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New media did not turn out the way we had hoped Lauren Southern has an interesting perspective on why the ‘dissident’ social media did not go the way we expected.
Yet again, I am very happy I never made Samizdata anyone’s “day job”.
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Well said!
The older I get, the more I think that developing practical skills, including stuff like working with physical materials, is important not just as a practical matter but mentally as well.
I think she makes good points. Back in the day, the New Heralds of the Red Dawn had to spend many hours at Speaker’s Corner to get exposure to maybe a couple of hundred people, so that like-minded nutters were only accumulated slowly. Now, a few keystrokes will reach millions in milliseconds, and although there are really no more nutters today than there were 100 years ago, they are far-more easily reached. It’s the difference between fishing with a hook and fishing with a net. Plus, back in the day, even when you’d hooked your nutter, they were still exposed to a broad sweep of opinion in daily life, through which your message had to struggle to stay heard above the noise. Now, opinion is laser-focussed – one click in your basement, and you can be immediately immersed in a universe that only supports one worldview and completely-suppresses all others. If an evil overlord wanted to design a system finely-tuned create and foster all kinds of radical extremism, today’s Internet is what he would come up with.
llater,
llamas
I don’t think I agree. She raises a fair point, but just because people like Fuentes get stuck in their own mess, but “new media” as a whole has been a roaring success. Fuentes has to live or die based on his audience, but it is very easy for a different voice with different ideas to rise up and take over. It is unadulterated competition in ideas (adulterated only by the social media companies’ attempt to cancel — something that Elon Musk has largely saved us from). Ideas live and die on the basis of the audience interest, and that is a very good thing.
I don’t care if “new media” people can feed their families — that’s their business — I do care that there is a market place of ideas easily accessible to everyone.
New Media has been one of the great victories of the Internet. I mean who even reads the newspaper or watches broadcast news any more?
Does it lead to echo chambers? Sure, but so did the old way. Not too many people read (past tense) both the Telegraph and the Guardian, or watched NBC News and Fox News.
Gotta agree Fraser!
Does Quora count as New Media? Well, I find it an excellent place to discuss Tolkien and have answered there on the role of mythology and religion within the works of JRRT. There are a lot of old gits (like my Dad) who thinks the internet (which he is never used) is just the domain of perverts and scammers.
Does Samizdata count? It is via you folks I gained a much greater understanding of economics (and loads of other stuff).
She should worry about keeping a job in the old media. Just because an extmist might paint himself into a corner doesn’t mean the is no place for painters. By contrast the old media are addicted to lying and selective editing. And they don’t seem to be able to give that up.
BTW, she complains that the “dissident media” is constantly promoting toxic ideas and are trapped by their audience.
But how come nobody ever accuses the traditional[*] media of toxic ideologies? They are rife with some of the most horrible ideas, like eat the rich or the racism of DEI, or Trump is a Nazi, or just plain socialism. Nearly everything you see on a traditional media feed is ALL coming from horrible toxic ideologies, that are doing vastly more damage than wankers like Nick Fuentes.
[*] We really need to come up with an alternative term than “mainstream media”. Because they are not “mainstream” either by volume or ideas promulgated. I propose “traditional media” is a better term being accurate and not being a loaded term capturing my personal distaste for them.
Fraser Orr: can I proffer ‘conventional media’?
How about obsolete media?
The phrase I usually see these days is ‘corporate media’ which seems to pretty much sum it up.
I never thought otherwise, but there is very much a ‘dark side’ & she is not taking about “as a whole”, she’s talking about the nutters.
@Perry de Havilland (Prague)
I never thought otherwise, but there is very much a ‘dark side’ & she is not taking about “as a whole”, she’s talking about the nutters.
Of course, and there is no greater advocate of freedom of speech than you. However, as you surely know, the problem with freedom of speech is that you have to let the nutters and the psychos have their say too. You don’t have to listen to them, you just can’t interfere with their attempts to make their views know. In fact, I think that is a feature not a bug. If I know what Nick Fuentes has to say by his public proclamations I know to stay the hell away from him, or alternatively use those public proclamations to mock him, or shame him and his supporters. And if some crazy nutters are making a plot to blow something up and doing it publicly it means I can sic the cops on them.
It is also a useful thing. Sometimes I read comments on X and I am reminded how utterly stupid some people are. That’s good information to have.
“Sometimes I read comments on X and I am reminded how utterly stupid some people are.”
One of the unfortunate side effects of having a Facebook account is learning just how nuts someone you’ve known for quite some time really is.
I can understand this in the case of Nick Fuentes. He made his name with hatred of Jews, if he suddenly stopped – his audience would, yes, leave him, he would have no money.
But Tucker Carlson was born wealthy (that is also why he has a college degree – although, it is claimed, he has difficulty with both writing and reading – much like his fellow Californian Governor Gavin Newsom, I am not being nasty – I am both dyslexic and dyspraxic myself – i.e. I have trouble with spelling and I am clumsy), and he had a very large audience when he was saying sensible things – he did not “have to” go down the Nazis-were-the-good-guys, down-with-the-Jews, rabbit-hole that he has gone down. Oddly enough it did NOT even start with the Jewish question – the bizarre claims started with what he kept saying about Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt – Mr Carlson started repeating (as truth) leftist talking points about how “Teddy” Roosevelt “created the middle class” with his “trust busting” – in reality the arbitrary antics (almost random economic interventions – attacking some business enterprises, but not others, on what appears to have been a matter of personal likes and dislikes of their owners) of the Theodore Roosevelt Administration did harm, not good.
