Click-Bait from Tudor Times to the Present.

The publishing industry experienced revolutionary growth in the final decades of the sixteenth century. Techno-social revolutions moved much more slowly, then, but the movable-type printing press was changing that as well. Gutenberg's press was rapidly felt as a cultural earthquake in Germany. The publishing revolution that followed, in two waves, some 50 and 100 years later, was the subsequent tsunami that washed over all of Europe.

The earthquake was followed by centuries of aftershocks. The history is surprisingly little known. We do not have time to supply it here in full.

Suffice it to say that the revolution created many of the Western World's greatest works of fiction, vast numbers of topical pamphlets and broadsides, and even more vast numbers of advertising fliers. The entrepreneurs that drove that explosion of printed material were also the tech bros of their time. They rapidly improved their machinery, their product packaging, their distribution and their advertising.

What didn't improve, however, was the product itself — the content. Ironically, it did improve in that ever more of the new publications were printed in the vulgar language of the given country. But the educated portion of the European population continued to write their works in Latin and less often in Greek. In fact, the first wave was brief and smaller, of publishing new and old works in the classical languages. Classical Greek works actually became generally available for the first time.

The second wave brought fiction in the vulgar tongues and rapidly reached a level that gave us the likes of Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes and the wide range of Italian writers from whom they stole/borrowed. Many of those Italian writers flourished before Gutenberg's press. Their books were copied by hand in monasteries and urban workshops. Copies were rare and they were very expensive.

Non-fiction, however, was the best seller. Seeking the widest possible sales (that is to say profits), it was written in the language of the common man, by freelance writers and translators, and included wild tales of men with their heads embedded in their chests, cannibals, giant sea-serpents, the most gruesome murders under the most lurid circumstances, etc. Witches were suddenly no longer rare beings but were everywhere around as was a literature informing the reader how to identify them. In short, most non-fiction was on a par with our supermarket tabloids and click-bait sites and throve for the same reasons. On the level of the pamphlet, non-fiction was in large part an entertaining topical fiction. It was not simply fiction, it was often dangerous fiction that could result in torture, violent attack, death, maiming and financial loss.

For the first 50-100 years after Gutenberg, legitimate information was largely available only in Latin. It was the universities' way of protecting their own markets. To know Latin was to know the facts of things... as they existed in classical times. More importantly, as greater circulation placed non-fiction beyond the universities' monopoly control, classical facts slowly began to give way to non-fiction based upon observation and experimentation. At first, still in Latin.

Knowing the history of the printed word, it is striking to see just how much the more recent history of the Internet runs parallel to it. Professionally vetted information — for all its was first openly available — has gone almost entirely behind paywalls as exclusive as the classical languages. Such vetting costs considerable money, much like learning, type-setting and proof-reading classical languages. After a couple of decades, subscription fees have been added to advertising in order that legacy media might cover its overheads and make a profit.

Left behind for the average reader are the popular non-fiction: small freelance “companies” that have sprung up to bring information to the multitudes. Their names suggest the situation: Knewz, MiBolsillo, Benzinga, Money Talks News, Slingshot News, The i Paper, Stockwits, Cryptopolitan. Red Effect, Irish Star, Tagtik. The full list is longer still. Many more such names attach to “news” outlets that feature paid advertising (“sponsored content”) presented as news.

In the spirit of the pamphlets of 400-500 years ago, the best from these venues tends to be brief sensationalized overviews of various pay-walled and social media content, behind sensational hyperlinked headlines, without meaningful vetting or otherwise standards. Spelling and grammar are haphazard. Typos often showing signs of having been dictated into a computer transcription program. It is unwise to believe their information without confirmation from more reputable sources.

Unlike the pamphlets, the new media provides colorful photos rather than colorful word portraits. More and more often, articles are actually slide-shows composed of pictures purchased from the growing number of online image brokers. Accompanying text is severely limited — barely more than a caption — information even moreso. Photos are not specific to the article. It is their job to keep eyes glued to the page and accompanying ads.

It took some 300 years, after Gutenberg, and a good many maimings, deaths, frauds, bankruptcies, and vast amounts of wasted time, for standards to be established for the popular media. How long it will take — if it will be accomplished at all — for the Internet revolution to develop standards to stave off the worst of the glorious and treacherous flood of popular media is an important question. It is hard to believe that we have anywhere near as much time.

