For Sale: Journalistic Integrity

Already widely reported but only just having come to my awareness is an initiative by Rolling Stone to establish a Culture Council: “an Invitation-Only Community of Influencers, Innovatives, and Creatives.” The flattering terms tastemakers and thought leaders are also used. One must presume that submissions will be promotional and propaganda pieces masquerading as news articles. Selling advertising disguised as news is an old practice, but the ad usually has the notation “advertisement” somewhere on the page. Who knows whether submissions will be subject to editorial review?

To be considered for membership, candidates must sit in a senior-level position at a company generating at least $500K in annual revenue or have obtained at least $1M in total institutional funding.

Rolling Stone‘s website doesn’t say it anywhere I can locate, but third-party reports indicate that members pay either a $1,500 annual fee and $500 submission fee (one-time? repeat?) or a flat $2,000 submission fee. Not certain which. Just to be abundantly clear, fees would be paid by the submitter to the magazine, reversing how published content is normally acquired (i.e., by paying staff writers and free lancers). I’d say this move by Rolling Stone is unprecedented, but of course, it’s not. However, it is a more brazen pay-to-play scheme than most and may be a harbinger of even worse developments to come.

Without describing fully how creative content (arts and news) was supported in the past, I will at least observe that prior to the rise of full-time creative professions in the 18th and 19th centuries (those able to scratch out earn a living on commissions and royalties), creative work was either a labor of love/dedication, typically remunerated very poorly if at all, or was undertaken through the patronage of wealthy European monarchs, aristocrats, and religious institutions (at least in the developing West). Unless I’m mistaken, self-sustaining news organizations and magazines came later. More recent developments include video news release and crowd sourcing, the latter of which sometimes accomplished under the pretense of running contests. The creative commons is how many now operative (including me — I’ve refused to monetize my blog), which is exploited ruthlessly by HuffPost (a infotainment source I ignore entirely), which (correct me if wrong) doesn’t pay for content but offers exposure as an inducement to journalists trying to develop a byline and/or audience. Podcasts, YouTube channels, and news sites also offer a variety of subscription, membership, and voluntary patronage (tipping) schemes to pay the bills (or hit it big if an outlier). Thus, business models have changed considerably over time and are in the midst of another major transformation, especially for news-gathering organizations and the music recording industry in marked retreat from their former positions.

Rolling Stone had always been a niche publication specializing in content that falls outside my usual scope of interest. I read Matt Taibbi’s reporting that appeared in Rolling Stone, but the magazine’s imprint (read: reputation) was not the draw. Now that the Rolling Stone is openly soliciting content through paid membership in the Culture Council, well, the magazine sinks past irrelevance to active avoidance.

It’s always been difficult to separate advertising and propaganda from reliable news, and some don’t find it important to keep these categories discrete, but this new initiative is begging to be gamed by motivated PR hacks and self-promoters with sufficient cash to burn. It’s essentially Rolling Stone whoring itself out. Perhaps more worrying is that others will inevitably follow Rolling Stone‘s example and sell their journalistic integrity with similar programs, effectively putting the final nails in their own coffins (via brand self-destruction). The models in this respect are cozy, incestuous relationships between PACs, lobbying groups, think tanks, and political campaigns. One might assume that legacy publications such as Rolling Stone would have the good sense to retain as much of their valuable brand identity as possible, but the relentless force of corporate/capitalist dynamics are corrupting even the incorruptible.

Citizenship in the Community

Something in an online discussion brought me back to my days as a Boy Scout. (No, not that, with your nasty, nasty assumptions.) It was one of the first merit badges I earned: Citizenship in the Community (link to PDF). I can’t remember any of the content anymore (haven’t yet consulted the PDF), and indeed, looking back with the advantage of several decades of hindsight, I have a hard time imagining any of the (morality? ethics?) lessons learned back then having had much durable impact despite remembering an emerging confidence and awareness (a commonplace delusion of youth) of my position within the community. Still, I appreciate having had many Boy Scout character-building experiences, which led to simple and enduring understandings of ideals such as honor, duty, preparedness, service, forbearance, shouldering hardships, and perhaps most of all, accepting responsibility for others, particularly those younger and weaker. (I’m not claiming to be any sort of paragon of virtue. Cynicism and misanthropy may have wrecked that aspiration.) I never served in the military, but I surmise others learn similar lessons slightly later in life when more readily absorbed and not so easily forgotten. In the past decade plus, some may seek these lessons through participation in endurance sports or martial arts (if not distorted by bad instruction like in Cobra Kai), though the focus outward (i.e., toward community and mutual reliance) may not be as strong.

