People are acting like “misinformation” is some kind of uniquely modern plague. Come on. Societies have always been mis-, dis-, and mal-informed. Spoiler alert: it usually Comes From Within. And by that I don't mean MAGA, I mean Stanford. At the macro level, we’ve always had censors and masters of the larger narrative. Remember the old saw “history is written by the victors”? though I guess some of the losers are doing more of the writing lately. Meanwhile, at the micro level, all editorial decisions are arguably “misinformation”: cuts are made, words chosen. It’s called “making sense of shit” and has vanishingly little to do with RuSsIa or ChInA. Unless you live there, I guess.
Although the (mis)info game is an age-old one, it’s true the landscape has shifted and mutated in modern times. As the scale of communications increases exponentially (thanks, tech “innovators”!), vast rivers of money pour into the game c/o the ever-expanding luxury greed blob. We now have a crisis of quantity and quality. The thing is ,who trusts the war machine—much less tech companies run by IPA chads and/or their pet algos—to perform quality or quantity control?
At the dawn of the internet, elite technocrati like Al Gore used to get all jizzy about the “information superhighway.” Like it was going to free us all. Whereas now it’s burying us all…in freedom, I guess. And yet, my dude, a “superhighway” suggests a shared sense of order; clearly defined rules of law; a collective direction for all; and so on. I’d like to offer up a different metaphor. How about: “information superdouchenozzle expressway to your skull”? No? How about “trillion-armed social engineering control infrastructure”?
Hark! Hear Ye Thee Infinite Cacophony of Tin Horns! It’s the Tower of Babel all over again, except instead of babbling, everyone’s screaming and throwing feces. All these fools out here making stacks of cash shoveling more and more shit onto the info grift pile while most people can’t even pay their medical bills. smdh
Issue: 16-1 (orig. pub. date: )
