Breakout One: The Pre-Forum Press
Although the first people to report on the destruction in an official capacity were called reporters, the meaning of the term has drifted significantly over the last two-hundred years. Here, we must pause a moment to explain, for the problems I will now describe were of primary motivation to what followed.
Modern readers would better understand “reporters” of this age as News Sellers or perhaps News Reactors. While reporting did, of course, exist prior to the creation of the Index -the lack of trustworthy decentralized reporting being one of the primary reasons the Forum and the Index found mass adoption- it was difficult to track or quantify and was sustained mostly by textual mediums. Even still, the concept of transparent, traceable, meritorious, subject-level prediction simply did not exist on a large scale and it was not uncommon for News Sellers who had publicly deceived their audiences -several prominent News Sellers of the century, when caught in lies, claimed in legal proceedings that they were not actual reporters but entertainers, going so far as to say that no reasonable person could possibly take them seriously, and received favorable rulings- to retain both their positions and their prominence.
More strangely, the news industry was economically sustained by advertising. It was completely common for news programs to be interrupted by advertisements for laundry detergent or breakfast cereal or gasoline-powered vehicles. This was a cultural norm for pre-Forum society, and almost no one questioned why news reports should be interrupted by advertisements for life insurance, or foot powder. The strangeness of the juxtaposition, the absolute inappropriateness of it, was as invisible to them as the air they breathed. And all the while, this structure created a myriad of unintended consequences and misaligned incentives, including once driving nations to war over the marketing of bananas. As the only other known alternative was state-run media, this monstrous construction seemed the best possibility imaginable. Without the Forum to price universal social goods very few such social goods existed.
As the public face of reporting at the end of the previous age was also produced largely by television networks that also produced entertainment content, a confusion developed between acting and reporting. “Reporters” of the age were typically physically attractive. Hours were spent on their grooming each day, and budgets for wardrobe and make-up often exceed budgets for fact-checkers. Very few considered this a sign that a negative selective pressure was being exerted on the news industry against competence, yet later studies would show that as public trust in the news began to decline the attractiveness of reporters inversely increased in roughly the same proportion. By the time the Forum emerged, News Anchors were frequently well-ranked on lists of “The Sexiest People Alive.”
The artificiality of News Sellers extended deeper than their skin. A reporter had not only to report the news but also to maintain illusory friendships with their peers, all conversation written out in advance and read from a teleprompter, yet delivered with the appearance of spontaneity. These programs are not best understood as news reports but bizarre and needless stage dramas where the audience willfully suspended disbelief to follow along. Driven by the perverse incentives of advertising, this format was most common on news programs running in the morning where large illusory social circles had to be maintained through hand-selected individuals based on the demographics of the desired viewers. Actors were often interviewed on these programs regarding matters of grave national importance, as the nation’s credentialing systems had also failed -this was yet another of the primary reasons for the Forum’s adoption which we will discuss later- and the best experts to be found were often people who only pretended to be experts on television.
By yet another silent agreement, reporters spoke with an artificial, theatrical diction not common to any other human interaction. When students reviewing historical footage have asked “What accent was that?” I have had no recourse but to shrug. I was only a child then, but it was understood without question that such intentional, disingenuous speech was appropriate for giving the news.
The advertising based model of reporting created yet another hazard: the moral-warping of those who were financially supported by the model. The perverse incentives of advertising based news demanded that when events were going poorly, viewership should increase, and thus the news became more profitable. The survival of those engaged in reporting then became inexorably linked to calamity. Archival footage -never, of course, intentionally shared with the public but mostly coming from what is known as “pre-roll” footage from the moments prior to a broadcast- can be easily found of News Sellers gleefully telling one another that there had been a school-shooting, or a terrorist attack, or a natural disaster. They celebrated such tragedies as farmers celebrate a bountiful harvest. Tell-alls written after the creation of the Forum Index and the destruction of the previous News regime reveal a sad self-aware despair as the never-ending need for attention drove bright young minds to sociopathy. By the end of the era, it had become a common practice for the press to wholly invent catastrophes where none existed simply to create public interest.
I have shared footage of the Columbus Strike with my classes and the absolute incompetence of what was then known as the “mainstream press” has always been what my students notice first. It all seems so embarrassingly obvious in retrospect, but it must always seem so at the end of a paradigm. By custom, News Sellers spoke for no longer than five or ten minutes as any longer was considered to be a breach of the public’s attention and would negatively impact viewership and therefore advertisement revenues. The same people were present to discuss every single subject as if it were possible for them to truly know what they were talking about. Whenever the truth could not be compressed into a five-minute segment it was substituted with an approximate fiction. When truth could not be approximated the truth was ignored or falsified based on what the reporter believed the audience wished was true. At the end of these segments, when the viewer had barely even understood the question, let alone the answer or its ramifications, the news was interrupted by an advertisement speaking to the nutritional value of various foods, the cleaning power of some detergent, or the sex appeal conveyed by some clothing brand.
All of this might have been forgivable if the television press had retained any powers of scrutiny, but in the last years prior to the Forum and the Index they almost exclusively repeated whatever talking points were given to them by the ruling political party. In an effort to increase viewership before it could be entirely leached away by the internet, and because they had exhausted all sense of national outrage with previous false crises, they had also resorted to fomenting civil unrest as a way of making their stories appear more urgent. It became their highest goal to tell people what they wanted most to hear and to superficially prove that all social ills were the fault of the opposition party. Many News Sellers actually became Political Activists, abandoning all appearances of objectivity, often doing little more than copying and pasting the talking points of whatever party their viewership favored and reciting them as fact. Often, these News Sellers deluded themselves as much as their viewers and considered it their solemn duty to tear the nation apart into a Civil War so long as it kept ratings strong.
As there was temporarily no government in the aftermath of the Columbus Strike, there was no one to approve an official story. Having lost the ability to discover and discern truth themselves, the press milled around asking after the military and geo-politcal opinions of people who happened to be wandering in the street. Without a self-policing, self-evidencing, decentralized mechanism by which truth could emerge, experts be identified, a plan created, and order be restored, the world for a few hours entered a state of total chaos. Society had become too big and too complicated while it’s government remained a strict, bandwidth-constrained, hierarchy and no one was sure of who to trust.
There were reporters, yes, and we will return to them in a moment. They waited off in the shadows, much the same then as they are now. People who, by some quirk of nature or nurture, almost enjoyed telling people things they didn’t want to hear. People who would swim through a garbage dump to reveal a minor discrepancy in the account of a government official. People who would abandon the warmth of their friends and family and court divorce to correct even their own spouse on simple matters of fact. There are always such people and they existed then.
In the age before the Forum, their dedication to truth had made them incompatible with corrupted institutions. They demanded resources to know what was and what was not, and because these resources did not exist -indeed, could not exist in an ad-based marketplace that drove research budgets to zero- they had been excised like tumors and fled to the furthest corners of the internet. There, they checked facts for a world which had fashions instead of morals, and reported truth wherever they could to whoever would listen, which was almost no one. But on podcasts, patronage sites, and newsletter subscription services a small heart still beat and a thousand small voices still insisted that truth was not a matter of taste. It was only that there was not yet a place for their efforts to be made productive. They waited there, off in the wings, for their call back to center stage.