Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
wiby: a kind of search engine for the old-school web wiby.me
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
the enemy of your frenemy is what now?
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
boxing without regulation is just beating. what is commerce without regulation?
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
just because you disagree with someone and their poast doesn't mean they are the person you want to spend a lot of fighting with and taking down. you have better targets than that. and the person whose post you dislike is with you against those better targets.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
yes, but what did Aileen Cannon have to say?
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
there isn't anything in this world that is free to read. reading taxes readers' time and attention. it's a miracle they sometimes let themselves be taxed in money on top of that.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
Freddie DeBoer says nice things about my sister's book. freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/2024-in-re...
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
i'm perhaps ill-equipped.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
all else equal, kind. but i don't want them to be hungry, or to suffer from precarity and self-loathing.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
am i crippling my child's future life chances by discouraging narcissism and mendacity?
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
Organizing leadership by seniority is an important part of the incumbency bias of the US Congressional elections. Voters understandably choose representatives that will have influence over representatives who will not. Under seniority-based leadership rules, only incumbents have influence.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
(deleted and reposted to fix an oopsie. sorry about that!)
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
(and i wish i could do it again! but too many reactions now.)
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
"I was just following market forces" is the new "I was just following orders"
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
I also see little hope in collective bargaining with FB/Google/etc. I don't want a world in which good journalism is funded by, and so depends upon, mass propagandists. While these things exist, we could tax the fuck out of them to fund something else. When, gratefully they don't, we'd still fund.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
The LJI approach (@deanbaker13.bsky.social proposes something similar) strikes me as broadly the kind of thing we want. I'd go for the 1% of GDP rather than 0.15%, and want support for topical and national journalism, not just local. But the basic idea/structure is about the best we have for now.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
(I really didn't like this sentence, though: "And if people elect to have disingenuous local news media? Just like elections in general, that is the possibility in a democracy." Misreads both what democracy means and we should accept of journalism. Election does not render a tyranny a democracy. )
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
(That's quibbling annoyingly over what's mostly a throwaway line. The substantive point is, if an electoral or allocative procedure that funds journalism proves not to finance a diverse, high quality ecosystem, that is not to be shrugged off as "democracy" but remedied by reconsidering institutions)
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
okay. but that structure has to look very different than “what attracts viewership prospers”. that is to say, if we want to call it “restructuring the market”, we need to invent from whole cloth what precisely the good is, and what kind of choice would reward that. perhaps “market” is strained here.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
competition is a poison pill in this context, though. not the diversity aspect of competition, that’s great. but business models based on attracting eyeballs are epistemological catastrophes. the market does not optimize for the value we require. news “worked” only when it was a loss leader.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
assuming we are right (i'm pretty sure we are right!) that Dittman is Musk, i don't know what to do with an epistemological environment in which one of the world's most powerful men and most prominent speakers does this.
Screenshots of X posts by Elon musk meming mockery of people who think Adrian Dittman is Elon Musk, quoting followers asserting believing this apparently true claim is false is an"IQ test", ie to be smart one must believe the lie.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
that doesn't sound like a meaningful free speech regime to me. it doesn't sound like a free society.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
i agree that fox's viewpoint and content is free speech, like any other viewpoint or thing one might say. 1/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
but, as you suggest, the combination of a viewpoint untethered from requirements of diversity, fairness, some meaningful epistemological filter and its domination, extent, reach should not be protected by a free-speech regime. with great reach comes responsibility. /fin
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
the game was not fair but still you’ve been checkmated.