Words to the Wise

The Week describes its "Daily News Digest" as follows: "Distilled from dozens of the world’s most trusted news sources, each update delivers the clarity and perspective you need to make up your own mind."

Arguments that the news media is in the business of "telling people what to think" generally don't hold water for me because, as I've mentioned before, I'm of the opinion that people chose their news sources based on what they think, rather than the other way around. And I also understand that many media outlets, including The Week, are as much, if not more, in the business of advocacy as they are information. Again, because this is what their readership expects of them. Along with, it seems, a certain amount of flattery.

One reason that news outlets tell their audiences that the final decision is in their hands is that it implies that there is some other group of people who simply blindly believe what they're told to, and lack the faculties to do otherwise. Fox News, with their "We report, you decide" slogan, was engaging in this, casting aspersions on both the "mainstream media" and the "mainstream" audience. This does everyone a disservice. But it stands to reason. Just about all of the news one encounters on a daily basis is effectively a diversion from other things. Not in the sense that it's a "distraction" from the "more important" things that people "should" be paying attention to, but in the sense that it isn't actionable. There was an audio story from The Atlantic in my podcast feed on the Darién Gap, the "Tapón del Darién," where Panama and Columbia meet. Given that it links South and Central America, a lot of migrant traffic goes through the area, and most of the piece was made of up of the human-interest stories of said migrants. Interesting, to a point, but not really useful in terms of taking any action one way or another. The push factors that drove people to leave their home countries and the pull factors that resulted in their destination being the United States were simply out-of-scope for the article as written. It had a viewpoint, and advocated for it, because, again, the readership of The Atlantic expects that, and I suspect it feels good for people to have their viewpoints reflected in the media they interact with. But they aren't being spoon-fed "what to think" any more than anyone else is. They're engaging with outlets that they trust. And maybe also flatter them to some degree.

Bold Choice

There is someone who sells advertising space on LinkedIn who scored a real coup.

LinkedIn's approach to advertising is a bit different from most websites. Given that LI is basically just another social media platform, advertisements are just another post, albeit a "sponsored" one. So rather than being special modules that have to be dropped into a page (and ad-blockers can detect), the ads look just like anything else in people's feeds.

Given this, I'm curious how they are targeted, because I've seen this ad pop up in my feed a few times recently. (This is another side effect of LinkedIn ads being posts on the site... one can link to them directly...)

To be sure, management types are just as likely to use LinkedIn as anyone else. But most companies, especially large ones, are going to have more individual contributors than managers, so one wonders if LinkedIn is really the right place for a spot that comes across as anti-labor. Especially given the number of people who use the site primarily to look for their next job. Of course, this may be why comments are turned off for the post. But people can still repost this into their own feeds. The one repost of this ad, was, unsurprisingly, critical of it.

Many businesses need to advertise their services; this being how they inform people that their services are available. And it's understood that advertising is something of a crapshoot.  After all, John Wanamaker is reported to have said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” But I suspect I know which half of the advertising budget this spot would up in.

Another Round

Video game performers, like voice actors and motion-capture performers are currently striking, hoping to pressure video game studios into commitments around the rules for the use of generative automation tools to simulate their performances and to be paid for such uses as if it were new performance, royalties, in a manner of speaking.

In the same way as the broader entertainment industry strike earlier, I suspect that this is going to backfire to a certain degree, because there are always going to be small, independent studios that aren't covered by any agreement. A SAG-AFTRA member quoted in the NPR story on the strike casts the dispute as being one between studio executives and workers, because portraying corporate executives as greedy and hostile to those less well-off than themselves tends to be a winner, but unless the tools are expensive enough that only the major studios than afford to use them, the big names are as likely to be followers in the use of the technology as they are to be leaders.

