The information sphere teems with platforms of communication: that is its most typical and abundant feature. The governing elites are not forbidden or unable to speak. They are unwilling to compete for attention. They dread the thought that the public will shout back. This phobia has been the strategic advantage of populists like Trump, who achieve proximity with the public by engaging with it on digital platforms. Until more constructive politicians master the art of online communication, the crisis of the elites will only deepen.
It is a long essay, but worth your time.
2. Gurri interviews Andrey Mir. Mir says,
The internet revealed that the business of the news media rested not on information but on the lack of information. Those conditions are gone. The market is already willing to abandon newspapers, but society is not yet ready. Social habits have slowed down the process. But it is demographics that have begun the final countdown. This is why it is possible to calculate the deadline, figuratively speaking. Millions of students today have never even touched a newspaper. They simply do not know how to consume the press, nor are they aware of why they should do it. As soon as this generation takes command, newspapers are done. Hence the last date for the industry—the mid-2030s.
The newspaper business is going to die within the next twenty years. Newspaper publishing will continue, but only as a philanthropic venture.
Not so sure all the newspapers are dying (especially the big national ones).
https://letter.ly/new-york-times-readership-statistics/ (March 2021)
Almost two-thirds of people who get their political news and commentary from The New York Times are under 50 — 34% fall into the 30–49 age group, and 29% are in the 18–29 bracket. As for other readers, 17% are aged 50–64, while the remaining 20% are over 65.
Are these people who get the paper version or the online version? I can see the paper version asymptotically approaching zero but the online version prospering as a “curated” repository of “what I should know and what I should think to be a good person”.
Gurri appears to be whitewashing the rise of the divine right of internet monarchs to exercise absolute authority over internet communications. Yes, the press has always been overrated garbage and “journalists” water carrying propagandists, but did he sleep through the monarchs’ silencing of the Hunter Biden story prior to the election? Is he unaware of the widespread suppression of dissent on Twitter and Facebook? How does the Parler execution fit into his narrative? What about the divine right of payment processors to act as censors to the internet? And hosting services unrestrained oppression of dissenting voices?
The only real revolt the masses can attempt against this dystopian tyranny is to boycott USA internet commerce and use offshore services in countries like Sweden and Switzerland that retain the freedom of speech and can credibly be described as democracies.
I made a similar comment below. The elites have enormous and ominous control over news and public perception through the tech companies as you say, also the big media companies, and the school system both K-12 and the universities have engaged in highly partisan political rhetoric.
Andrey Mir says that news is controlled by those who wish to disseminate messaging: the elites. Gurri’s claim that elites have lost control is absurd.
“Gurri’s claim that elites have lost control is absurd.”
I might not put it that harshly, but I would say there was a moment of a high water mark for the strength of his overall thesis, and things have gone steadily downhill for it since then, and some of those claims “haven’t aged well,” as the kids say.
The way I put it is in terms of a Star Wars metaphor: it was easy for many of us to get swept away in that brief exciting moment of “A New Hope”, but inevitably, “The Empire Strikes Back.”
You could look at John Gilmore’s, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,” from 1993 in the same way. At the time it seemed almost plausible. Gradually, that view came to seem naive but perhaps salvageable. Now only fools still believe it, and those who know better weep with nostalgia of a lost era.
And this is exactly what everyone will think about Gurri’s claims soon, for in the grim darkness of the near future there is only control. “Boy, we didn’t think it was even possible at the time, but it turns out they sure got that genie stuffed right back in that bottle after all.”
But look, even a temporarily good insight is much better than what most people can do. Also, it still seems reasonable to most people unless they happen to be paying close attention to what is happening at the very edge of what the elite is still willing to barely tolerate, which are the canaries in the coal mine of a Niemoller sequence that will inevitable get to everything because it has no limiting principle. Information control is already a fait accompli in other countries to include Gurri’s prime example of Egypt which ten years later is now locked down tight. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, except *he* won’t get fooled again.
This is what I find really disappointing in Gurri as a public intellectual is that he just keeps beating the same drum and repeating the same lines without updating anything as time marches by and in response to this steady drip of new contrary observations and obvious questions and criticisms, many of which I’ve explained at length in the comments here. I am hardly the only one, and I seriously doubt he is unaware of them. However, despite having read dozens and dozens of his articles and interviews, I have never seem him engage with any of those questions seriously even one time.
Well, that’s his prerogative, but look, to me, that’s both sad and not the mark of a serious thinker.
