I was a journalist for 20 years back in the day when it was ethical and about its objective watchdog role to protect democracy. I left when newsroom conversations became about how to entertain people who don’t read. I have been in PR where at least I made a living good enough to put my kids into expensive colleges. I love that PR has an ethics code and most PRSA chapters now have ethic chairs on their board. I am that person for our local board, doing my part to inoculate against disinformation and misinformation (and yes there is a difference.) I am applauding your efforts!
Sure. I am looking for a new job and out of work so I have time. :-)
Michael Cherenson https://www.linkedin.com/in/cherenson/ is a good resource since he does a lot in the inoculation against disinformation research area and worked with Cambridge University researchers there. He also gives talks on this.
The canal essay was...next level. Deeply appreciate your sharing. Shared w/a friend (neither of us is religious, fwiw) who said "one of the best things I've read all year". Yeah, for me too, buddy.
I believe most/all of us have something like this inside/available to us. But so few access it...thank Panem et Circenses and all that, right?
Pirsig took a different path through adversity and arrived at a deep integration in his 'travels'. It's the biggest gift you can get -- and it's 'free' (but you have to do the work to make it to Christmas, so to speak.)
Good luck with Trust Assembly. Sounds like Ground News. Sounds like what (Camus? Orwell?) wanted in the 50s for print newspapers -- and independent meta-paper that tracked opinions and leanings and omissions/commissions. People gonna want their Blue Rage Rag or Red Rage Rag at some point, but having a truly independent barometer of what's out there is harder. I'd put the Intel Community's curated work....dead last. (Sorry; a bit of red rage leaked in there....)
I've thought this was a 'media' problem for a long while but just recently realized I've been wrong. It's not the media that's broken ( it is, of course...) but our ability to critically think in a non-stationary environment where 99% of the time we have to trust others rather than directly/independently verify. If anything, the root deficit is in our education (wherever/however one gets that...)
Observation, open communication, adaptive thinking, and group trust come first. With, dare i say it (yes I do) a guiding faith of some kind. With those, one can protect oneself from many evils.
you know, I had not known about Orwell or Camus wanting something special. I will look into it.
What I want is hard to explain but it’s basically a rules based approach to your view, your group, and the consensus across groups. Nobody gets to be the king of everyone.
I am always up for more autobiographical pieces, because what you wrote in your old blogs and books still resonate through time to me to this day (and I find myself rereading a lot of them, because I swear at times there is a cursed wormhole between your part of the Pacific Northwest and my part of Western Pennsylvania for all the compounded weirdness that occurs). I swear, someday I'll actually collect some of those stories if only to leech off a little more of the strangeness that happens in small places.
Aside from that, I'm glad to see you're still trucking along and doing well! I was chatting with my wife a few weeks ago about one of your books after we saw a new toy line that portrays cute little animals as pancakes, and, well...you can guess where it went from there.
Kinda eerie how many Substackers I know who are making comebacks, shouting each other out or doing this kind of post lately (literally did my own yesterday). But the inspiring kind of eerie. This is just such a fun place to be.
Trust Assembly sounds like an interesting idea. I’d be happy to jam on the interface if you ever get there! Did a lot of research around the world on what creates “trust” with users in UX (tldr: security / trust / safety product person over here) which could be a nice reinforcing of the concept overall. Rooting for you! Oh, and I love your writing.
As soon as they enable it in here I’ve got to figure out a group discussion or something. I work a lot with decisioning so I’ve got that part the most nailed down. I’d love to talk your ear off on it.
Hi Guy - I just need to chime in & say that, although I found the mystic experience piece amazing, it was not the supernatural aspect that made me immediately subscribe - it was the powerful & incandescent skill of your prose, your storytelling. (As well as the audacity to present a spiritual vision. Looking forward to your take on more mundane topics.)
Thanks for providing all the links & teasers to peruse.
As a fellow Pacific Northwesterner (up the road in Olympia), you've inspired me to double down on my own piece of writing about how I came to this region, & what it means to me.
I had to grab my pencil and try my hand at ambidextrous writing 😂 I wrote your line “We are all a dumbass to someone” with my dominant hand. Then scribbled it out with my non-dominant hand twice—once from left to right and once mirror image from right to left. The mirror image was easier! Thanks for the ‘table of content’ for your writing so I can go check out more!
