Billionaires vs. The Press in the Era of Trump

Alternative View:

The New York Time is at the heart of a network that controls a huge part of Washington's mindshare. The paper itself is something like the top portion of a considerably larger iceberg.

Consider for a moment the possibility that if state controlled media is a problem, which of course it is, then a corollary of that thought is that if the media controls the state then it is also a problem. Is that a realistic proposition?

To be non-abstract; the New York Times makes no secret of the fact it sees its role as an agent of change within the Western world. It is not merely reporting the news in an information discovery process. Former NYT employees like Michael Cieply state that the NYT has a plan it calls 'The Narrative' which it plans years in advance. Stories are wrapped around this to keep on message. It is functionally identical to the concept of a party line, except a political party does this publicly and these memos are not made overt to their readership. They are a newspaper coupled with a think tank agency which operates together to form opinion.

Perhaps just as important, I believe the NYT also determines the priority of news headlines across the world. Without fail, if I spot a certain news headline in a local Dublin paper, you may be sure the agenda was set by the NYT. I am reminded of how so much Net culture is downstream from 4chan and Reddit. There's an organization that determines what 'colour' is in this year for fashion. NYT does that for the 'issues'.

What I am describing here is not just syndication. Every major broadsheet in the West has many of the same stories and offers similar conclusions. Much of this is inorganic. When enough people think the same thoughts, even using the same phrases and words, using the same chains of logic, then they are either in the same culture or they are being unwittingly subscribed to a narrative.

I noticed this myself because I used to be belong to a proselyting cult. They have periodicals which they spread across the world in many different languages. The local context would change, but at the end of each article, whether it is religious or general interest, there will be a remark alluding to or tying in a 'faith based interpretation'. To a non-believer this is tediously obvious. Believers are but dimly aware of the tactic. The new thought slides into their mind well greased. Later they are impressed that other believers had similar parallel thoughts. How much I have in common with my fellows! Warm feelings result and a sense of being special.

This is how you traffic shape human thought across a population. The fact is that for persons of normal intelligence and experience there are only so many possible branches in human reasoning when presented with limited data. I'm not calling it pyschohistory, but I think a clever Narritive caretaker is well able to predict the trajectory of thought in advance.

The simple truth, and I think of this as our dirty little secret, is that we're not as unique as we popularly imagine ourselves to be. I think the Internet has made that much clearer than before. I imagine for example, that while reading this you thought: "yeah this is not new information, we knew that already".

I am not calling this all bad. I think some of what I'm describing is a natural outcome.

The basic problem with this is that every once in a while, they get something really, really wrong. The Narrative stops matching reality. I'm sure over your lifetime you've spotted this happening under a wide array of circumstances.

My suspicion is that mindshare coordination is useful to society up to a certain point of complexity, and thereafter it is better to be less coordinated for reasons Taleb outlined with his anti-fragile concept. If you live in a world where everybody is going along the same path, then having a strong contrarian bias is going to continually pay off even if you get some commonsense things wrong.

One item that struck me as interesting is that Chomsky and Moldbug had a problem with the NYT. They have different takes on what is wrong with the world, but I think their basic intuition is bang on.

tldr; The New York Times is a political actor. If you want to be different it is easy. Throw away your newspaper and television. Stay on the Net with your fellow weirdos. We have hivemind too of course but don't you prefer organic mindfoods?