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Comment by openrisk | Hacker News Reader

> the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was - nor will it ever be again

This is very darkly ominous and of course it does not apply just to tech journalism.

Written communication, by real people, is not an optional luxury, its the best means to exchange dense, valuable, high quality information.

It feels as if the current digital "economy" is hell-bent to turn society into an illiterate, short-video watching, ad-clicking mob.

Not sure there has ever been technological innovation that was so regressive in its impact, profiting by actively degrading the human condition. Alas, here we are and we can't blame the Martians.

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I would push back some. Humans have communicated orally long before writing and lectures / interviews / discussions remain highly effective.

After all, not everyone was in favor of the pulp that churned from mass-market printing presses.

However, I can certainly imagine a voice-enabled LLM trained on European History that students could learn a lot from. People have been printing books for 500+ years, but we’ve really only gotten into user-generated video within the past 10 years.

Throughout my childhood video was really quite time-consuming to produce. It largely still is. If we can continue get that friction down, then over time I expect we’ll se more and more valuable video content being produced.

Compare broadcast television's first days with what it is now. There are a lot of parallels.

OTOH, although not tech journalism, but consider the Substack success of The Free Press and some others. There might be some light at the end of this tunnel.

It’s not really a “current economy” thing or anything to do with technological innovation itself. As someone mentioned elsewhere, our economic model of line must go up quarterly forever is the real thing to fix here. Does turning society into an illiterate mob make sense long-term? Most would say no. Does it make sense short-term? Unfortunately it makes a lot of sense as long as you can get out with your cash hoard before everything burns. Companies are simply acting towards what we have been incentivizing for decades now.

> you can get out with your cash hoard

cash is effectively claims against what other people can give you in the future.

An illiterate mob can only give you very few things of value. So, indeed, this is short-termism running society to the ground - as if there is no tomorrow.

This is why some of the rich are constructing elaborate bunkers just in case. So I guess there is some long-term strategizing after all.

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