i don’t love the state level in the US, it’s true. (i think there should be maybe 500 or 5000 states rather than 50.) but i do love the idea of a diverse publicly funded media ecosystem. i don’t hate state governments per se, just want them structured to be more meaningfully democratic. 1/

i don’t think virtue can compete with vice in ecosystems dominated by bot swarms. fascism offers compelling accounts that can fit on a bumper sticker and in a tweet. truer stories won’t fit their. i think we want to reduce the scope and importance of bot swarm media, not compete in manipulation. 2/

the late, great-even-if-i-often-disagreed @kdrum.bsky.social has made the case that fox news alone accounts for basically everything. 3/

like yeah, the specific disfigurations of soul that inflict eg JD Vance come from “too online” edgelording, but the main reason all that matters is because organs like Fox and Newsmax amplify it to less informed, less political audiences. 4/

i’m not sure i’m persuaded that’s right, but it’s worth taking seriously, and reminding ourselves that most people try to avoid rather than immerse themselves in online political content. 5/

whether its the absence of more better quality media or the presence of putinbots all over social media that’s the bigger problem is hard to tease out. but we should do our best to encourage the former and make the world less hospitable to the latter, i think. 6/

i don’t think we can compete on bots, but well funded, social-democratically inclined media can absolutely create great material that can flow onto tiktok, great podcasts that develop parasocial followings, etc. /fin