The subject came up in a discussion of participants in small-scale democracy, something I’ve always known is messy, unrewarding, thankless, and sometimes costly yet still necessary to be a good citizen contributing to one’s community. Many adults get their first taste of local democratic groups (read: self-governing) through parent groups like the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA). Or maybe it’s a performing arts organization, home owner’s association, church council, social work hotline, self-help group, or cooperative. Doesn’t matter which. (Political activism and organizing might be something quite different. Hard to say.) Groups run on the good will and dedication of volunteered time and skills for the benefit of members of the community. As with any population, there are always free riders: those who contribute nothing but enjoy and/or extract benefits. In fact, if everyone were integrally involved, organizational complexity would become unmanageable. If activities of such groups seem like a piece of cake or vaguely utopian, just join one and see how different character types behave. Lotta dead wood in such organization. Moreover, power mongers and self-aggrandizers often take over small-scale democracies and run them like private fiefdoms. Or difficult policy and finance discussions divide otherwise like-minded groups into antagonists. As I said, it’s a decidedly messy undertaking.

Members of the community outside of the executive group (typically a board of directors) also have legitimate interests. Maybe community members attend meetings to keep informed or weigh in online with unconstructive complaints and criticisms (or even mockery and trolling) but then refuse to contribute anything worthwhile. Indeed, boards often have difficulty recruiting new officers or participants because no one wants to take on responsibility and face potential criticism directed at them. I’ve also seen boards settle into the same few folks year after year whose opinions and leadership grow stale and calcifies.

Writ large, leadership skills learned through citizenship in the community rise to the equivalents of Boy Scout merit badges Citizenship in the Nation and Citizenship in the World (no links but searchable). Skills deployed at those strata would arguably require even greater wherewithal and wisdom, with stakes potentially being much higher. Regrettably, having just passed through an election cycle and change of leadership in the U.S., my dour assessment is that leadership has failed miserably at multiple issues. The two most significant involve how we fail to organize society for the benefit of all, namely, economic equality and resource sustainability. Once market forces came to bear on social organization and corporate entities grew too large to be rooted in community service anymore, greed and corruption destroyed high-minded ideals. More self-aggrandizers and careerists than ever (no names, fill in the blanks, they’re all famous — or infamous) rose to the tops of organizations and administrations, especially politics, news media, and the punditry. Their logical antidotes are routinely and ruthlessly disenfranchised and/or ignored. The lasting results are financial inequality run amok and unsustainable resource addictions (energy mostly) that are toxifying the environment and reducing the landscape to ruin and inhabitability. (Perpetual war is a third institutional failure that could be halted almost immediately if moral clarity were somehow to appear.) It’s all out there, plain to see, yet continues to mount because of execrable leadership. Some argue it’s really a problem with human nature, a kind of original stain on our souls that can never be erased and so should be forgiven or at least understood (and rationalized away) within a large context. I’m not yet ready to excuse national and world leaders. Their culpability is criminal.

Tab Dump 04

I simply can’t keep up with all the reading, viewing, and listening in my queue. Waking hours are too few, and concentration dissipates long before sleep overtakes. Accordingly, it’s much easier to settle into couch-potato mode and watch some mindless drivel, such as the Netflix hit Bridgerton binged in two sittings. (Unlike cinema critics, I’m not bothered especially by continuity errors, plot holes, clunky dialogue, weak character motivation, gaps of logic, or glossy decadence of the fictional worlds. I am bothered by the Kafka trap sprung on anyone who notices casting decisions that defy time and place — an ill-advised but now commonplace historical revisionism like editing Mark Twain.) As a result, blog posts are less frequent than they might perhaps be as I pronounce upon American (or more broadly, Western) culture, trying vainly to absorb it as a continuously moving target. Calls to mind the phrase Après moi, le déluge, except that there is no need to wait. A deluge of entertainment, news, analysis, punditry, and trolling has buried everyone already. So rather than the more careful consideration I prefer to post, here are some hot takes.

