The Known Knowns

If you've been reading this for any length of time, you've probably noticed a bit of... disengagement from world events over the last several weeks. This is because you are perceptive and wise, the type of person who is attuned to through-lines and themes beneath the surface of lazy smarm and dick jokes.

But then I realize that because you HAVE spent any length of time reading this, all that accumulated goodwill goes straight out the window. Display all the insight you want, but what does it mean if you're clearly lacking the discernment required to disregard junk like this in the first place? Do you have any idea how many copies of The Economist go unsold every month? If it weren't for people like you wasting your talents and energies on this literary corn syrup, The Economist could still be out there actually printing monthly issues to sell. Now they're just online, struggling in the mire with the lowbrow internet crap that trades in lazy smarm and dick jokes. I hope you're proud of yourself.

What I'm saying is that there's an obvious hierarchy to the information that's available. I think that kind of organization is something we're really only starting to get a formalized, institutional handle on after so many internet years.* It's a daunting task, especially considering that there are no institutions behind the "institution" part, except the autogenerated and self-sanctified ones that bear the stamp of authenticity provided solely by surviving the internet primordial ooze of the 1990s and early 2000s to tower over a landscape they themselves created. It's like in the Michelangelo painting in the Sistine Chapel if Adam reached up and touched himself. And from that act, what issued forth were Google and Facebook.

We have an FCC, but like the rest of our branches of government at the moment, it seems to be in the hands of pirates and anarchists. That means that if we want the internet to undergo some kind of scrutiny and regulation, the internet has to kind of do it all on its own. Given the sheer number of websites and discussion boards dedicated to cats alone,** organizing any of this in a way that would do anyone any kind of constructive good seems more or less impossible. I would argue, however, that we're already doing most of that work on ourselves.

Don't get me wrong, we're doing a terrible job of it, but think of all the websites you go to for information. You definitely, 100% have a ranking in your head of which ones of those are sources of actual news and which ones are sources of simultaneous "information" (in the loosest sense) and "entertainment" in a product I like to call "entermation." Maybe not that exactly, I'm still working on it, but you get the idea. Two things in one. Like a Reese's peanut butter cup but instead of chocolate and peanut butter, it's more like trying to find bits of peanut butter that were shit out by an Indonesian cat.

For me at the top I have probably Reuters, the NY Times and the Washington Post, followed by the born-online aggregators like Politico and Talking Points Memo, followed by the slightly more tawdry ones like the Daily Beast and those pesky contrarians at Slate, then the really pulpy stuff like Raw Story, then forty layers of a perpetual magnesium and sulfur fire, then stuff I read on Facebook.

To be fair, Facebook is making an effort to start policing this stuff up, which will begin to help I'm sure. As a for-profit company with no mandate in its charter to even consider the public interest, let alone protect or uphold it, I have a nagging wonder that huh, I guess it's possible that these efforts are a sop to public relations disasters that have piled up in the wake of the 2016 electo-pocalypse, to hold us all at bay until we lose interest. Or worse, we gain interest because another election is approaching and all we want is the adrenaline rush of shoving some article about the WRONGNESS of the people with whom we disagree into the timeline of some shitty relative who deigns to caucus with the Others. Am I going to go with a careful scrutiny of source materials that may include the Russian propaganda doomsday machine OR am I going to take the opportunity to say LOOK HOW NOBODY BELIEVES YOU UNCLE TED, YOU FUCKING SHEEP?

If you know the internet at all, you know ALL CAPS tells you everything you need.

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*They're exactly like regular years, just way more things happen in that timespace. For instance we have a lot more opportunities to obtain herbal products specifically designed for male sexual wellness than at any point in human history.

**And cats in groups and cats in pairs and cats with human clothes on and cats with other animals who are not cats, etc.