I'm kind on the left, but Obama's campaign slogan, "hope" and "change," totally irritated me. Zero content—all blind belief. Of course, Trump can say a million words and they are all content free.
It’s our own fault for not demanding specifics. That’s the part I keep coming back to. If we withheld our loyalty more strategically or demanded better plans, we would have better outcomes. I love that the ACA did away with denial of care for preexisting conditions, but you needed half a dozen other things tacked onto that to make the system sane. You can’t just wave your hands and say “then the businesses will figure it out… somehow.”
Thanks for the perspective(s) you've been sharing. I stumbled across your substack (via avoidable contact) and have been captivated for the last couple of days. Reading with what spare time I have between meetings and family life. I too have a similar "slice of heaven"; thank you for reminding me of that.
REASON FOUR: The credible voices for resisting authoritarianism have retreated (there is not really another word for it) into the more left-wing press, and you have to go there to find them.
Here is a short list of the sites you should be visiting on a daily basis because they are doing substantive journalism and avowedly resistance-based opinion pieces:
There are more, but these are a good starting point -- and you are probably going to have to fork over for subscriptions to most of them.
Here's what.I mean by different reporting.
Here's a snippet from the Mother Jones' story "You Can Stop Asking Where the Mass Opposition Is. It’s Everywhere," by Tim Murphy
////You could meet a dozen people and hear at least a dozen different existential threats. Hands off Social Security. Hands off public health grants. Hands off student visas. Hands off women. Hands off trans people. Hands off our tax dollars. Hands off Greenland. Hands off books. Hands off 401ks. Hands off immigrants. Hands off Mahmoud Khalil. Hands off grocery prices. Hands off unions. I even talked to a woman clutching a sign that said “Hands off Libby”—the popular e-reader for public library systems which is now in jeopardy thanks to massive cuts to the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services.
////This barrage of grievances offered a snapshot of the new Trump administration’s multi-front war on modernity. But it also got at something essential about the current anti-Trump movement. People weren’t taking action just to protest what the president and his movement represented, but because of visceral fear—real fear—of what he had already done, and that once impossible things were now very much possible. People had lived through a Trump administration before. They were taking to the streets now, in part, because they had not lived through this....
////“They have fucked everything up in how many days, in how many months?” said Jewels Nation, a musician escaping the rain under a stretch of sidewalk scaffolding. “January, February, March—in three months, they have fucked us completely.” She was “terrified” about applying for Social Security, but her fears went deeper than just retirement savings; like other attendees, she believed that the United States had already become a “fascist state.” ...
////This was just one protest in one place—albeit one very large protest in one very big place. Perhaps the vibes were different in Marshfield, Mass. or Salt Lake City or Bolivia, N.C. (Hopefully the weather was.) Ultimately the big story is not what the signs said, but the deep groundswell of anger and unrest that brought so many people in so many places out into the streets and other public spaces of their communities. The message is: crowd large. A lot of politicians and administrators and business leaders, in bowing to Trump, have drawn confidence and comfort from the perceived vibe shift. Events like this puncture that delusion. They are an unavoidable illustration of outrage. Trump may have gotten a lot undone in the last three months, but the opposition never went away, and it may finally be emboldened.
////On Saturday, it showed that it is everywhere./////
We are going to have to change many things before we redeem our nation from fascist authoritarianism and rule by racists, homophobes, nativists, and billionaires.
In the end, changing the way we receive and process our news is going to be among the tiniest of them. Start today.
FOUR REASONS WHY THE MEDIA IS NOT COVERING THE PROTESTS AS ANYTHING EXCEPT A CURIOSITY
Once we are done celebrating that fact that "we did it!" and turned out what I'd guess is going to be 2-3 million people in a single day, we have to come to grips with two big facts:
(1) This is either the beginning of a long road, or the beginning of our end. This protest, if we look at it honestly, is aimed at mobilizing more of the people not paying attention than it is to change the minds of the Trump administration and the MAGA Republicans in Congress. They've got years to do more damage before the next substantive elections. I'll say more about this below.
(2) The media at large is NOT our ally in campaigning to save democracy, nor are the universities, nor the huge law firms, nor even (so far) the Democratic Party leadership. Remember what Jonathan V. Last has written:
////VL’s Law is: Any institution not explicitly anti-Trump will eventually become useful to Trump. I originally thought this would apply only to media orgs. Turns out that it applies to everyone and everything. From Ross Douthat to John Fetterman, from Paul Weiss to Facebook. All of our institutions are the Republican party now.