I can see what you're thinking about on the Trust Assembly idea, but to me that sounds pretty similar to what is already being attempted as a way to put the genie of independent news back in the bottle. I spend most of my news consumption energy on the issues of information control and how it relates to modern politics, and something similar to what you describe is already being built but it's being built by the same people who tried to control the old system.
Take NewsGuard for example, they're a company funded mostly by a couple of sympathetic billionaires and some contracts with The Pentagon. Their entire business model consists of rating "news" for people so that they don't have to evaluate it themselves, giving them a score, ranking them, and then working with advertisers to make sure that the low rankers get their revenue strangled. They admit this openly.
Meanwhile, there are a bunch of companies like NewsGuard in what can now be referred to as the "Disinformation Industry." Except it's not just businesses, it's also a bunch of NGO's. No matter what they are, they all seem to be staffed by former intelligence officials and people from the State Department and although initially it looks like there is a political bias it eventually becomes apparent that what they actually define as "mis/dis/mal-information" often tends to be anything that goes against the government's foreign or domestic policy objectives.
I guess my worry is that if you create a substack version of "The Trusted News Initiative" or some such project, you're just creating another target of centralized control and dis/incentivization that is ripe for subversion by the very powerful entities that exert control over information currently. That's exactly the system they're already trying to use to punish substackers who break stories they don't like.
I'm just sitting on my phone waiting for a meeting, but I'd love to talk about this more.
Would be happy to connect. My solution to this is basically “allow the formation of more than one group so you’re not crowning a single entity as the kingmaker.”
I like that idea, but we already have a veritable army of fact-checking groups and news rating services out there and they all have most of the same biases and issues. I guess I don't see how this would end up being different after a couple of years.
In my view, the purest form of evaluation is by the readers' vote. Contrary to what the WEF seems to think, real trust is built organically. To appoint anyone to the role of "truth committee" or "trustworthiness ranking board" you are asserting that they are better at objectively evaluating the facts of this infinitely complicated and confusing world than any other reader who might disagree. Creating a whole bunch of Truth Committees doesn't really change that, especially because the ones that currently exist all share the same "best practices" anyway.
I spent a lot of time reading the Twitter Files source material, which ended up showing a vast and partly formalized system for carrying out censorship at the behest of government entities, but through proxy actors with more complicated funding streams. The coverage of the Twitter Files in the mainstream media was terrible, and ignored basically all of this evidence. Likewise, there were plenty of fact checkers who came out to try to shape the narrative around the Twitter Files but they didn't deny all of the evidence because it was literally screenshots of emails and communications and tracking of relationships in hiring and funding. In the end, my takeaway from the way this system works is that it attempts to maintain "artificial trust" by making sure nobody ever sees anything that would make them question reality. But that's not sustainable anymore, and I think as hard as they try to get control of the information space they'll have to either shut the lights off or give up eventually. But right now, they're trying to more subtlely influence our perception.
My conclusion over the last couple of years is that true free speech is messy, but in that giant mess there are actual kernels of truth. We have this tendency to want to have the mud washed away for us because it's easier, but when someone else washes your truth for you there isn't a great way to trust that they didn't wash away something that was actually true, or that you might actually believe. In the end, you have to operate your own gold sluice, or someone else is going to pick out some of the good parts before they give it to you. I really think it's inevitable, because it's simply too powerful of a position not to attract subversion. I think the simplicity of the first amendment shows that the founding fathers realized this on some level as it relates to government.
Decentralization of the acquisition of truth, to me, is the only way to truly achieve it.
I was a journalist for 20 years back in the day when it was ethical and about its objective watchdog role to protect democracy. I left when newsroom conversations became about how to entertain people who don’t read. I have been in PR where at least I made a living good enough to put my kids into expensive colleges. I love that PR has an ethics code and most PRSA chapters now have ethic chairs on their board. I am that person for our local board, doing my part to inoculate against disinformation and misinformation (and yes there is a difference.) I am applauding your efforts!
I’d love to get your take if you ever have a minute. I really want the return of economically sustainable and honest journalism.
Sure. I am looking for a new job and out of work so I have time. :-)
Michael Cherenson https://www.linkedin.com/in/cherenson/ is a good resource since he does a lot in the inoculation against disinformation research area and worked with Cambridge University researchers there. He also gives talks on this.
