Written in fast response to a recent article from Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic, The End of News. I emailed him a trim version and the full text as well to the letters editor, but knowing both missives are bound for the crank file I share here. The note to end this year on.
I’ve my own theory for media preferring chain gangs to bucket brigades, one which many prefer to avoid for reasons to follow. Simply put, I think the masses embraced too fully the DIY self-segregation business model of all the online socials, formulating ideological gated communities for barring entry into their lives of anything unfamiliar or uncomfortable. They took to the power trip so well they expect the exact same results from schools, and from news platforms, regardless of partisanship. And as the world does not exist for anyone’s pleasure and the function of truth remains something other than flattery, every dream fell short, unreal expectations over the self-determination of others proving an even more egocentric and altogether unnecessary incarnation of living beyond one’s means. And, they pointedly seek out escapism from acknowledging this self-defeat, escapism from any personal responsibility at all, because sacrifice is the business of others and while everyone is capable of ego and every experience we know as evil is merely someone somewhere acting in self-interest, the masses would rather leave exceptions for their own, as well as for those they wish to be, wish to befriend and wish to fuck. The accountability for understanding how this results in the very problems we face for ourselves, whether by indulging the loudest egos we happen across with influence over livelihoods and well-being or pardoning our own, evidently requires impossible soul-searching for a peoples who sold theirs for the independence (from forethought or hindsight) to get lost in a cut from the same cloth crowd of human capital, of human shields. The next civil war will be a free-for-all. Media has indeed failed, but this is only emblematic for Americans righteously failing themselves.