Also from the Virtual Vanaprastha:

• Public Health Alert: Trump Variant Corona Virus 2025. February 17, 2025. "It is now running rampant through the body politic furiously working to hollow out its institutions and shift taxation..."
• The American Garden.  January 16, 2019.  “By 1890, the Ladies' Home Journal was the most popular advertising venue in the country. There, between ads for cook books, children's clothing, stave-less corsets, indoor water-closets, refrigerators and pianos, and popular female columnists who advised the housewife about them all, were a profusion of ads for seeds.”
• Blank Verse Now and Then.  January 1, 2019.  “Surrey was as erratic as most young noblemen during early English history, and far more brilliant, and was imprisoned several times for temper and intemperance. In the end, he became rather impatient for the gouty, porcine, syphilis-riddled Henry VIII to die, and for the Howard faction to rule as regents to the young, fragile, son conceived of the syphilitic, Edward.” 
• The Elegy and the Internet.  July 1, 2005.  ‘Drummond, we may remember, was the William Drummond, of Hawthornden, who Ben Jonson visited during a trip to Scotland, in 1619. The Scot took the time to jot a memorandum of Jonson's conversation, in which we learn inter alia that "he cursed Petrarch for redacting Verses to Sonnets, which he said were like the Tirrant's bed, wher some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short,"7 and "That Shakspear wanted Arte."’

• Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.

Also from Virtual Grub Street:

• Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”

• A Thousand Years of English Terms.  June 2, 2019.  ‘One person did not say to another, “Meet you at three o’clock”.    There was no clock to be o’.  But the church bell rang the hour of Nones and you arranged to meet “upon the Nones bell”.’

What's News?

For above a hundred years, the news media regaled the U.S. public with unprecedented amounts of information for a small fee under the old advertising model that would serve the western world so well. In print media, advertising became more science than art thus stabilizing and increasing profits. Improved color printing technologies also made advertising more effective.

With the advent of television the advertising model proved even more lucrative. Television advertising revenues were much larger, the small fee impractical (the alternative being coin-operated televisions) and unnecessary.

It is probably fair to say that the quality of the product created by the larger players, and a good many of the smaller players, in print and television, was high. Mostly what was lacking was diversity — which is to say “quite a lot” but not to the present point.

Perhaps a decade after its inception, the Internet began to offer quantities of news. The potential revenue was too much to resist and legacy media began expanding into the digital realm. The old advertising model was kept largely intact as the main source of revenue. For another decade still, the strategy was to lower production costs via the remarkable new technologies coming available and to gain audience through the vastly expanded connectivity.

Investment and overheads in order to be able to establish new venues being so tiny compared to historical models, however, “new media” rapidly captured a huge part of the available audience. The price of expertise and journalistic ethics being irreducible, they were, at best, conveniently redefined. If legacy media would follow suit they would have no superior product to offer. Sadly, however, they would be unable to manage sufficient profit without discounting that same expertise and those same ethics.

Search engines not bringing enough traffic to the larger venues, news aggregators, such as Google News, YouTube and Yahoo News, sprang up to attract more eyes. Those news venues with more resources purchased prime listing space and additionally developed their own proprietary apps to capture as much of the audience the aggregators brought to them as possible thus increasing their audience and data share.

To overhead and operating costs, scaled back by going digital, then, were added in stages: 1) IT and consulting costs; 2) placement costs on search engines; 3) SEO costs; 4) subscription costs to aggregators. The aggregators being essential, they take far-and-away the lion's share of the advertising revenue. Burgeoning new media take an ever greater share of what remains.

All of this history has arrived at my morning news. In order to take away more traffic from Google News and YouTube aggregators, Microsoft Network began locking in its own news aggregator to its Edge browser, displaying the aggregator on every New Tab that the user calls up. All comers, large and small, in the news field, were offered the chance to apply for their articles to be listed. Once the population reached optimum, in MSN judgment, the invitation-links landed on a deactivated page.

Meanwhile, the larger venues had, one at a time, begun instituting paywalls — requiring paid subscriptions — in an attempt to turn what was left of expertise, ethics and reputation into revenue. Microsoft Network has been so successful traffic-wise, however, that it has been able to require all its venues to drop their paywalls for links submitted to the MSN aggregator.

So most mornings I am regaled by a large colorful photo from Tagtik News and a headline designed to hint at compelling information. While Tagtik states that it was founded in 2008 so regular a news hound as I has never seen it until the past year. It sees itself as the future of journalism:

Tagtik News’ unique selling proposition of providing bite-sized,meticulously curated news stories resonates in an era of information overload, setting a compelling example for the future of digitaljournalism.

