Vicious Cycles: Theses on a philosophy of news (2020)
harpers.org
harpers.org
Is he though?
I thought it was pretty well known he's manipulated timelines, selectively edited interviews and staged things.
He puts his world view first and makes the facts fit that view.
Oh what little insight they had into how bad things were knowing what was to come.
when you have an ideology, everything becomes an ideology, and this serves only to reinforce its own cycle of criticism. thinking in terms of ideologies is just a materialistic mind virus.
the essential ingredient of news or a story is conflict, and "ideology" just synthesizes and manufactures conflict to hang the facts and events of the day on. This false, solipsistic foundation is why the news is garbage.
im glad we have fun podcasts as a kind of replacement social fabric because they are based on sincere interest and desire, whereas the news was a system of braying, histrionic criticism in a permanent power struggle.
the old news establishment were impostors, and a kakistocracy of compromised pretenders. I say good riddance to them.
Who doesn't have an ideology? Everyone has a framework through which they view the world. The trick is recognizing the ideological framework of the media which you are consuming.
> im glad we have fun podcasts as a kind of replacement social fabric because they are based on sincere interest and desire
I'm pretty sure that's not always true.
the basic problem is that rooting consciousness in language is inferiorizing, and then iterating this yields the narrow cone of "everything is ideological" which conflates it with perspective, experience, and the rest of the whole shebang.
it becomes relevant with AI and machine alignment because as they are not conscious, this prison (to us) of language is (for now) their substrate, and interestingly a lot of our garbage ideas about how to entrain humans with narratives may become tools for managing these super powerful language machines.
however, it requires that as humans, we "pop" up a level in our own ideas of consciousness if we are going to learn to manage these new mechanisms.
these days i ask people, if you were an agent, what would you do next? the analogy is worth reflecting on because we didn't have this meta understanding of unconscious but autonomous agents until recently. indont think we have found a new kind of consciousness, but we have found something that forces us to reflect on our own. it begins with recognizing that ideology was not a substrate.