we're not burdened with enormous monthly fees for her care in our own retirement.

We are not alone. Our neighbors are 80 years old and they recently moved her 102-year old mother from their home to a care home, as she and her husband could no longer lift her Mom out of bed.

In many cases, the caregivers don't get to actually retire until they're well into old age. Family conflicts arise as some adult children refuse to do their share, burdening one sibling with the workload and financial costs.

People living longer put an enormous strain on families and the government. The wealth that was intended to be an inheritance passed onto children and grandchildren is consumed by elderly care: at $150,000 a year, even $1 million is consumed in a few years.

The strategy pursued by many families is to transfer ownership of the parents' home to the adult children long before retirement, so the parent's remaining assets will be modest enough to qualify for Medicaid, where the federal government pays for the parents' care home expenses.

Federal programs for retirees, the disabled and the elderly already consume 44% of the budget, and this percentage will rise sharply in the decades ahead.



As we all know, the federal government is already borrowing trillions of dollars to cover its ballooning expenditures, and 80% of the expected growth of federal spending is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest on the debt.



As the 70+ million baby Boomers (those born between 1946 and 1965) retire, how will families and the nation pay for the retirement of a generation of this scale? As this chart illustrates, in retirement, the Boomer generation will be more than twice the size of the preceding Silent Generation.



As a rough estimate, let's say there will be 30 million more elderly than there were in the previous generation--the equivalent of adding an entire nation of elderly retirees. Yes, many elderly people continue working into their 70s and 80s, and many are still living alone and do not need any assistance. One of our neighbors is a World War II vet who is 102, and he still drives and lives on his own. But he is an outlier. Few reach old age without needing assistance of some kind.

The decline of the population's health as poor diet and inactive lifestyles take their toll will heavily impact the Boomers' need for care. And the decline in the health of younger generations will also impact the ability of the nation to fund the costs of caring for 60 to 70 million elderly and supply the workforce to provide all the care.

Anecdotally, there is little evidence that new care facilities are being built at a rate anywhere close to meeting the future need for such facilities. Even if elderly Boomers wish to move out of their own homes into a care home, there may not be enough facilities to meet demand. There may be few options to spending one's last years at home, but with what level of care if that care costs $13,000 a month--$156,000 a year?

The younger generations expecting to inherit the immense wealth piled up by Boomers in home equity and stocks may be in for a shock as they learn that 24/7 home care for a grandparent with dementia costs $250,000 a year unless they provide the care themselves, and that even modest care facilities can cost $100,000 a year.

Combine the popping of the Everything Bubble with the rising costs of care, and it becomes apparent that dreams of inheriting fortunes are as unrealistic as the dreams of 60 to 70 million elderly Boomers of living comfortably at home with caregivers doing all the work.

The retirement hopes of those with elderly parents to care for will also go up in smoke, as I can attest from our own experience: the Golden Years of one's 60s and 70s can be consumed by caregiving, at the cost of one's own retirement funds and health.

It's estimated that around 30% of the debilities of aging are the result of genetics; the other 70% are the result of our lifestyle and life choices. Piling up money in the hopes it will be enough may not be enough. The higher-return investment may well be in radically changing our lifestyle to become as healthy as possible as we age so we won't need the kind of care that will bankrupt families and the nation.

New podcast: Is the Everything Bubble About to Pop? (37 min, 40 charts)

---

My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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What's "Free" About "Free Speech"?

Without being aware of it, we've privatized "free" speech in the form of digital monopolies.

Free speech is getting a lot of attention these days, so let's consider what's actually "free" about it and what's not "free." The general view seems to be that censorship is the threat to free speech, and that's certainly an issue. But that's not all that's going on in the realm of free speech.

Let's return to the pre-social-media days and consider what "free speech" meant. It did not mean we could demand a newspaper publish our opinion. The newspaper was a private enterprise and its offices were private property. As such, it had the right to choose what it would publish. Free speech meant that we could pass out leaflets on the public sidewalk outside the newspaper offices, or we could launch a competing publication.

On a smaller scale, consider my blog / site. Over the years, some readers have complained that I didn't host a "comments" forum where they could post their views. I tried one such option many years ago and gave it up as too much work. This is a private enterprise. I pay for the server. The content is copyrighted. I am not obligated to offer a forum for others to post their views. They are free to launch their own blog / site. That's free speech in the digital age.

In other words, free speech doesn't mean everyone has a right to address an audience hosted by a private enterprise; it means everyone can stand on the public sidewalk and pass out leaflets or pay for a server to post their views online. I complain about being shadow-banned by various institutions, but they have no obligation to post whatever content I create; they're private enterprises pursuing their private interests by maximizing profits.