It exists not to provide quality journalism, by any traditional measure, but to provide a “unique selling proposition”. It is a pretext for advertising provided in the Dutch, French and English languages.

It is one of the more analytical and disciplined of the many such new media sites. The photo is sourced not from a staff photo-journalist but from several among the myriad “stock” photo and video companies that have sprung up to serve the new media and to monetize their stock by asserting newly developed legal bases to claim copyright for every video and illustration they can manage to print their name on and offer up for sale. There is no more a graphics department than there is a print shop.

The article on the other side of the headline will uniformly be 100-150 words or less. It will be general and generally disappoint the headline and it will be so free of specifics as to avoid check-able facts. It will reference an unlinked (unverifiable) source so general that expertise can only be implied to have been brought in from outside the Tagtik newsroom (such as it is). The “news” will be several days old, as the rule (some new media show contemporary headlines connecting to stories from weeks to decades old without disclaimer). The byline will be unidentifiable — in the English language version, generally initials.

Tagtik, it bears saying, is among the more successful of the new media. If for no other reason than having seen the MSN invitation soon enough to apply before it was closed down.

Also from the Library of Babel:

• Public Health Alert: Trump Variant Corona Virus 2025. February 17, 2025. "It is now running rampant through the body politic furiously working to hollow out its institutions and shift taxation..."
• The American Garden.  January 16, 2019.  “By 1890, the Ladies' Home Journal was the most popular advertising venue in the country. There, between ads for cook books, children's clothing, stave-less corsets, indoor water-closets, refrigerators and pianos, and popular female columnists who advised the housewife about them all, were a profusion of ads for seeds.”
• Blank Verse Now and Then.  January 1, 2019.  “Surrey was as erratic as most young noblemen during early English history, and far more brilliant, and was imprisoned several times for temper and intemperance. In the end, he became rather impatient for the gouty, porcine, syphilis-riddled Henry VIII to die, and for the Howard faction to rule as regents to the young, fragile, son conceived of the syphilitic, Edward.” 
• The Elegy and the Internet.  July 1, 2005.  ‘Drummond, we may remember, was the William Drummond, of Hawthornden, who Ben Jonson visited during a trip to Scotland, in 1619. The Scot took the time to jot a memorandum of Jonson's conversation, in which we learn inter alia that "he cursed Petrarch for redacting Verses to Sonnets, which he said were like the Tirrant's bed, wher some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short,"7 and "That Shakspear wanted Arte."’

• Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.

Also from Virtual Grub Street:

• Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”

• A Thousand Years of English Terms.  June 2, 2019.  ‘One person did not say to another, “Meet you at three o’clock”.    There was no clock to be o’.  But the church bell rang the hour of Nones and you arranged to meet “upon the Nones bell”.’

Shelving the books in a dying democracy.

I have undergone many changes, major and minor, for better and for worse, in my life. Over the years, when those changes come, I have grown in the habit of re-shelving the books that are always scattered throughout my rooms. Along with them I re-collect my thoughts. The underlying task is so simple that my mind cannot help but wander.

There is a pleasure to reliving moments of my life through those books and the thoughts they revive. I cannot resist dipping into a volume or two or twenty. Almost certainly Rilke, Virginia Woolf, the Transcendentalists of little Concord, Massachusetts, the artists and intelligentsia of Paris and Vienna before the Great War (as World War I was called before there was a World War II), Hofstadter (not so much Richard as Douglas), John Burroughs.

I say “my rooms,” as if I were a Fellow at Oxford, but, actually, I've long lived (wherever I've lived) in a library. Everywhere floor to ceiling bookshelves. Being a submariner and an engineer / nuclear technician by training it feels perfect that I travel dark alleyways with one of several droplights in hand.

Burroughs and his brotherhood and a raft of field guides remind me how I loved my life as a quasi-hermit (more hermit than quasi), in a little tumble-down cottage nestled in an emerald swatch of semi-tropical forest, better than any other that hasn't included my beautiful, sparkle-eyed little daughter. I might have stayed there — no telephone, no television, in the midst of a virtual bird sanctuary, Anole lizards for pets and an opossum replete with annual litter for upstairs neighbor — for the rest of my life if it had proved possible.

