"Do your own research": why is the internet worse?

Kyle Chayka observed in the New Yorker that “the Internet today feels emptier, like an echoing hallway, even as it is filled with more content than ever. It also feels less casually informative.”

I'm a writer; I spent the last twenty years online absorbing a huge amount of nonsense, and sometimes writing about it. When much younger I read some really great cookbooks - specifically, Paula Wohlfort's The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean - and thought "I would love to have a job where I go travel places with good food and write about the things I learn." That job, more or less, is journalism, and speaking both as a reader and a writer, it's harder to find than it used to be.

There are vanishingly few actual jobs in journalism. A story in the AP last week covers the scale: nearly 3,000 outlets have closed over the last 20 years. That equates to about 43,000 jobs that have vamoosed. Half of the counties in the US only have a weekly newspaper, and 204 counties have nothing at all.

It’s worth revisiting the big picture here to understand why: Tech companies pulled all the ad dollars out of local newspapers. People switched from primarily getting news on TV or the paper to getting it from a laptop or phone. They optimized for outrage. News has always had a sensationalism bias, but now it was faster, more confrontational, fragmentary. A huge amount of regional news outlets disappeared entirely, or atrophied to the point of husks. A lot of digital outlets, as I alluded to in my intro note, have now vanished entirely. Gawker is dead, again, even though the deathblow was dealt many years ago by Palantir founder, bankroller of dark-money politics, and actual vampire Peter Thiel. (Read Moe Tkacic in Slate on the relentless churn at Jezebel making outrage bait posts for $12 a pop.)

These companies knew what caused outrage because they built a spectacular surveillance apparatus that not only tracked what we did on their pages, but tracked what we did everywhere else, too. And then they offered the data from that surveillance at a price, so anyone could put ads in front of exactly the demographic they wanted. Companies became absolutely dependent on that surveillance. None of this information is produced for the public good – it’s for the private interest. I don’t think there’s any other time in history when corporations had access to such a  breadth of knowledge about their consumers and the consumers knew so little about corporations in return.

(Also, I do not think that this surveillance is actually all that good! It screws up all the time. I get ads to join the UK Navy and work on a submarine. I am one of the least submarine-worthy individuals on earth.)

Katie Notopoulos observed that the advertising underpins the whole ecosystem and poisons it:

When we think of what’s most obviously broken about the internet—harassment and abuse; its role in the rise of political extremism, polarization, and the spread of misinformation; the harmful effects of Instagram on the mental health of teenage girls—the connection to advertising may not seem immediate. And in fact, advertising can sometimes have a mitigating effect: Coca-Cola doesn’t want to run ads next to Nazis, so platforms develop mechanisms to keep them away. But online advertising demands attention above all else, and it has ultimately enabled and nurtured all the worst of the worst kinds of stuff. 

The news, in this aerodynamic moneymaking paradigm, is not there to inform you or make you a better citizen. It's a tool to rile you up, to make you to engage more on social media and reveal more things about yourself to the surveillance apparatus, which can then be used to sell you stuff on those same platforms. News feeds surveillance, which feeds the shopping. Journalists were suddenly tech workers by default.

I used to work at Logically, a tech company that tracks mis- and disinformation online. At the height of the pandemic, we covered conspiracy weirdos and anti-vaxxers, and the refrain bad faith actors always used to get people down the rabbit hole was “do your own research.” But as a journalist, that’s my job! Google stuff, read obsessively, chat with experts or the well-informed. As individuals, we have access to more information than anyone else in history has ever had – the perpetual infinite library in our pockets is nothing to sneer at – but it is harder than ever to know whether that research is any good or not.  

Journalists who don’t have staff jobs – which is most journalists – are starting little newsletters and making "content" for subscribers. Rather than paying fifty cents a day, or whatever the Anchorage Daily News cost in the 90s, you can pay five dollars a month for a single journalist's dedicated output. You can also subscribe to your favorite artists or musicians or podcasters on Patreon. If you want to be informed, pay that to about ten different people. Plus your Netflix and Amazon subscriptions. 

Before you think I'm only complaining here, I think this is all basically good in that independent media is proliferating, like ciliated bacteria swimming around the petri dish. Obviously it's fun for me, and you're all here reading this. But I’m worried about the asymmetry – can we reasonably expect everyone to stay well-informed through a dozen random monthly subscriptions? Probably not. The single newspaper subscription gets replaced with an independent newsletter or two. So I have to wonder whether this disruption in the media industry better serves the disruptors than the public. 

Let's visit one such disruptor to understand what he thinks is going on. Marc Andreeson* of the venture capital firm Andreeson Horowitz, which has set much of the agenda for the Silicon Valley set, recently published a rambling, grievance-laden manifesto:

We have enemies.

Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas.

Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.

Whoa there, Marc! Maybe sit down, take a deep breath. Have a valium.

The manifesto has sections like “Lies” and “Truth” and “The Meaning of Life”, which I take as “let’s make lots of money as fast as possible while hand-waving away any conflicts this hyper-capitalist pursuit might have with human dignity, freedom, or the physical environment.” It’s written in a lilting, pseudo-poetic style, like if Joe Rogan released a all-lullaby show, or if Ayn Rand wrote Goodnight Moon.

I get it; the rosy optimism that greeted tech magnates back in the early 2010s has been replaced with public skepticism, criticism, getting dragged up in front of congress to make the occasional and pitiable mea culpa. As the honeymoon ends and the national mood switches from techno-optimism to -pessimism, tech firms have received a barrage of state and federal lawsuits. The FTC has sued Amazon and Google for anti-competitive processes.  A coalition of 42 state attorneys general are suing Facebook (and likely, TikTok, soon) for knowingly causing a public health crisis among young women and girls. 

Coincidentally, the change in public sentiment towards tech guys also roughly maps onto a lot of divorces in the tech guy sector. Bezos: divorced. Gates: divorced. Musk: divorced. Zuck: not actually divorced, but check out this episode where Jack Dorsey, the founder and ex-CEO of Twitter, met Mark Zuckerberg at his home for dinner:

Evidently in Palo Alto there’s a rule or regulation that you can have six livestock on any lot of land, so he had six goats at the time. I go, “We’re eating the goat you killed?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Have you eaten goat before?” He’s like, “Yeah, I love it.” I’m like, “What else are we having?” “Salad.” I said, “Where is the goat?” “It’s in the oven.” Then we waited for about 30 minutes. He’s like, “I think it’s done now.” We go in the dining room. He puts the goat down. It was cold. That was memorable. I don’t know if it went back in the oven. I just ate my salad.

Serving cold goat you killed yourself because you don’t know how to cook? Truly, I cannot imagine a more divorced-guy thing. Except maybe publicly agreeing to fight Elon Musk in a cage match, complete with plenty of shit-talk, and then Musk dropping out because of alleged back problems. (Which, yes, is a thing that happened.)

This is a glib point more than anything else but the guys that run the biggest tech companies have a bottomless need for validation, which is part of the reason they get into that business to begin with. Critical journalism does not feed that abyss; in fact, it often makes the abyss yawn that much wider.

None of these guys are incentivized to set up an internet where people can actually find out what the hell is going on.

(I’d also be remiss if I didn’t draw attention to the fact that a lot of these guys in the news-surveillance-shopping axis also have an enormous amount of power over the government. Something like 7500 US government webpages are run off Amazon Web Services. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is one of the largest US military contractors because of all the sattelites, and Musk managed singlehandedly to stop a Ukrainian assault on Russian warships last year because he cut off their access to said sattelites, because he read some edgelord's post on Twitter suggesting that it would cause nuclear war. Musk also owns Twitter, which used to be where everyone got their firsthand info, and now is where various species of cryptonazi (for example, a guy named "Raw Egg Nationalist") whisper into the ears of policymakers. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, which laid off 240 people in October. This is: bad.)

Anyways I’m talking about all of this because it’s really hard to get a job, and it’s hard to get a job because the priorities of tech guys forced journalism to pivot to a lot of silly stuff to stay relevant. You, the adoring public, end up suffering the most. I end up suffering because here I am, hat in hand, writing my silly little blogs to stay relevant. We are all of us uninformed.

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*If you’re not familiar, Andreeson Horowitz is the vanguard of VC tech – they find companies that have crazy ideas, give them a million bucks, and hope for the best. Most fail, but the one that pays off will theoretically make billions, so it all shakes out in the end. They have invested in nearly every big tech company you’ve heard of: Skype, Facebook, Groupon, GitHub, Twitter, Coinbase, Lyft, Airbnb, Foursquare, Stripe, Coinbase. (Also, BuzzFeed.) (Also Yuga Labs, aka the Bored Ape Club, aka the NFT company that sold pictures of monkeys for hundreds of $millions that are now (and were always, really) worth nothing.) 

**I’m in Portugal this week with my family and Rachel and we’ve made/eaten some outrageously good food. Cod with chickpeas, roast dorado with new potatoes, adjika mayonnaise, piri piri chicken, Nicoise with fat tuna steaks. You can go to the farmer's market on Saturday and buy clams straight out of a plastic bucket. For thanksgiving, we're going to a friends' house, and they used to own a natural wine bar/restaurant, so I am pretty hyped. There will be more about this food in next week's newsletter when I've had time to digest.