The way they maximize profits is encourage users to post content / perform searches for "free" and then monetize that "free" content / search by collecting data on users and selling it at a premium. This model has generated enormous profits and trillion-dollar enterprises.

There's nothing "free" about these enterprises' platforms accepting our "free" content. We choose to give these enterprises content for free, and they're free to monetize this content and the data they collect on us. We can opt out by not posting content on their platforms and not using their search engine.

But this isn't the entire story, either, is it? These enterprises are monopolies, dominating the search / social media realms, realms which are now dominant cultural, social and political influences in the digital / online era. The appeal of reaching a vast audience so easily is simply too irresistible, and so we not only give these enterprises our content for free, we've granted them extraordinary powers few of us truly understand.

Bruce Schneier served up a nuanced, wide-ranging critique of this revolution in his essay The Hacking of Culture and the Creation of Socio-Technical Debt. Here are some key excerpts:

"Blending Stewart Brand and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, McKenzie Wark writes in A Hacker Manifesto (2004) that 'information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains.'

Ultimately, this notion was foundational in the construction of the era we find ourselves in today: an era in which internet companies dominate public and private life. These companies used the supposed desire of information to be free as a pretext for building platforms that allowed people to connect and share content. Over time, this development helped facilitate the definitive power transfer of our time, from states to corporations.

Like any well-designed operating system, culture is invisible to most people most of the time. Hidden in plain sight, we make use of it constantly without realizing it. As an operating system, culture forms the base infrastructure layer of societal interaction, facilitating communication, cooperation, and interrelations.

Culture can also be hacked--subverted for specific advantage. If culture is like an operating system, then to hack it is to exploit the design of that system to gain unauthorized control and manipulate it towards a specific end.

Culture hacks under digital capitalism are different. Whereas traditional propaganda goes in one direction--from government to population, or from corporation to customers--the internet-surveillance business works in two directions: extracting data while pushing engaging content.

The extracted data is used to determine what content a user would find most engaging, and that engagement is used to extract more data, and so on. The goal is to keep as many users as possible on platforms for as long as possible, in order to sell access to those users to advertisers. Another difference between traditional propaganda and digital platforms is that the former aims to craft messages with broad appeal, while the latter hyper-personalizes content for individual users.

The far more pressing issue is that both have virtually unchecked surveillance power. They are both reshaping societies by hacking culture to extract data and serve content. By determining who sees what when and where, platform owners influence how societies articulate their understanding of themselves.

This has two consequences. First, companies that control what users see in a nontransparent way influence how we perceive the world. Second, by optimizing algorithms for individual attention, a sense of culture as common ground is lost. Rather than binding people through shared narratives, digital platforms fracture common cultural norms into self-reinforcing filter bubbles.

This fragmentation of shared cultural identity reflects how the data surveillance business is rewriting both the established order of global power, and social contracts between national governments and their citizens.

The rise of digital surveillance as the business model (is) turning instruments of social cohesion and connection into instruments of control.

(Citizens) become de facto free labor for the tech companies providing them. The value generated by this citizen-user-laborer stays with the company, as it is used to develop and refine their products. In this new blurred reality, the relationships among corporations, governments, power, and identity are shifting. Our social and cultural infrastructure suffers as a result

Permitting internet companies to hack the systems in which culture is produced and circulates is a short-term trade-off that has proven to have devastating long-term consequences."

Without being aware of it, we've privatized "free" speech in the form of digital monopolies. "Free" speech is now subject to "community standards" that are both Orwellian in the finality of their control (no recourse, no appeal process) and Kafkaesque in their arbitrariness and vagueness. As in Kafka's The Castle, we can peer through a peephole at the power of "community standards" but cannot engage it. We are powerless observers.

There are only two ways to retrieve the power we have unknowingly transferred to digital monopolies: 1) regulate these monopolies as public utilities, or 2) nationalize them and strip out all the surveillance / monetization features, leaving only the basic search / social media functions.

This runs into the buzzsaws of The Market and private enterprise, which are core to the ideology of "free enterprise." The government regulates privately owned utilities, as these provide essential public services. If we consider this common sense, then why is it anathema to regulate digital monopolies for the same reason?

We can have either "free" enterprise, or "free" speech. We can't have both when "free" enterprise has a lock on "free" speech.

This photo is from the 1976 film All the President's Men which elevated journalists to heroes / heroines in a world of power hiding its abuses. Now that digital monopolies are the power hiding their abuses, who will be the heroes / heroines that rescue the citizenry from digital exploitation and servitude?





New podcast: Is the Everything Bubble About to Pop? (37 min, 40 charts)

---

My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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When Local Newspapers Close, We Lose What Matters: Journalism

Self-serving special interests are delighted to fill the void when local journalism disappears.

The vast majority of social media is opinion, spin or all about me. Whatever passes for analysis is often cherry-picked data packaged to support the spin.

