What will a NZ culture without news dominated by social media hate algorithms look like?
The deal Stuff have cut with Warner Bros for Newshub will be less than 30 staff out of 300 jobs lost.
That’s not success.
Fingers crossed the obligation doesn’t choke Stuff and weaken them for a Sky News and Rupert Murdoch takeover.
We are already seeing what a culture without News is starting to look like.
The vast majority of Kiwis are on social media, and they mistakingly believe what they are seeing in their feed are the most important stories of the day when the reality is that social media hate algorithms are pumping them with the most reactionary opinion to keep them doom scrolling and fixated emotionally to their phones.
This allows for Swamp Kingdom Conspiracy theories and culture war revenge fantasies to dominate most peoples social media feeds and drawing more and more into vortex’s of wilful ignorance and demented realities.
You can already see Qanon conspiracy theories shaping part of this current Government’s agenda!
If there are no agreeable facts, and everything is dominated by easily manipulated feelings, we have replaced reason, objectivity and rationality with the worst imagined monsters of our deepest insecurities.
The Big Tech Tzars have manipulated our collective fear, ego, anger and insecurities through social media hate algorithms in a way that has led to the largest psychological civil war ever launched against one another.
Meanwhile, the planet burns and every aspect of our existence is monetarised for big data to sell us more stuff we can’t afford. We are alienated and anesthetized by a consumer culture that keeps us neurotic and disconnected. Our work, our existence, every move we make are all built to suck money to a minority class that sits above us while under neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, and automation, our existence as individuals has only become more disposable.
Rather than celebrate the human experience, we will vomit the worst of us into an existential gravity of likes for hate.
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The ‘Big Tech Tzars’ are cut from the same cloth as every other big money entity. As such, it hardly matters which one of ‘them’ is shaping our world. What matters is that the counterweight to their influence – government – has never been weaker. Thus, it is up to us, the people, to change this.
The last government ably assisted by the elites and MSM exploited our insecurities, fears, egos and anxieties to control us during covid
Nothing changes
In a rare instance of the stopped clock being right occasionally, Musk stated that media care more for clicks than truth. NZ media burned themselves to the ground.
“The vast majority of Kiwis are on social media, and they mistakingly believe what they are seeing in their feed are the most important stories of the day when the reality is that social media hate algorithms are pumping them with the most reactionary opinion to keep them doom scrolling and fixated emotionally to their phones”.
A nice turn of phase and not far from the mark. The internet, social media and the tyranny of the algorithm is a challenge not seen a decade or so back. Yet, back then, and way back further, news has always been subjected to being manufactured. Chomsky’s turn of phrase concerned the manufacture of consent, withholding the truth to influence public opinion, specifically around the lack of reporting in the US media of the American involvement in the invasion of East Timor in the mid 1970s. But in a broader sense hasn’t ‘news’ always been subject to manufacture in the hands of editorial policy? Or should that be manipulation? The traditional MSM has rarely been impartial, always reflecting particular point of view. For many folk this impartiality was and is still well accepted. Its part of the game: have your guard up, don’t believe everything you read, get a alternative perspective, make your own mind up. Its so much fucking harder now to be discerning. Truth, disinformation, misinformation, who the fuck knows anymore. Not the ordinary punter on the street that’s for sure. And in the bigger picture what is “news” if not a manufactured reality anyway, to simply capture for a consuming public simply what is considered newsworthy. A bit like highlighting some stuff on a vast canvas and ignoring or minimizing the rest. Are we not led to believe what we read and see reflects the reality we live in? Fuck, we are all living in a manufactured reality, made even stranger by social media and the tyranny of the algorithm Mmmm… is that taking it all a bit too far?