The Irregular Aphorist. Caitlin Johnstone offers many trenchant observations in the form of aphorisms (some of which I’ve quoted before), all gathered under the subtitle Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix. The modifier irregular only means that aphorisms are a regular but not constant feature. Her site doesn’t have a tag to that effect but probably ought to. Here’s one in particular that caught my attention:

Everything our species has tried has led us to a dying world and a society that is stark raving mad, so nobody is in any position to tell you that you are wrong.

Twin truths here are (1) the dying world and (2) societal madness, both of which I’ve been describing for some time. Glad when others recognize them, too.

Piling on. Though few still are willing to admit it, nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs, e.g., distancing, masks, and lockdowns) to stall or reduce the spread of the virus failed to achieve their objectives according to this study. Instead, NPIs piled on suffering no one could forestall. I read somewhere (no link) that the world is approaching half of total, cumulative deaths/infections predicted had nothing been done to impede the pandemic running its course. Adding in deaths of despair (numbers not entirely up to date), we’re using the wrong tools to fight the wrong battle. Of course, interventions opened up giant opportunities for power grabs and vulture capitalism, so the cynic in me shrugs and wonders half aloud “what did you expect, really?”

Growth of the Managerial Bureaucracy. A blog called Easily Distracted by Timothy Burke (never on my blogroll) publishes only a few times per year, but his analysis is terrific — at least when it doesn’t wind up being overlong and inconclusive. Since a student debt jubilee is back in the news (plenty of arguments pro and con), unintended consequences are anticipated in this quote:

When you set out to create elaborate tiers that segregate the deserving poor from the comfortable middle-class and the truly wealthy, you create a system that requires a massive bureaucracy to administer and a process that forces people into petitionary humiliation in order to verify their eligibility. You create byzantine cutoff points that become business opportunities for predatory rentiers.

Something similar may well be occurring with stimulus checks being issued pro rata (has anyone actually gotten one?), but at least we’re spared any petitionary humiliations. We get whatever the algorithms (byzantine cutoff points) dictate. How those funds will be gamed and attached is not yet clear. Stay alert.

No Defense of Free Speech. Alan Jacobs often recommends deleting, unsubscribing, and/or ignoring social media accounts (after his own long love-hate relationship with them) considering how they have become wholly toxic to a balanced psyche as well as principal enablers of surveillance capitalism and narrative control. However, in an article about the manorial elite, he’s completely lost the plot that absolutism is required in defense of free speech. It’s not sufficient to be blasé or even relieved when 45 is kicked off Twitter permanently or when multiple parties conspire to kill Parler. Establishing your own turf beyond the reach of Silicon Valley censors is a nice idea but frankly impractical. Isn’t that what whoever ran Parler (or posted there) must have thought? And besides, fencing off the digital commons these very entities created has catapulted them into the unenviable position of undemocratic, unelected wielders of monopolistic power and co-conspirators to boot. That’s what needs to be curtailed, not free speech.

The Taxonomic Apocalypse. Although drawn from fiction and thus largely hypothetical, a new book (coming late 2021) by Adam Roberts called It’s the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of? surveys doomsday stories and categorizes different versions of how it all ends. Alan Jacobs (yeah, him again — must have an advance copy of the manuscript) recommends it as “a delightful and provocative little book” but fails to grok two things: (1) these stories are rehearsals-cum-preparations for the real thing, and (2) the real thing really is bearing down on us implacably and so is no longer a mere hypothetical to contemplate and categorize for shits and grins. Despite acceptance of the eventualities that await all of us, reading Roberts’ taxonomy is not something I would expect to find delightful. Skip.

Narrative Collapse. Ran Prier (no link) sometimes makes statements revealing an unexpected god’s-eye view:

[45] is a mean rich kid who figured out that if he does a good Archie Bunker impression, every lost soul with an authoritarian father will think he’s the messiah. We’re lucky that he cares only about himself, instead of having some crazy utopian agenda. But the power, and the agency, is with the disaffected citizens of a declining empire, tasting barbarism.

This is all about people wanting to be part of a group that’s part of a story. Lately, some of the big group-stories have been dying: sky father religion, American supremacy, the conquest of nature, the virtue of wealth-seeking. In their place, young and clumsy group-stories struggle and rise.

Collapse of certain fundamental stories that animate our thinking is at the core of The Spiral Staircase (see About Brutus at top), though it’s often couched in terms of consciousness in transition. Getting through the transition (only temporarily, see previous item in list) probably means completion of the Counter-Enlightenment historical arc, which necessarily includes further descent into barbarism.