The world around me as of this past January 20^th, however, has so totally changed that I find myself constantly peering out the window and into the computer monitor (behind which most of my books are now “shelved”) trying to understand what I am seeing. I only now begin to shelve books, in fits and starts, with the scenes I am seeing replaying over and over as I do.

The world outside the window looks much the same, on the surface, and, when I bike through the landscape, I see the same pavement, the same trees. Though spring is blossoming around us I see almost none of the smiles that customarily bloom along with it.

The products on store shelves are considerably more expensive but that was happening before the 20^th. The neighborhood has no regular mail-carrier, no regular daily schedule. Again, a trend begun before. There are almost no birds their numbers having steadily dwindled now for decades. Some crows are evident, now, from time to time. Some grackles. A migrating flock of perhaps a dozen geese where there once were hundreds.

On the other side of the computer monitor, on the other hand, is a new hubris and ignorance, on one hand, and growing fear and anger on another. Internationally, the U.S. is recklessly destroying its reputation for dependability. Climate projections are getting worse. The President is claiming climate science is a sham and is shifting responsibility to respond to the continually increasing natural disasters onto the state governments. Economic numbers are getting worse. The President says that economic pain will be necessary in order to reverse the “false positive” economic numbers of the previous administration.

Arthur Laffer is back in the news touting his ridiculously failed economic theory that tax cuts increase revenues. The Republican congress is preparing to revive their specialized mathematical system called Dynamic Scoring created in order to justify the Laffer theory. The world's richest man is practicing the math of simply declaring (inexplicable) mathematical outcomes without showing his work (the President nodding along). In case all of this still doesn't result in the desired outcomes all the math-checkers in the government are being ferreted out and let go as a cost-cutting measure.

In spite of all of this (and much much more) — and because of it — the enormously ambitious Trump agenda — the agenda, that is to say, of the Ultra-Wealthy, to end progressive taxation and the liberal democracy and social programs which require it — is in danger of failing to meet its schedule. There being no Plan B, he has begun launching attacks against anything and anyone who might be slowing its progress. He feels justified in destroying anything and everything except for the economy that makes the Ultra-Wealthy wealthy and the instruments of authoritarian control intended to keep them that way.

Also on the other side of the monitor, I see that far and away the most useful ally of the Ultra-Wealthy is the Extreme-Left, as usual. This has been the case since the Ultra-Wealthy coӧpted the evangelical and alt-right communities (that compose the MAGA movement) in order to have enough voters to win elections. These communities receive the gratification of seeing their social agenda flourish at the cost of supporting the tax and economic agendas of their senior partner. For their part, the Ultra-Wealthy provide unlimited campaign donations and are rewarded with control of the financial machinery of the government.

The Extreme-Left assures voter turnout among MAGA for the candidates of the Ultra-Wealthy. More importantly, it assures a growing coӧptation of the center-right and of unaffiliated male vote through vigorous fore-fronting of movements such as “Me Too,” “Transgender Rights” and “Gender Fluidity” in spite of the disadvantageous economic agenda required by the Ultra -Wealthy.

Well, this certainly isn't getting any books shelved. Let's see. The Dover reprint of Bent's Life Histories of North American Birds culled from the publications of the United States National Museum. It informs me that the cardinal was reported no further north than northern Kentucky, in 1886. By 1923 numerous sightings were reported in Iowa. Already sightings had been reported as far north as southern Ontario in 1916. There was a mating pair in the boscage in front of the old hermitage. The male would fly up to the top of the tall Florida pine in the morning to welcome the day with song. Boy, do I miss that.

Also from the Library of Babel:

• Public Health Alert: Trump Variant Corona Virus 2025. February 17, 2025. "It is now running rampant through the body politic furiously working to hollow out its institutions and shift taxation..."
• The American Garden.  January 16, 2019.  “By 1890, the Ladies' Home Journal was the most popular advertising venue in the country. There, between ads for cook books, children's clothing, stave-less corsets, indoor water-closets, refrigerators and pianos, and popular female columnists who advised the housewife about them all, were a profusion of ads for seeds.”
• Blank Verse Now and Then.  January 1, 2019.  “Surrey was as erratic as most young noblemen during early English history, and far more brilliant, and was imprisoned several times for temper and intemperance. In the end, he became rather impatient for the gouty, porcine, syphilis-riddled Henry VIII to die, and for the Howard faction to rule as regents to the young, fragile, son conceived of the syphilitic, Edward.” 
• The Elegy and the Internet.  July 1, 2005.  ‘Drummond, we may remember, was the William Drummond, of Hawthornden, who Ben Jonson visited during a trip to Scotland, in 1619. The Scot took the time to jot a memorandum of Jonson's conversation, in which we learn inter alia that "he cursed Petrarch for redacting Verses to Sonnets, which he said were like the Tirrant's bed, wher some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short,"7 and "That Shakspear wanted Arte."’

• Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.

Also from Virtual Grub Street:

• Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”

• A Thousand Years of English Terms.  June 2, 2019.  ‘One person did not say to another, “Meet you at three o’clock”.    There was no clock to be o’.  But the church bell rang the hour of Nones and you arranged to meet “upon the Nones bell”.’

Public Health Alert: Trump Variant Corona Virus 2025.

The Center of Disease Control being forbidden to issue health alerts, even after a judge's order requiring them, surely it falls to us as citizens to fill the breach.

We have entered an age of pandemics. The medical community has known to expect it for some decades now. The growing world population, especially in impoverished regions, together with the close proximity in some to animal species that host a range of pathogens, mean it is only a matter of time before the next epidemic occurs. The interconnectedness of our world means that every epidemic is a potential pandemic.

Furthermore, our antibiotics have proven to have a devastating side effect. While they give us a sense of ever increasing security, enough bacteria survive them to build up ever-growing populations immune to their effects.

Various scientific groups have been modeling the likely biological outcomes of these facts. How many sociologists have thought to model the social effects, local or worldwide, however, is not clear. We tend to leave that kind of research to eccentrics and dystopian novelists. Especially in the instance in which the pathogen is a political idea.

But to the political pathogen we must add its constituents as modelers. It is most certainly not operating on instinct. Unlike cellular agents, the societal pathogen must develop a conscious plan of attack. Such a plan requires a model. We see this in the various think tanks and 501(c)(3)s that have grown up around the Republican Party over the past 50 years.

First the party had to be conquered. The name had to be kept in order to wield its influence and connections. The party was at a particularly vulnerable moment due to its shrinking base. For this reason it welcomed a foreign agent that took it over. As is the way of viruses, it made the party into a zombie vehicle of its will. The pathogen next took control of state legislatures and institutions.

Thus fortified, the zombie vehicle had a power-base. Like any virus, it had established control over a few organs and processes, at first, with an eye only to taking over the entire body.

It is not generally recognized that the pathogen itself does not have an Alt-Right orientation in the least. It is resoundingly intent upon the ultra-wealthy being free of taxation and regulation and able to wield the police forces and the military to enforce their interests. Everything else is just a tool to achieve its goals. Its identification with the Evangelical Religious Right is merely a tactic. It controls most of the money in the country but it needs votes in order to acquire the power of the government to forward its objectives. The ends justify the means.

As the population of the Religious Right shrank, the pathogen's strategy would be to replace their numbers by coöpting disaffected voting groups so opposed to progressive government that they could not find candidates to represent them. The strategy was to add them to the Religious Right in order create cobbled-together majorities eager to dismantle secular political norms, institutions and legal processes, thus creating the conditions to bring an end to the income tax, business and financial regulation and the social safety net that made them essential.

The model was simple. Keep absolute control of the party's money. Coöpt radical communities through their sense of marginalization and increase their voting rates by describing them as victims of insidious conspiracy. These voters were only too glad to assist the pathogen in conquering the body politic in exchange for non-monetary benefits such as the right to reject those “others” who marginalized them, to daunt various “others” by carrying firearms in areas not inhabited by the hyper-wealthy, exclude “others” from job and housing markets, etc. A “conservative” news media was created in order to feed them constant propaganda and instructions.

This having been achieved, the pathogen has developed into full-blown Trump Variant Corona Virus 2025. It is now running rampant through the body politic furiously working to hollow out its institutions and shift taxation (and the National Debt) from the ultra-wealthy to an already shrinking middle class and the rapidly growing poor. Constant Internet and television images (the nervous system of the body politic) are being deployed in order to keep the body off balance and the coöpted voters so mesmerized that they are unaware that they are to receive absolutely nothing of value for their role — that they will be among the biggest losers inasmuch as they are no longer needed.