And there is also the case of Candice Owens – he used to say perfectly sensible things, and was making a good living (deservedly so – the lady was an excellent presenter), no one forced Candice Owens to go down the rabbit holes the lady has gone down – the lady led her audience down these rabbit holes (that the wife of the President of France is a man, and, of course, the obsession with how evil the Jews are) rather than being led by the audience.
What happened to Tucker Carlson and Candice Owens still baffles me – was it mental illness? I have long suspected that, a least in the case of Candice Owens, it was mental illness.
Candice Owens is not, of course, a “he”.
I apologize for my typing mistake.
But you-know-who is! 😂
There was something off about Candice from the start. I didn’t see it at the time, but some noted her rather sudden switch from radical Left to conservative Right. She was very impressive and articulate, but a bit too articulate for such a recent convert 🤷🏻♀️
I did have significant doubts about Tucker some years ago. At first it was that weird laughter that got increasingly weirder as time went on. But more materially and re Paul’s point about “Teddy”: years ago Tucker was at a debate on stage representing the Right, while the Left was represented by Cenk Uygur. Tucker went out of his way to kiss up to Cenk, going on about all that crap about Teddy, how much in common they had, and how those notions of Left and Right are no longer relevant, and so on. What was especially notable to me was Cenk’s reaction of utter contempt, thinly veiled by “friendly” condescension.
It may have been this debate in 2018, but I haven’t the stomach to watch…
Alisa I did not know about that debate.
Yes someone who talks about how “notions of left and right are no longer relevant” has gone over to the dark side.
You were much quicker at seeing through Mr Carlson than I was.
As for Candice Owens – a brilliant performer, but, perhaps, never someone who had a real-core.
Meanwhile the Supreme Court of the United States has decided, in effect, that rigging elections (election fraud) is just fine – as it did repeatedly both before and after the 2020 Presidential Election (refusing to even hear cases opposing a flood of “mail-in ballots”).
And it has decided that someone who was paid (yes paid) to make up absurd stories that President Trump sexually assaulted them (but, when asked, could not “remember” what YEAR the attack was supposed to have taken place) should be paid millions of Dollars – because a giggling New York City jury said so (the city jury knew perfectly well that the story was nonsense – but they did not care).
The personal insult, and, more importantly, the continued attack on democracy – the continuing effort to make elections a rigged farce, appears to be an effort to goad President Trump into declaring a State of Emergency – that backfired when the former President of the Republic of Korea tried to do so.
The former President of the Republic of Korea was correct – the Democratic Party of Korea is controlled by people who were bought by the People’s Republic of China, and the election that gave them the Korean Congress was probably rigged (although that is a hard thing to prove) – but as soon as you declare Martial Law and send in the soldiers, you become the Bad Guy.
So it is very hard to know what to advice – do nothing and the Democrats take control and destroy you and destroy your family (thanks to the TDS of Chief Justice Roberts – which was also clear in 2020), but act in a military manner – and you become the monster than say you are.
Perhaps there is no good option.
Hard to argue with that! 😀
They are both on-the-make talking head sock puppets, dealing themselves into the great game. Nothing they say is sincere belief, everything is calculated for advantage.
The biggest difference that I see in New and Olde Media is that the New stuff occurs on the internet, and usually has open discussion and commenting.
When Walter Cronkite told us we had lost Vietnam, there was no countering voice to be heard. We got that one viewpoint alone.
Now, make a statement of fact on a New Media site, and you will get every possible take on it, from “yeah, I agree”, to “you are too stupid to live.” Point is, we get discussion along with announcement.
Agreed bobby.
Yes bobby b – Walter Cronkite was lying through his teeth, as the Tet Offensive was a disaster for the Communist forces (and he knew that) but the Western media showed the Tet Offensive as a Communist victory – even as far back as 1968 the Western media were engaged in agitprop. Mr Cronkite did not even have the basic decency to use blunt language such as – “my opinion is we should let the Marxists have the Republic of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos – and do whatever they like to the populations of these nations” instead he waffled on about an “honorable peace”.
However, this is to be expected – as Mr Cronkite was very much an establishment person, including his support for world “governance”, and, at least privately, American Presidents were much the same as him – Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon (yes Nixon as well), none of them wanted to defeat the Marxists – they wanted “talks” and an “agreement”.
Very much like the betrayal of Chang over the Manchurian Offensive of 1946. The American government demanded that the offensive be stopped – because it was defeating the Communists, and they did NOT want to defeat the Communists, they wanted “talks” and an “agreement” – many tens-of-millions of people died under Mao because of that, and the People’s Republic of China is a deadly threat today – and becoming a worse threat every day.
Damn the establishment – damn them to Hell.