Hail Mary for Individualism. I always take special notice when someone cites Allan Bloom. Alan Jacobs (um, yeah, he’s prolific and I’m using his ideas again — sue me) cites Bloom to argue that individualism or the sovereign self, a product of the Enlightenment, is already dead. No doubt, the thought-world described so ably by Bloom no longer exists, but individualism has not yet died out by attrition or been fully dissolved in nonduality. Many of us born before the advent of the Internet retain selfhood and authenticity not yet coopted by or incorporated into mass mind. Moreover, ongoing struggles over identity (e.g., gender, sexual orientation, and race that are often used improperly to define the self) result from an inchoate sense that individualism is eroding precipitously, not that it’s already passé. Defiant attempts to (re)establish an authentic self (contravening all logic and becoming critical theory of one sort or another) in the face of this loss may well be a last-ditch effort to save the self, but it’s failing.

In Flagrante Delicto

I have a memory of John Oliver dressing down a room full of entertainment journalists (ugh …) asking him questions following his Emmy win a few years ago. The first few had failed to offer even perfunctory congratulations for his award but instead leapt straight into questions. After his demand that everyone observe basic courtesy by at least acknowledging the reason for their attention being focused on him, each dutifully offered their compliments, which Oliver accepted graciously, and a question and answer ensued. It was a worthy reminder (something I mistakenly believed superfluous when I was much younger) that we have a sophisticated set of manners developed over time to which we should all subscribe. Behaving otherwise (i.e., skipping straight to matters at hand) is boorish, clownish, rude, and unsophisticated. Thus, routine exchanges at the beginnings of most interviews intended for broadcast go something to the effect, “Thanks for appearing on the show” or “Nice to meet you” followed by “Pleased to be here” or “My pleasure.” It’s part of a formal frame, the introduction or prologue, bearing no significant content but needful for hosts and guests to acknowledge each other.

In the course viewing many podcasts, often conducted by relative unknowns who nonetheless manage to attract someone of distinction to interview, I notice a tendency to geek out and succumb to effusive fandom. Even a little bit of that has the unfortunate effect of establishing an uneasy tension because the fan often becomes unhinged in the presence of the celebrity. Even when there is no latent threat of something going really wrong, the fanboi sometimes goes to such an extreme heaping praise and adulation on the interview subject that nothing else worthwhile occurs. Instead, one witnesses only the fanboi’s self-debasement. It makes me squirm watching someone figuratively fellating a celebrity (apology for my coarseness, but that’s really what springs to mind), and those on the receiving end often look just as uncomfortable. There’s simply no good response to the gushing, screaming, fainting, delirious equivalent of a 15-year-old Beatles freak (from back in the day) failing to hold it together and being caught embarrassingly in flagrante delicto.

Like others, I admire some people for their extraordinary accomplishments, but I never describe myself as a fan. Rather, objects of my admiration fall uniformly in the category of heroes people one shouldn’t scrutinize too closely lest their flaws be uncovered. Further, those times I’ve been in the presence of celebrities are usually the occasion of some discomfort precisely because celebrities’ fame invokes a false sense of intimacy (one might say oversharing) because details of their lives are in full public view. A balanced interaction is impossible because I know quite a bit about them whereas they know nothing about me, and topics gravitate toward the reasons for their celebrity. Most of us average folks feel compelled to acknowledge the films, trophies, recordings, awards, etc. that form their accomplishments, no matter how out of date. I’ve never been in the circumstance where a famous person, recognizing that I don’t recognize him or her (or don’t kowtow as expected), plays the celebrity card: “Don’t you know who I am?”

An interrelated effect is when someone has way too much money, that fortune clouding all interactions because it transforms the person into a target for those currying favor or otherwise on the make. Scammers, conmen, golddiggers, sycophants, etc. appear to extract wealth, and the dynamic breeds mutual distrust and wariness even in routine transactions. Chalk it up as another corrupting aspect of inequality run amok, this time affecting wannabes as well. In light of this, I suppose it’s understandable that rich, famous people are most comfortable among those similarly rich and famous, thus, immune to envy and fandom (but not always). Everyone else is alienated. Weird sort of gilded case to live in — not one that I admire.

