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I've been a news editor for WantToKnow.info for many years. During this time, I've summarized about 6K news reports about high level corruption and cover-ups, primarily from mainstream outlets. I watched mainstream reporting shift dramatically in 2016, then again in 2020. Both shifts involved collusion between political and corporate forces to push control regime narratives and sideline dissenting voices.
At the same time, more and more news outlets have installed paywalls and anti-adblocker features on their websites. Everybody complains about this but almost no one is talking about the deeper implications of the trend. These deeper implications involve opening the door to a degree of totalitarian control we definitely don't want.
News reporting is our culture's mechanism for keeping society informed about what's happening. Someone has to pay for this reporting. The advertising revenue model for news media worked when the world was paper-based. Back then, you could buy a paper for a trivial sum of money and pass that paper along to anyone else for no additional cost. The ads you'd encounter while reading this paper consisted of print and still images.
Those days are long gone. On a basic level, most online ads today are pure malware. They burn cognitive resources, capture personally identifying information, and waste your device's computing power. When a website demands that you turn off your ad blocker, what it's really demanding is that you allow your device to be infected with malware, typically from unknown third parties.
Society's primary mechanism for staying informed obviously shouldn't depend on our willingness to infect ourselves with garbage. But ads aren't the only revenue source used by mainstream media. Paywalls and registration walls are also widespread. To pass beyond these walls, you must create an account whose activity is closely monitored.
That means news outlets now know exactly who is reading exactly what. And once this information exists, it can be exploited by corporate interests or government agencies. The American surveillance state is already a public private partnership. Reverse search warrants are now being used by law enforcement to identify criminal suspects based on Google queries. It's not a stretch to imagine our news consumption habits being used against us.
There are two great dangers in account-based delivery of news. First is the danger of customization. I'm personally a fan of customized news feeds, but there does exist the potential for these feeds to be manipulated, in extreme cases presenting one version of reality to one group and another version of reality to another group, leading to conflict between groups.
The greater danger of account-based delivery of news is that political forces would secretly obtain user data and use this to systematically identify and suppress dissidents. We've seen how comparably systematic repression was done across social media platforms to censor and manipulate COVID information. So our control regime has recently demonstrated the willingness to use technological dirty tricks to fool us into believing the official story. Forcing users to have accounts to read news gives the powers that be yet another set of dirty tricks to use against us.
If the revenue model for online news shouldn't be advertising or standard account-based subscriptions, what's left? Nonprofit news and affordable anonymized subscription models. I'd love to see nonprofit news grow. And I can envision a future media network running on Hive or EOS micropayments.
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.