I've been exploring ways to amplify and get the games on this web site ( https://inoculation.science/inoculation-games/harmony-square/ ) out more ahead of the U.S. presidential election.
I need to get some kind of group discussion going. I will look him up. Good luck on the job hunt!
The canal essay was...next level. Deeply appreciate your sharing. Shared w/a friend (neither of us is religious, fwiw) who said "one of the best things I've read all year". Yeah, for me too, buddy.
I believe most/all of us have something like this inside/available to us. But so few access it...thank Panem et Circenses and all that, right?
Pirsig took a different path through adversity and arrived at a deep integration in his 'travels'. It's the biggest gift you can get -- and it's 'free' (but you have to do the work to make it to Christmas, so to speak.)
Good luck with Trust Assembly. Sounds like Ground News. Sounds like what (Camus? Orwell?) wanted in the 50s for print newspapers -- and independent meta-paper that tracked opinions and leanings and omissions/commissions. People gonna want their Blue Rage Rag or Red Rage Rag at some point, but having a truly independent barometer of what's out there is harder. I'd put the Intel Community's curated work....dead last. (Sorry; a bit of red rage leaked in there....)
I've thought this was a 'media' problem for a long while but just recently realized I've been wrong. It's not the media that's broken ( it is, of course...) but our ability to critically think in a non-stationary environment where 99% of the time we have to trust others rather than directly/independently verify. If anything, the root deficit is in our education (wherever/however one gets that...)
Observation, open communication, adaptive thinking, and group trust come first. With, dare i say it (yes I do) a guiding faith of some kind. With those, one can protect oneself from many evils.
you know, I had not known about Orwell or Camus wanting something special. I will look into it.
What I want is hard to explain but it’s basically a rules based approach to your view, your group, and the consensus across groups. Nobody gets to be the king of everyone.
I am always up for more autobiographical pieces, because what you wrote in your old blogs and books still resonate through time to me to this day (and I find myself rereading a lot of them, because I swear at times there is a cursed wormhole between your part of the Pacific Northwest and my part of Western Pennsylvania for all the compounded weirdness that occurs). I swear, someday I'll actually collect some of those stories if only to leech off a little more of the strangeness that happens in small places.
Aside from that, I'm glad to see you're still trucking along and doing well! I was chatting with my wife a few weeks ago about one of your books after we saw a new toy line that portrays cute little animals as pancakes, and, well...you can guess where it went from there.
Man I’ve been doing this a while
Since we were both in college, I think!
This is probably my favorite Substack that I've subscribed to completely by accident due to funky UI.
In Mills I trust
Kinda eerie how many Substackers I know who are making comebacks, shouting each other out or doing this kind of post lately (literally did my own yesterday). But the inspiring kind of eerie. This is just such a fun place to be.
Respect my friend, keep doing what you do.
We should be grateful for how good it is while it lasts
Trust Assembly sounds like an interesting idea. I’d be happy to jam on the interface if you ever get there! Did a lot of research around the world on what creates “trust” with users in UX (tldr: security / trust / safety product person over here) which could be a nice reinforcing of the concept overall. Rooting for you! Oh, and I love your writing.
As soon as they enable it in here I’ve got to figure out a group discussion or something. I work a lot with decisioning so I’ve got that part the most nailed down. I’d love to talk your ear off on it.
Yes let’s do it! I’d love to hear all about it.
Are you on X?
I’m not! But I’m on LinkedIn 🥹 and WhatsApp too (currently walking across Switzerland)
He Laura, I know this has been over a month but are you still interested in connecting on this? Sorry, lot going on with the new baby.
Hi Guy - I just need to chime in & say that, although I found the mystic experience piece amazing, it was not the supernatural aspect that made me immediately subscribe - it was the powerful & incandescent skill of your prose, your storytelling. (As well as the audacity to present a spiritual vision. Looking forward to your take on more mundane topics.)
Thanks for providing all the links & teasers to peruse.
As a fellow Pacific Northwesterner (up the road in Olympia), you've inspired me to double down on my own piece of writing about how I came to this region, & what it means to me.
Thanks Anna although I just shoot crap I try to look to the good now. Shoot a link when you finish your piece.