And if they are followers, then all bets are off. Smaller studios, including those that are only a single person with some passion and a game idea, are going to be all over generative automated tools as a way of putting out games with the polish and appearance that the big studios manage. Sure, a lot of games indulge in quirky pixel art or proudly display graphics that haven't been cutting-edge for the past quarter-century, but a lot of that is driven as much by necessity as it is by aesthetics. After all, if people didn't want the latest and greatest, I'm pretty sure that Square Enix could have saved a fortune on their Final Fantasy VII updates by sticking to the animation style of the original. And some of what made Resident Evil so charming back in the day were clever uses of workarounds for the technology of the day; Capcom left the old look behind for a reason. Tools that allow lower-budget operations to put out better products will be adopted, regardless of how often SAG-AFTRA attempts to stand athwart progress shouting "Stop!"

One of the ways in which unions protect their members is by shielding them from competition; in this case from technology. But they can only shield members from organizations they have pull with. SAG-AFTRA may be able to intimidate some small studios by threatening to stifle them once they become large enough that they would need to rely on unionized labor, but that's unlikely to work on an individual or small group of friends who are working on a labor of love. And if these tools allow for these independent games to be competitive in the marketplace, they're going to attract more people to use them.

The answer to automation is always going to have to be the next thing. If automation is going to produce the next wave or jobs that only people can do, then the goal should be to start looking for that wave now, and bringing it about, rather than sitting on the shore commanding the tide to turn back. (After all, even kings know better than to think that would work.) But that's a serious ask for an organization that's built on protecting the ability of people to do things as they've been done in the past.

Distortion Field

I was listening to a recent episode of the Plain English podcast, one that was investigating the question of "Why are Conservatives happier than Progressives?" Guest Greg Lukianoff put forward the theory that much of Progressive culture works on what he calls "Reverse Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy." In effect, instead of combating the cognitive distortions that lead people to become anxious and depressed, Progressivism stokes them, and in ways that Conservatism manages to avoid, even when it engages in some of the very same behaviors.

One question that host Derek Thompson asked, that would have liked to see more time spent on was the nature of the problem that Progressive culture had set out to solve with this Reverse CBT regimen they'd started on. And that's kind of a shame, because I think understanding what circumstances a behavior is attempting to adapt to is very important in both understanding why it is maladaptive and what a better option would be.

I suspect that a lot of it deals with self-esteem and self-worth, given that those are prime drivers of many cognitive distortions. While I suspect that it's really no different than any other time, the modern world seems to be a particularly difficult place for people to maintain positive images, some people of themselves, and some people of others. While I agree with Mr. Lukianoff that the political utility of fear leads to the political establishment using it as a tool, I think that it politics doesn't create fear so much as find and amplify it. To paraphrase Dahlia Lithwick, if you scare people's faces off, they will vote.

But it occurs to me that just as I replaced "click" in Ms. Lithwick's original with "vote," one coiuld replace with any number of other actions. The more I think about it, the more institutions in the world around me come across as being invested in people's fears, and thusly in the cognitive distortions that feed those fears, as a way of looking out for their own interests. Perhaps the question isn't why Progressives have such high rates of depression and anxiety, but when those maladies are coming for everyone else.

Is Who He Is

“I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”
Donald Trump. 31 July, 2024

The idea that anything that Donald Trump did during his term in office comes close to signing the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 is laughable on its face. Yet he repeats the claim over and over. So I have the same question today that I had beck in 2016 when Mr. Trump would talk about all of the things that he would do for Black people: Who is he talking to?

And this is emblematic of the way that Mr. Trump speaks when he's not in front of a friendly audience, because that's the only audience that he every really talks to. Everyone else, he talks about. I suppose it comes with being in a position where he doesn't really have to listen to anyone, because any competent campaign manager, or even staffer, would have told him to actually attempt to address the audience in front of him, just as he would at a rally. But this has never really been Mr. Trump's style, and I think that his surprise upset of Hillary Clinton in 2016 reinforced for him the idea that it didn't need to be.

It's odd, because I suspect that Mr. Trump could be as popular with the public as a whole as he appears to want to be, and tells people that he is. But that would mean giving up attempting to play various groups off against one another. And I think that's simply too central to who he is.