The premise that the Internet took away control of public narrative from the elites, was a terrible thesis from the beginning. It wasn’t a good thesis that didn’t age well.
Andrey Mir’s arguments seem insightful, they seem to explain reality. Mir argues that throughout history, elites find ways to control the dissemination of news, and he seems to be correct.
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
“Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
“Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
“Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Pastor Martin Niemoller
Alternate versions include Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Communists.
When you link to articles you should also give the FIT score(s) the author got for it.
One good reason is that it provides “case law”. People playing FIT are like machine learning algorithms that benefit from being ‘trained’ by experiences. This is especially true for what the judge thinks the correct holding is for a variety of ambiguous or arguable cases, and also on the dicta explaining the reasoning behind why he things it is correct.
For example, in reading the work of a lot of public intellectuals, I see a whole spectrum of “thinking in bets”, and it’s not clear to me where the right line would be.
Consider the following which I think have “bet-like-ness” qualities, but declining amounts of it, (and how often it tends to appear). You could measure these in terms of “expected penalty for BS”.
1. Providing public proof of taking a large position (given their personal circumstances) on a contract which pays off a lot for being correct in a narrow band, but with a payoff that quickly decreases and rapidly becomes very painful as it moves away from the prediction. (Extremely rare, I don’t recall ever seeing it outside some writing by investment professionals and sports betting. Yes, I understand the legal problems of trying to go beyond this context.)
2. Making a small, “gentleman’s bet” (Very rare, Caplan does it about a couple of times a year. Yes, it’s not easy for everyone to get betting partners or bookmakers, etc.)
3. Making a costless claim about one’s perception of the odds of a particular scenarios. Costless in pecuniary terms, not necessarily in terms of reputation, to the extent one’s audience cares or one’s personal interests are otherwise affected in line with the results. This is more bet-like if one reliably practices the discipline of public follow-up, and less if it just gets dropped and forgotten in the stream of new topics. (This is more common, but still pretty rare. Consider all the people calling odds for election results. Also, I am not convinced of the propriety or rigor of claiming ‘probabilities’ for claims of a one-off character, outside of the “multiple, comparable iterations” context amenable to a frequentist interpretation.)
4. Making a confident statement of a clear but imprecise forecast. “Unemployment will be lower next year.” Or, “Crime will go up next year.” (Common. People of different views but good faith can easily agree whether the call was right or wrong.)
5. Making a ‘forecast’, but in vague and hedged language, such that it’s hard to get people to agree on whether the author was even correct or not, almost impossible to infer the author’s “true model”. (Very common.)
In my view, the 5’s are out and 2’s are in. The 4’s are tough. On the one hand, they pose little risk to the author if he’s engaging in BS. On the other hand, this is the normal way public intellectuals write and communicate concepts which *could* be expressed in terms of bets but usually are not. We don’t want to over-reward people just because they put quantities next to predictions the equivalent concept for which we are accustomed to reading into the usual interpretation of typical usage of language in that mode of discourse.
3’s are tough too. The whole point is commitment to “accountability” / “cost for being wrong”. I’m not convinced that most public intellectuals face the kind of reputational, career, or audience risk for getting things wrong, when they are wrong in the ‘right’ (i.e., forgivable) way according to their fans and friends, who will make all kinds of excuses for them. If you put a lot of money at stake, the difference between saying “75% confident” and “90% confident” can be a lot. If you are just making costless claims of those numbers, if things go against your predictions, you just use the weatherman’s defense.
Gurri says:
Andrew Mir says the opposite:
Mir says that the hand written newsletters of 16th century Venice, initially aimed at simply spreading news, were “immediately acculturated by power” and we see parallels to that with the Tech companies of today.
The elites have enormous power in controlling the information agenda. Gurri’s suggestion otherwise is absurd.
Big Tech and Big Media strangled the circulation of the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 election season. People who heavily follow news still heard the story and saw the attempt to squash it, but the masses did not hear about it at all. That is power. When Google signal boosts outlets like NYT and bans The Federalist from generating ad revenues through their platform: that is power. When figures like Jeff Bezos buy up the Washington Post and Lauren Jobs buys up The Atlantic and Axios: that is power. In recent years, the public universities and public K-12 school systems have engaged in political messaging on the George Floyd story and other political news, and gave partisan messaging that that a few years ago, would have been out of bounds. That is power.
Gurri’s claim that the elites at Google and Amazon and Twitter and Facebook and the Universities and the NYT have no control over news and public perception is quite absurd.
I meant Andrey Mir, not Andrew. Sorry!