Faces of America

I admit it: I’m a bit triggered. Storming of the U.S. Capitol Building last week, even though it was over in one day, sent a lot of us back to the drawing board, wondering how things could come to that. Not that civil unrest, attempted coups and secession, and even revolution haven’t been predicted for months. Still, the weirdness of this particular manifestation of citizen frustrations is hard to fathom. See, for instance, this blog post, which offers a reckoning not easy to face. Simply put, crowds that form into protests and physical occupations fully recognize their abandonment at the hand of oligarchs and political leaders and as a result act out their desperation and nihilism. Their question becomes “why not take over and occupy a building?” Doesn’t matter, nothing to lose anymore. It’s already all gone. Whether it’s a college administrative building, governor’s mansion, federal or state office building, or the U.S. Capitol Building, the sentiment appears to be the same: why the hell not? Doesn’t matter there was no plan what to do once the building was breached; doesn’t matter that it wasn’t occupied for long; doesn’t matter that property was damaged; doesn’t matter that lives were ruined and lost; doesn’t matter that no replacement government or executive was installed like a real coup or revolution would demand. Still works as an expression of outrage over the dysfunctions of society.

On the bright side, actual death and injury were quite limited compared to what might have obtained. Mayhem was largely limited to property destruction. Plus, it was a potent reminder to legislators (filmed scrambling for safety) that maybe they ought to fear backing the citizenry into corners with nowhere to turn. Conjecture that, had the racial make-up of the protesters been different, a massacre would have ensued remains just that: conjecture.

Bad as You Wanna Be

The end of every U.S. presidential administration is preceded by a spate of pardons and commutations — the equivalents of a get-out-of-jail-free card offered routinely to conspirators collaborators with the outgoing executive and general-purpose crony capitalists. This practice, along with diplomatic immunity and supranational elevation of people (and corporations-as-people) beyond the reach of prosecution, is a deplorable workaround obviating the rule of law. Whose brilliant idea it was to offer special indulgence to miscreants is unknown to me, but it’s pretty clear that, with the right connections and/or with enough wealth, you can essentially be as bad as you wanna be with little fear of real consequence (a/k/a too big to fail a/k/a too big to jail). Similarly, politicians, whose very job it is to manage the affairs of society, are free to be incompetent and destructive in their brazen disregard for needs of the citizenry. Only modest effort (typically a lot of jawing directed to the wrong things) is necessary to enjoy the advantages of incumbency.

In this moment of year-end summaries, I could choose from among an array of insane, destructive, counter-productive, and ultimately self-defeating nominees (behaviors exhibited by elite powers that be) as the very worst, the baddest of the bad. For me, in the largest sense, that would be the abject failure of the rule of law (read: restraints), which has (so far) seen only a handful of high-office criminals prosecuted successfully (special investigations leading nowhere and failed impeachments don’t count) for their misdeeds and malfeasance. I prefer to be more specific. Given my indignation over the use of torture, that would seem an obvious choice. However, those news stories have been shoved to the back burner, including the ongoing torture of Julian Assange for essentially revealing truths cynics like me already suspected and now know to be accurate, where they general little heat. Instead, I choose war as the very worst, an example of the U.S. (via its leadership) being as bad as it can possibly be. The recent election cycle offered a few candidates who bucked the consensus that U.S. involvement in every unnecessary, undeclared war since WWII is justified. They were effectively shut out by the military-industrial complex. And as the incoming executive tweeted on November 24, 2020, America’s back, baby! Ready to do our worst again (read: some more, since we [the U.S. military] never stopped [making war]). A sizeable portion of the American public is aligned with this approach, too.

So rule of law has failed and we [Americans] are infested with crime and incompetence at the highest levels. Requirements, rights, and protections found in the U.S. Constitution are handily ignored. That means every administration since Truman has been full of war criminals, because torture and elective war are crimes. The insult to my sensibilities is far worse than the unaffordability of war, the failure to win or end conflicts, or the lack of righteousness in our supposed cause. It’s that we [America, as viewed from outside] are belligerent, bellicose aggressors. We [Americans] are predators. And we [Americans, but really all humans] are stuck in an adolescent concept of conduct in the world shared with animals that must kill just to eat. We [humans] make no humanitarian progress at all. But the increasing scale of our [human] destructiveness is progress if drones, robots, and other DARPA-developed weaponry impress.