I don't know who'd enjoy it more but i bet a meal conversation between Some Guy and Rob Henderson ("Troubled") would go very well, indeed.
He seems very famous but he shows up in a lot of substacks I read. Maybe one day.
Congrats on Nadia sharing your post!
I’m torn between sending a thank you email and remaining mysterious since it’s probably better for her that way, I think.
I had to grab my pencil and try my hand at ambidextrous writing 😂 I wrote your line “We are all a dumbass to someone” with my dominant hand. Then scribbled it out with my non-dominant hand twice—once from left to right and once mirror image from right to left. The mirror image was easier! Thanks for the ‘table of content’ for your writing so I can go check out more!
left handed high five
I can see what you're thinking about on the Trust Assembly idea, but to me that sounds pretty similar to what is already being attempted as a way to put the genie of independent news back in the bottle. I spend most of my news consumption energy on the issues of information control and how it relates to modern politics, and something similar to what you describe is already being built but it's being built by the same people who tried to control the old system.
Take NewsGuard for example, they're a company funded mostly by a couple of sympathetic billionaires and some contracts with The Pentagon. Their entire business model consists of rating "news" for people so that they don't have to evaluate it themselves, giving them a score, ranking them, and then working with advertisers to make sure that the low rankers get their revenue strangled. They admit this openly.
Meanwhile, there are a bunch of companies like NewsGuard in what can now be referred to as the "Disinformation Industry." Except it's not just businesses, it's also a bunch of NGO's. No matter what they are, they all seem to be staffed by former intelligence officials and people from the State Department and although initially it looks like there is a political bias it eventually becomes apparent that what they actually define as "mis/dis/mal-information" often tends to be anything that goes against the government's foreign or domestic policy objectives.
I guess my worry is that if you create a substack version of "The Trusted News Initiative" or some such project, you're just creating another target of centralized control and dis/incentivization that is ripe for subversion by the very powerful entities that exert control over information currently. That's exactly the system they're already trying to use to punish substackers who break stories they don't like.
I'm just sitting on my phone waiting for a meeting, but I'd love to talk about this more.
Would be happy to connect. My solution to this is basically “allow the formation of more than one group so you’re not crowning a single entity as the kingmaker.”
I like that idea, but we already have a veritable army of fact-checking groups and news rating services out there and they all have most of the same biases and issues. I guess I don't see how this would end up being different after a couple of years.
In my view, the purest form of evaluation is by the readers' vote. Contrary to what the WEF seems to think, real trust is built organically. To appoint anyone to the role of "truth committee" or "trustworthiness ranking board" you are asserting that they are better at objectively evaluating the facts of this infinitely complicated and confusing world than any other reader who might disagree. Creating a whole bunch of Truth Committees doesn't really change that, especially because the ones that currently exist all share the same "best practices" anyway.
I spent a lot of time reading the Twitter Files source material, which ended up showing a vast and partly formalized system for carrying out censorship at the behest of government entities, but through proxy actors with more complicated funding streams. The coverage of the Twitter Files in the mainstream media was terrible, and ignored basically all of this evidence. Likewise, there were plenty of fact checkers who came out to try to shape the narrative around the Twitter Files but they didn't deny all of the evidence because it was literally screenshots of emails and communications and tracking of relationships in hiring and funding. In the end, my takeaway from the way this system works is that it attempts to maintain "artificial trust" by making sure nobody ever sees anything that would make them question reality. But that's not sustainable anymore, and I think as hard as they try to get control of the information space they'll have to either shut the lights off or give up eventually. But right now, they're trying to more subtlely influence our perception.
My conclusion over the last couple of years is that true free speech is messy, but in that giant mess there are actual kernels of truth. We have this tendency to want to have the mud washed away for us because it's easier, but when someone else washes your truth for you there isn't a great way to trust that they didn't wash away something that was actually true, or that you might actually believe. In the end, you have to operate your own gold sluice, or someone else is going to pick out some of the good parts before they give it to you. I really think it's inevitable, because it's simply too powerful of a position not to attract subversion. I think the simplicity of the first amendment shows that the founding fathers realized this on some level as it relates to government.
Decentralization of the acquisition of truth, to me, is the only way to truly achieve it.
Let’s talk. We are in the same spot and I can clear this up