Federal spending is scheduled to be reduced by demolishing the social safety net — a change that will as consequence greatly reduce wages for all but the dedicated minions with high-level skills that obey the orders of the ultra-wealthy without question. Spending will also be reduced by ending humanitarian aid and shifting the financial burden of alliances totally onto the backs of those allies and bullying them into ending taxes on U.S. Companies that operate within their borders. The power of the U.S. will no longer be used to enforce international law but will sweep it away wherever necessary in order to benefit its ultra-wealthy ruling class.

If the timing works out, the Trump Variant Corona Virus 2025 will have less and less need of the coöpted voters (now called “MAGA”). They will desperately cling to their belief that the lies of the pathogen promise genuine rewards, nonetheless. Tariffs will drive high inflation for all including MAGA. The federal minimum wage will remain $7.25 (or the equivalent) for all including MAGA. Natural disasters will ravage the planet and the homes of the common man including MAGA. Potable water will become an expensive market commodity. The wealth-gap will become immeasurable. It will all be Joe Biden's fault.

This is the model upon which the Trump Variant Corona Virus 2025 operates. Already it has shown frustration that not all is proceeding as planned. It was aware from the start that threats, lies and bluster, would be necessary in order to confuse the body politic, to dominate historical allies and to impress the coöpted voters. Those tactics having been insufficient, outrageous demands are being delivered with an absolute confidence designed to amplify the effect. Failures can only be addressed by doubling down.

What, you may ask, can be done to prevent the body succumbing to the Trump Variant Corona Virus 2025? Can there be a cure?

Also from the Library of Babel:

• The American Garden.  January 16, 2019.  “By 1890, the Ladies' Home Journal was the most popular advertising venue in the country. There, between ads for cook books, children's clothing, stave-less corsets, indoor water-closets, refrigerators and pianos, and popular female columnists who advised the housewife about them all, were a profusion of ads for seeds.”
• Blank Verse Now and Then.  January 1, 2019.  “Surrey was as erratic as most young noblemen during early English history, and far more brilliant, and was imprisoned several times for temper and intemperance. In the end, he became rather impatient for the gouty, porcine, syphilis-riddled Henry VIII to die, and for the Howard faction to rule as regents to the young, fragile, son conceived of the syphilitic, Edward.” 
• The Elegy and the Internet.  July 1, 2005.  ‘Drummond, we may remember, was the William Drummond, of Hawthornden, who Ben Jonson visited during a trip to Scotland, in 1619. The Scot took the time to jot a memorandum of Jonson's conversation, in which we learn inter alia that "he cursed Petrarch for redacting Verses to Sonnets, which he said were like the Tirrant's bed, wher some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short,"7 and "That Shakspear wanted Arte."’

• Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.

Also from Virtual Grub Street:

• Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”

• A Thousand Years of English Terms.  June 2, 2019.  ‘One person did not say to another, “Meet you at three o’clock”.    There was no clock to be o’.  But the church bell rang the hour of Nones and you arranged to meet “upon the Nones bell”.’

The Mass-Production of Individuality

Mass production and mass consumption have steadily been redefining the Individual such that the term has become synonymous with "Consumer".  Behavioral algorithms are the final stage in which the last vestiges of the Individual are being eradicated.  They standardize the last, most stubbornly resistant step in the production-consumption process: desire.  Because the data shows that people deeply desire the feeling that they are Individuals, our behavioral algorithms must constantly inculcate the illusion that consumption choices are the proper definition of "individuality" in order to accomplish optimum outcomes.  Because the truth-value of an algorithm, like any logico-mathematical equation, is its effectiveness in solving a problem upon which it is brought to bear, then, the existence of individuality has actually been proved “true” by virtue of its eradication.  We mass-produce individuality.

 

Cultural products

When cultural products are valued according to how many units they sell they can only become products designed for the mob. The culture, after a number of iterations, each requiring ever greater sales, can only become driven by ever greater collective mood swings, as is the case with mobs. Neither creator nor consumer able any longer to have an individual experience. Neither to have an individual identity. Each subsumed in the mob.

A mob can never see any difference between what it wants and what is right. 

Words don’t mean much anymore: "Content Creator".

Young women with millions of “followers” who post videos to teach young girls how to apply nail polish are now called “content creators”. The brand name of their sponsor’s nail polish products are carefully kept turned toward the camera. At the end of the ten minute video there runs an advertisement from the sponsor. Words don’t mean much anymore.

To have no past is to have no present.

