On the media on the dawn of a new year.
I think it's going to get crazy, but I'm still excited about life on earth.
There is so much discussion going around on AI and if I think about it too long, it honestly freaks me the fuck out.
Ai bots combined with ai multi-media creation is wild to think about. A few months back I wrote that the whole ai thing was freaking me out, and it hasn’t stopped. It’s not hyperbole to say I think the internet is ending as we know it, at least with regards to news and information. There not only are fake events being created, but in this vein, in combination of fake personas and conversations now beginning, we will no longer know what, or even who to trust. And short of knowing someone yourself, or knowing someone you trust that knows them, it will be incredibly challenging to know if a person is even real or not.
I think about discovering
on the internet a few years ago. I found out about Walter from a friend who listened to the America This Week podcast. This podcast has opened up a whole new view of the political and media environment. At some point Walter discussed living in Livingston, Montana, just a few hours from where I live. I reached out to him via Twitter/X and hoped to eventually meet him in person. This fall I got to join him and a small group of people associated with County Highway, the paper he publishes. I met the human Walter Kirn. He’s accessible. He’s real. He is not an ai bot.But thinking about this led me to realize just how many people I follow on Twitter/X that may or may not be real for all I know. I know no one that knows them. They never discuss where they live. It would be, even with present technology, very easy to make their entire being up.
But it’s rapidly changing. Getting easier. Now it doesn’t even necessarily take a person to run it. Bots can create and disseminate information like any human. And soon it could be creating interactive videos, even podcasts that have no basis in reality. Not only can the characters be made up, but their entire outlook focused on changing one slight aspect of public thought, all the while entertaining all who listen and watch. And we likely will have no idea that they are not real.
Where will this take us? How will we know who we can trust? How will we be able to know if an event actually occurred or not? And then, even more diabolic and paranoid I suppose, but my mind can’t help but going there, because this is the very sort of thing our own government has worked on in other arenas, what about when even the people we know get their communication intercepted and recreated to tell the inquiring parties something different from the truth. Say for example you have an uncle Dave that lives in NYC, and you’ve just seen on the internet that NYC had a bomb go off. You call uncle Dave to see what he knows. The connection is not perfect, but Dave tells you it is worse than the news shows. It’s crazy. Things are falling apart.
All the while NYC is fine. Uncle Dave is fine. His communication got hacked along with millions of others, through simple geo-fencing, all with the goal of telling a story to everyone outside of NYC.
I know, this sounds insane. It sounds impossible. But I don’t think it is, or at least I don’t think it will be in the very near future. Between the ability to censor, ie, remove very specific communications from the internet, and ai’s ability to create real looking multi-media, and ai’s ability to create real looking persona’s on media platforms happy to advance the presence of bots across their apps, I think it is highly plausible for this sort of thing to occur in the near the future. I’d love to say it won’t, but look at the highway we are on within the internet. Now just look down the road a little… It tracks.
So what is to be done?
All I can think for this wildness is that it is more important to know where you are gathering information and having a filter that recognizes that at some point very soon very fake things are going to be appearing more rapidly than Steele dossier. It is going to be more important to support writers, photographers, artists, and journalists you know of, are familiar with, and whom you can trust to have their own independent reasons for working.
In a time when more and more consolidation is occurring across not just media companies, but all businesses around the world, it is more potent than ever to support independent people and businesses. This is where and how we break free from the multinationals that control more and more of our lives. As more companies move under ever larger umbrellas the world is becoming less personal, less interesting, less diverse, and easier to control. When one umbrella company controls not only what media we are fed, but what we eat, how much we pay out for healthcare, food, drugs, entertainment, transportation, and housing, as well as what we can get for options within all those arenas, life starts to whither quickly. Corruption becomes condensed. We see it already in the health arena. The same companies that own the seeds, the farming chemicals, now much of the land, also own the food industry, determining what we have as food options, and then adding insult to the already diabolic mix, they own the healthcare industry insuring they profit from the illness they create. Drug companies can literally own your health and well being, seed to table to doctors office. And they control our news, so you only find out what you want about them. (70% of msm news is paid for by… (drumroll…) Pharma. Which owns seed, chemical, and food companies and has a steady stream of people passing into the “federal regulation” offices, ensuring they get approval without issue. This isn’t in the future. This is now.
Ok, but I’m an optimist. When the world tells me to stare at the bad news in my phone, I look out the window. I put on my shoes and go outside. I walk the river trail. I go in the mountains.
This is the future. We need to retrain our relationship with media. We need less of it. We need to get outside. We need to return to the 1980’s in our media consumption. We will benefit greatly in mental, physical, and community health. That is the hope I see in this new wild landscape we are about to set forth in. They control it because we let them. They control it because we willingly buy their goods, listen to their news, and play their game. It’s time to create our own game that involves supporting local businesses, journalist, writers, artists, etc.
So don’t fret. But do be aware. It’s going to get crazy, but you can act outside the nonsense. Cheers to a new year. Excited to be part of it.