There are a number of dynamics driving this post-truth competition for attention and engagement, but they boil down to money and selfhood in the online era.

Money is an obvious dynamic: the tech monopolies in search and social media and the media conglomerates all reap billions of dollars in revenues from users' attention and engagement, as the data collected from users is sold at a premium. The more time users spend online, the greater the revenues and profits.

Why do people spend such large chunks of their lives posting "free" content on platforms? Many, including myself, of course, are hoping to make money by attracting subscribers, viewers, sponsors, advertisers, etc. to their feed / site, while others seek to establish a selfhood online that is larger and more fulfilling than the one they have in the real world.

Changing our selfhood in the real world is difficult; it's much easier to curate a carefully edited mise en scene version of ourselves and our life online.

What's been lost in this frenzied competition for eyeballs and "likes" is the distinction between opinion and journalism. The post-truth cliche is that there is no distinction, that everything is mere opinion and spin, but this is not true: journalism is different from opinion and spin.

In the post-truth competition for attention and engagement, the more sensational the content, the better. In contrast, much of journalism is DBI: dull but important. It's never going to attract the same attention as sensationalist extremes, and few are willing to pay for it.

The core claim of the post-truth era is that there are no facts, there are only ambiguities and interpretations that can be spun 360 degrees at will. Actually, there are facts, for example, the city council voted 5 to 2 to approve the transit station project, and the county received funding for the rehab of the bridge.

From 1988 to 2005, I was a free-lance journalist for metropolitan newspapers, paid to cover housing and urban design issues as well as other topics. Under the guidance of editors, I learned what I call the journalistic style of research, interviews, fact-checking and composition.

The basic idea is to interview subjects who are involved in the issue or knowledgeable observers, gather facts (who, what, when, where, budget, policies, master plans, etc.), confirm the quotes from the sources and if there was a controversial decision looming, make sure the competing views were represented, while making clear who had a financial stake in the issue.

I've endeavored to maintain the core tenets of the journalistic style in my posts from 2005 to the present.

Though few seem to notice, old-school journalism is still being done the hard way, and no, it's not all opinion and spin. Yes, a point of view can be established--for example, the muckraking investigative journalist makes it clear that The Little Guys are uncovering the dirt the Big Guys have been successfully hiding from the public--but this is different from opinion and spin. It's in plain sight, and part of the story being presented.

Yes, bias can slip in, for journalists are human, too, but the goal is objectivity--a standard that has been buried by an avalanche of spin, both institutional and online.

While most of what passes for "news" focuses on national and international events, what has more direct impact on our lives is what's happening in our city and county. These local decisions are the beat of local newspapers, who pay journalists to do the dull but important work of showing up to county council meetings, public hearings, judicial hearings, interview elected and appointed officials and their critics--all the scutwork of journalism that actually matters in our real-world lives, as opposed to the make-believe "life" we present online.

While the precise percentage of mass media ownership concentrated in the hands of a few corporations is open to debate, that most of the mass media is owned by a few corporations is not open to debate. This concentration is especially apparent in the tech monopolies in search and social media, where a cryptic Orwellian message that you've "violated community standards" sends you to Digital Siberia without any recourse.

The 6 Companies That Own (Almost) All Media

These global corporations have little interest in local journalism because it's expensive and rarely profitable. Local newspapers were once supported by advertisers, classified ads and subscribers. Craigslist and similar sites dismantled classified ads, and few younger readers bother subscribing to the local newspaper because "all the news is online for free."

Yes, all the corporate-packaged and sensationalized news is online, but local journalism dies when local newspapers go under. Investigative journalism and shoe-leather journalism are time-consuming, unglamorous and do not lend themselves to sensationalization. Few people are willing to pay for this work via direct subscriptions to journalists. Yes, there are a few superstars with thousands of paying subscribers, but local coverage attracts few subscribers. The investigative journalists I know only survive financially because their spouse has a steady job.

Self-serving special interests are delighted to fill the void when local journalism disappears. Once there's nobody left who is paid to dig beneath the surface of press releases, then there's no pushback when local power brokers carve up whatever's available. The public, uninformed and clueless, is powerless.

This California city lost its daily newspapers--and is living what comes next.

Relying on stalwart volunteers to do all the work local journalists once did is not realistic. Imagining that local journalists can recruit a couple hundred people to pay them a monthly stipend is also not realistic, as the work is DBI: dull but important, and few people will pay for what they imagine is "free" online.

The best way to support local journalism is to subscribe to your local newspaper before it disappears from lack of public support. Journalism is a trade, a profession, and it's not the same as opinion or PR-marketing-spin. We don't seem to even miss it when it's gone, but we are so much poorer when it's gone, a profound poverty we don't even recognize until it's far too late to reverse it.





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