To have no past is to have no present. To manufacture the past is to have a manufactured present. It might be asserted that it is not possible to have anything but a manufactured past. Should this be the definition of history from which we must manufacture the past then the only way to have a rich, nuanced, highly functional, non-partisan present is to manufacture a rich, nuanced, highly functional, independent history. To re-contextualize history in order to make it serve partisan purposes can only arrive at a de-contextualized, unstable present with no other reality than what can be imposed via power.

To fail to accomplish perfect certitude about all events and contexts of the past is the unfortunate and insuperable fate of all legitimate attempts at history. For this reason, the manufacture of history is a demanding pursuit requiring each subsequent practitioner to improve upon the previous attempts at disinterested improvement of the record in order to bring it closer and closer to the truth.  The victors do, indeed, write the histories, and, over time, the historians rewrite them. 

DARKNESS.

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came, and went—and came, and brought no day,

And men forgot their passions in the dread

Of this their desolation ; and all hearts

Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:

And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,

The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,

The habitations of all things which dwell,

Were burnt for beacons ; cities were consumed,

And men were gathered round their blazing homes

To look once more into each other's face;

Happy were those who dwelt within the eye

Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:

A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;

Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour

They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks

Extinguish’d with a crash—and all was black.

The brows of men by the despairing light

Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits

The flashes fell upon them ; some lay down

And hid their eyes and wept ; and some did rest

Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;

And others hurried to and fro, and fed

Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up

With mad disquietude on the dull sky,

The pall of a past world ; and then again

With curses cast them down upon the dust,

And gnash'd their teeth and howfd: the wild birds shriek'd,

And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,

And .flap their useless wings ; the wildest brutes

Came tame and tremulous ; and vipers crawl'd

And twined themselves anions the multitude,

Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food:

And War, which for a moment was no more,

Did glut himself again; — a meal was bought

With blood, and each sate sullenly apart

Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;

All earth was but one thought—and that was death,

Immediate and inglorious; and the pang

Of famine fed upon all entrails — men

Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;

The meagre by the meagre were devoured,

Even dogs assail’d their masters, all save one,

And he was faithful to a corse, and kept

The birds and beasts and famished men at bay,

Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead

Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,

But with a piteous and perpetual moan

And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand

Which answered not with a caress—he died.

The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two

Of an enormous city did survive,

And they were enemies; they met beside

The dying embers of an altar-place

Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things

For an unholy usage; they raked up,

And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands

The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath

Blew for a little life, and made a flame

Which was a mockery; then they lifted up

Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld

Each other's aspects — saw, and shriek'd, and died —

Even of their mutual hideousness they died,

Unknowing who he was upon whose brow

Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,

The populous and the powerful was a lump,

Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless —

A lump of death — a chaos of hard clay.

The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,

And nothing stirred within their silent depths;

Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,

And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropped

They slept on the abyss without a surge —

The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,

The moon their mistress had expired before;

The winds were withered in the stagnant air,

And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need

Of aid from them — She was the universe.

 

“Darkness” by George Gordon, the Lord Byron.

from The Prisoner of Chillon (1816).

 

 

Reality as construct.

Reality and Truth are mere constructs we have discovered.  All these millennia we have been trapped by elites in an illusion created to oppress us.

Now we will put the insidious illusion aside and embrace the… um…  The what?  The Truth?  The real Truth?  Derived from what?  The real Reality?  The right Illusion?

Facts do not scale.

A fact that has been focus grouped is no longer a fact, it is an opinion.  The only fact that can be determined by a poll is which among several prepackaged opinions a test population prefers.  Facts (to use the popular marketing terminology of the present moment) “do not scale”.  They do not fail to be facts if they are unpopular.  They do not become greater or more factual inasmuch as opinion proves to favor them.  Because they do not, the tools of marketing can neither produce nor arrive at truths.  In fact, a Democracy of polling and focus groups begins to believe that truths are an undemocratic illusion.  We have entered a market driven age in which vast resources are available (for a price), and, except for a tiny minority of specially trained persons, only opinions can possibly result from their use.  Those opinions can only compete for market share in the fashion of all other products.  A Democracy based upon marketing methods can only arrive at dysfunction or empty ritual… or, as is the case at the moment, a struggle to determine which of the two will prevail.  The only question is which will win out in the end.

A life without reflection...

A life without reflection is an animal's life.  Prevailing social constructs become the functional equivalent of instinctive behavior in the animal.  The person who lives such a life values it as an animal values its life.