I wanted to be that change and not just report it. Sometimes I’ve succeeded, sometimes I have not. Elizabeth Nickson, another renegade former journalist and Canadian (her career include stints as an editor at Time and Life magazine) describes acerbically the delusions of the contemporary press corps. For some reason, modern journalists consider themselves to be the peers of their subjects:

Average journalism-school graduates watched their fellow undergrads go on to wealth in finance, innovation in technology, or power in politics. Meanwhile, the high Masters of Journalism are struggling to avoid replacement by college interns and to out-write AI software. After years in expensive schools cozying up to the right people, they believe that an equal professional respect is due. The trouble is, they’ve done little to earn it.

The media follows a socialism of status, demanding cultural equity with the newsmakers they cover. The members of the media don’t realize that the elites consider them with as little regard as does their dwindling audience. Striving for acceptance into the right social circles makes them all the more desperate to parrot the conventional wisdom of the ruling class. See, I’m on your team, the reporter thinks, as the Vice Undersecretary for the Department of Agriculture (Tropical Fruit Division) glances across the room to find someone worthy of his notice….

Perhaps journalists could improve…by not catastrophizing every issue that has plagued humanity since ancient Sumer. But one crisis left unnoticed has doomed journalism to dwindling audiences, rising irrelevance, and public contempt. Newsrooms from Washington to San Francisco, New York to London, suffer from a humility crisis. What makes this odd is that journalists have so much to be humble about.

This is part of her essay contributed to Michael Walsh’s new book Against the Corporate Media: Forty-two Ways the Press Hates You (2024).

I’m far from certain I could bear to read 448 pages about the contemporary press but for those who care about fourth estate, it looks like obligatory reading.

On a serious note, what’s gone wrong with journalism is the tendency for publications to no longer pay their reporters properly and no profits from the press. Journalists need a side gig. Side gigs depend on being considered “easy to work with” and “cooperative. Almost all newspapers and magazines are money losers now, and their future existence depends not on their readers, but on their advertisers and their corporate sponsors.

Courage has left the building, and modern mainstream journalists have become PR hacks instead of investigative/critical journalists.

Substack and independent websites provide the vast majority of serious reporting these days. The decline started with the rise of the internet. Journalists slowly became toothless from as far back as the year 2000.

^* I wrote regularly for The Economist, The Moscow Times, Dance International; produced news spots for ABC Television and short documentaries for Radio-Canada.

UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming discussing how we can make our information ecosystem safer and more humane

There is a genocide going on in Palestine, with at least 200,000 women and children dead, either form direct bombing, or sniping or malnutrition.

The US elections have turned into mudslinging events, with votes cast by non-citizens and widespread ballot fraud.

The EU has turned into an unelected oligarchy of despots, who are stealing our tax revenues to turn our peaceful lands and trading zone into a “military union”.

Taiwan is being disinherited as we speak, with its billion-dollar chip factories migrated to Texas. Taiwan will no longer be a trading and manufacturing powerhouse, running positive trade deficits, but a military camp running deficits.

Women are having their faces smashed in by gold-medal winning XY chromosome boxers, while Thomas Bach the head of the IOC, mumbles in Teutonic English that it’s impossible to determine what a woman is.

Israeli athletes, many of whom are IOF members and war criminals, participate in those Olympics with no restrictions.

All of this is before turning our attention to the Southern Hemisphere and Africa.

In the middle of these issues, the best Medium’s editors and publisher can come up with is online safe spaces?^*

It’s a crying shame as there are some very good writers on Medium (great, I’m not sure yet), writing about the latest themes. The annual membership at $50 is great value. Unlike Substack where one must pay for every single author individually (libertarian individualism), Medium is one payment takes all (collective, communal) and writers are rewarded by foot traffic to their articles.

One day Medium will hopefully have a publisher who cares about the world and the people in it, instead of a navel-genital-gazing twit.^**

^* The publisher Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine rattles on an on about making Medium a trans-positive space. Not about changing the world to reduce poverty, not about raising educational standards, not about world peace. Trans is the one issue the chubby publisher really cares about. For the moment, I can’t determine if Stubblebine (a name straight out of the Shire) is a useful fool or a paid-for-spook-fool like Keir Starmer.

