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Chris Crawford's avatar

A few minor observations:

News publication has always required financial support. The people who gather and report the news need to put food on the table. This has usually been done with a combination of subscriptions and advertising.

The problem is not that news media need money, it's that social media earn money without any need to disseminate the truth. If a conventional news source publishes a falsehood, its error will be exposed, its reputation tarnished, and its subscription base will wane. Social media suffer no such constraints, and so social media is a massive font of lies. Yet people embrace these lies because they WANT to hear them. A few conventional news sources, such as Fox News, have learned this and exploited it with great success.

Sad to say, there is no solution to this problem. The principle of freedom of speech was expected to work because, it was thought, a vigorous competition of ideas would always yield the closest approximation to truth. That belief, though, was based on the assumption that the electorate would be rational and, more important, that the problems facing society would be within with intellectual grasp of the electorate.

But two developments have destroyed the validity of this assumption. First, the franchise has been expanded to include the dumbest members of society. This was a necessary extension of basic democratic principles, but it has destroyed the effectiveness of the electorate as a decision-making group. There are ten nitwits for every rational voter.

The second development is the vaulting complexity of our civilization. Let's face it, not many people understand climate science. Nor are there many people who grasp the subtleties of modern geopolitics, as demonstrated by the growth of "me-first" nationalism at a time when nations are increasingly interdependent. Economics flies right over the heads of most people. Science has advanced far beyond the comprehension of the citizenry. Not many Americans understand their Constitution at even a basic level. And the British constitution isn't even written down! Fortunately for Britain, most British citizens have the intellectual humility to recognize that constitutional questions are best left to people who know something about the subject. Would that ignorant know-it-all Americans were so virtuous.

As I have written before, Homo Sapiens evolved to be a Pleistocene hunter-gatherer species, and we are faking it as civilized creatures. But that charade is breaking down as our civilization evolves past the intellectual capacity of this Pleistocene species. It is inevitable that this remarkable species excursion shall return to its original nature. It was fun while it lasted.

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