^** Quora is just as badly slanted in favour of nonsensical woke liberalism to a constant thump of Orwellian war drums, Facebook is worse and X is on a steep hill downhill after a few months of relative freedom.

let’s just grant that someday, the tech will be mature enough that this is possible, and let’s even say it goes beyond videogames to movies, to visual art, to graphic design, to writing, etc. Let’s say that AI gets to a place where any joe blow can put in a prompt, and get a competent, and even let’s be generous and say good product out of it. A solid 8/10. So… who the hell is going to buy it? Because videogames as an industry is already entirely saturated with products that range a whole spectrum from utter dogshit to amazing works of technical expertise, writing, design, etc. There are over 70,000 games on Steam alone now, with 9,000 added in the last 9 months. If this tech actually got to this place, there will be exponentially more games, because all you have to do is tell an AI what you want to play.

And you can take that further: Movies are also highly saturated as an industry, especially as larger studios move ever further into less making “movies” or “series” and just making “content” endlessly remixing their intellectual properties. So now, all of those companies (and all the people who like their stuff) can now just make their own Iron Man movie? Their own Wandavision? Just endlessly making and remaking and remaking, as though tons of people aren’t already sick to death of all the television programs and movies that are being made?

And again, you can just keep extending this to any media: print, music, art… we have more of everything now than we ever have before and the goal of companies like Adobe, like OpenAI, etc. is to put even more powerful creative tools into even more hands, broadening the group of people who can create stuff but like… even if you take it as granted that this can be done…

Who the hell is watching all of this stuff? Who is playing all of these games? And why in the world would you pay to watch someone else’s AI movie when you can pay to generate your own with whatever you want in it? Why would you ever buy a game off Steam again if you can just ask your game making AI to make you the exact game you want, even just copying the damn description out of steam?

All I see this doing is potentially killing off dozens of creative industries and funneling shit tons of creative control and platform-style power to a handful of massive corporations, running warehouses full of fucking graphics cards, to generate the same games, the same movies, the same music, over, and over, and over, to suit everyone’s personal taste, and absolutely destroying entire rainforest’s worth of electricity to accomplish it. And like… why do we want that?

This is a great point. When something becomes common it loses all value. The great Tulip deflation. Critical mass was reached.

When one can design movies in less time than it takes to write a review, it means there will be millions of movies created every day instead of thousands every year. You might watch your close friends’ designer movies, the same way the pre-Great War intelligentsia used to read our best friends’ poetry.

In his own life, Jobs had a daughter born out of wedlock with artist Chrisann Brennan. For some reason Jobs rejected Lisa Brennan for a few years before finally naming a computer after her.

Writer Lisa Brennan-Jobs

Curiously both sister and daughter are writers. A high level of verbal communication appears to be in Jobs genes. As Jobs is biologically half-Syrian, the entire Jobs family are a poster child against the absurd jingois against the intellectual abilities of the Middle Eastern peoples. It really makes wonder if Nobel peace prize counts are not more a question of the restriction of opportunity to those from Western countries.

Brennan-Jobs writing is splendid. Her treatment of the complexities of the Ivy League and fraternities in a story about date rape is spot on. Brennan-Jobs describes eventual acceptance into the special circles of the Ivy League and how it seems like another, better world to an outsider:

One weekend that summer the four of us went to Avery’s summerhouse in New Hampshire. She drove her father’s red MG with the top down and it was just right, just how it should be, I thought, on the East Coast during college in the summer with friends. The house was small, clean and furnished beautifully, expensively. The walls were thick. Vintage quilts spilled over antique four-posters.  The house was two stories, rectangular, with a patio and a lawn in back that sloped down and ended at an inlet of the Atlantic ocean. There was no beach, just a little drop down. I didn’t understand that the water was ocean, and not lake, until we jumped in and I tasted the salt and felt the sharp cold. It had a power that a lake didn’t have, too, even though it was calm on the top. Lake water seemed thinner. I had never seen this kind of ocean before, this domesticated version of the Pacific. Later we made dinner together and ate on the patio as the sky darkened. I extrapolated, watching the ocean from the porch, sitting with my friends, eating: here with these people, even wild and violent things were calm.

I began to wonder whether I’d been wading too deeply through my life, hampered by unnecessary seriousness. Maybe life could be lived more on the surface layer, where the sheen is.

Later Brennan-Jobs reveals the friend who introduced her to these perfect circles had a dark streak and had destroyed the life of the young woman she had just met in London:

“There’s something I want to tell you,” she said softly. Then she hesitated. “Maybe I shouldn’t say anything at all.”

I had a feeling this was about Cole. “Cole and I are just friends,” I said. “You don’t have to worry. We’re not a couple or anything.”

She began to tell me her story.

It was not, I learned, a crush at all. She had met Cole at a party at one of Harvard’s final clubs. She had a few drinks there, but didn’t remember anything after that. She woke up the next day in an unfamiliar bed, knowing that she’d had sex, missing her underwear. She went to the hospital and tested positive for the presence of Rohypnol—the “date rape drug”—in her blood.

I’d never heard of Rohypnol before. Emily said it made you cognizant, even excited or blissful, in the moment, and then you forget everything the next day. She didn’t know who had slipped the drug into her drink or who had had sex with her. Several people told her later that she and Cole had sex that night in the club in front of a group of people.

At the time, I learned, she was training to be a doctor at Harvard and had almost completed her course.  She dropped out after the incident with Cole and returned to her native London.

Here the banality of evil resonates quietly. This is what the Ivy League is about. The propriety is all surfaces, underneath which a morass of Kennedy ravishments and careless murder. The same dangers F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about in The Great Gatsby:

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

In another essay about abandoning vegetarianism, Brennan-Jobs nails the paradox perfectly in describing her first baked chicken. The human body is very unhappy without meat over time. All the frustration at the murder of animals for food does not change the underlying cravings of the body for flesh.

I felt unfastened, too, roasting the chicken today, eating it at night with my boyfriend. It wasn’t my first time eating meat – but it was my first time eating meat as a meat-eater. It was moist with crispy skin and there were vegetables, too, cooked in the juices in the same pan: beautiful white beets with red veins, shallots with burnt and twisting stems, sweet potatoes – all upstaged, though, by the flavorful meat that sat between us, glistening. It collapsed the space between us, brought us closer, I think, with comfort and normality; it also collapsed time, made the vegetarian years fade.

The very word vegetarian has so many different meanings, one can never be sure what someone else means or even what one means oneself.

I grew up, left home and traveled farther and farther from California to the East Coast, then to England, then to Italy. I slipped through holes in understanding and language: in Boston one can be vegetarian and eat fish; in England a vegetarian may also eat fish, and rarely objects to the meat that flavors a dish; in Italy una vegetariana may sample everything, as the population is perplexed by the concept of meatlessness; little exceptions seem unavoidable.

I absorbed the excuses and ate. I strayed as far as I could safely stray into the universe of flesh, emboldened by anonymity, right up to the point when I would be questioned, and then stopped.  And if I was troubled by the difference between what I said I was, and what I ate, the taste of the tender, flavorful meat seemed absolution enough, as if the spiritual problem was mitigated, the animal suffering alleviated, the question of my identity (a vegetarian? who eats meat?) obfuscated by my pleasure.

I deeply sympathise with Brennan-Jobs. I loathe the idea of eating meat, consuming flesh. I wonder about the health of the activity given the tortured flesh from modern day factory farms, pumped up with fatteners and hormones. Or even the terror of transported animals forced into slaughter houses. Consuming their death throes cannot be good for us.

Most people in the West eat far too much meat. The human body needs meat about one meal every two days. I try to restrict myself to that rhythm and make fish one out of every second meal. But abolishing meat altogether creates a slow decline to weakness. I know, I’ve been vegetarian for as long as a year at a time.

It could be worse. Fijans ate other humans like we eat beef. And when one sees what Westerners have done to Fiji or to the Philippines one can hardly blame their blood thirstiness.

Brennan-Jobs essay takes us deep into the riddle of flesh eating in delicious prose. Alas, it would be wonderful if she would post more prolifically to her weblog. There are only four or five posts for the last two years.

While I am far from convinced that Steve Jobs and Apple have done any good in the world of technology in the last five years (I share Stallman’s walled garden and privacy concerns), Brennan-Jobs fine writing is enough to take the sheen off my dismay.