////This is an extraordinary moment and it requires extraordinary vision and actions. We must stop viewing political life through the lens of American politics as we have known it, and adopt the viewpoint of dissident movements in autocratic states.////
Let's dig deeper into that media question, and get to my four reasons.
REASON ONE: Local coverage was local coverage. I do not mean this as a condemnation of the countless TV and radio stations across the nation whose pictures and videos gave us a window not just what was happening in Washington DC, Boston, or Chicago, but the protests in Ravenna OH, Bozeman MT, Ames IA, and at the Abort Terrace Senior Citizens Home in Hackensack NJ.
But if you expected more than cursory coverage of WHY the protesters were out there, or the uniqueness of this event in American history, you'd have been disappointed, because this is simply not the job of your local TV station.
REASON TWO: Mass media -- legacy media if you will -- is now more thoroughly than ever "sound bite" media. The big networks are, by and large, owned and controlled by major corporate interests, and they don't actually do investigative reporting any more. If you want a poster child for this, consider the Washington Post, famous as the outlet that brought Richard Nixon down through the intrepid reporting of Woodward and Bernstein.
Since Jeff Bezos bought WaPo, in a single year we've gone from his editorial page having its endorsement of VP Harris yanked by the billionaire publisher, to an overt declaration that the paper would be turning conservative, to a recent op-ed favoring the idea of providing an avenue to give President Trump a shot at a third term. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/02/trump-third-term-abolish-electoral-college/
So major media coverage of the protests was largely visual and with the same methodology of local news scaled up. If you expected large-scale considerations of WHY we are here just shy of three months into President Trump's second administration you'd have done better to replay parts of Senator Cory Booker's marathon speech from last week. He said substantive things; network and cable media did not.
REASON THREE: The "opinion" pages at places like Newsweek, The Hill, and others have been hopelessly compromised by a "both sides" mentality that is corrosive to the idea of reasoned public debate. Literally -- and I have been keeping track of these at several of the major sites -- for every anti-MAGA op-ed that runs, at least one pro-MAGA piece is published. More to the point, these sites consciously contribute to confusing the reading public by NOT substantively identifying the institutional affiliations or extreme political leanings of the authors.
An example of how this works. Suppose you see a piece by a doctor -- ostensibly a pediatrician -- holding for on abortion rights or gender-affirming care. His professional affiliation is listed either as belonging to
The American College of Pediatricians
The American Academy of Pediatrics
One began in 1930, has a long proud history of advocating for better medical care, has strict standards for membership, and represents 22,000 pediatricians and medical professionals in closely related fields.
The other is a fringe conservative group started in 2002 by a small number of right-wing pediatricians and others (who don't even have to be medical professionals working in the field) to advocate against LGBTQ+ rights, abortion rights, gender-affirming care, and vaccines. It represents less than 700 people.
Which is which? When you read that op-ed by a doctor who claims to be an officer in the American College of Pediatricians do you know that he's a right-wing nutcase? Well, now you do.
But our current crop of supposedly independent media outlets simply list these affiliations without providing readers a single clue that the MAGA right has spent years building an alternative, deceptively labeled set of institutions.
For example, did you know that the website "Evolution News and Science Today" is not a scientific site, but a subsidiary of the Discovery Institute, which is a theocratically supported organization devoted to "debunking" the entire concept of evolution in favor of "intelligent design"? Newsweek has published multiple editorials by that organization's president without ever alerting readers to his particular bias. https://evolutionnews.org/
Understand this: the right has no such problems. If an author appears at Fox News, the New York Post, the National Review, City Journal, NewsMax, the Daily Signal, the Daily Wire, the Washington Examiner, One America News, and etc., you do not have to wonder about that person's political pedigree.
we now live in a world wherein the "both sides of the argument" school of thought has progressed to the point that major publishers no longer think it necessary to tell you which side of the argument someone is coming from.
(I never thought I'd miss the 1990s so much, when the public refused to countenance that "both sides of the argument" for Holocaust deniers. Those days are long gone.)
Well Guy, I wish you Goddess Speed for your undertaking. I don't have any spare $ or web expertise, alas, but I think this is a grand endeavor.
I'm older (boomer land) & grew up curious & reading & came of age in the 60s & feel pretty clear in my choices for current information, & my sense of history is constantly on the update. But I worry about the younger people. I keep reading that education standards & funding have diminished, & that they spend their lives sucked into their phones. Perhaps this is just clickbait - kids I meet seem sharp & conscious & kind enough.
May your system aid the youth & the old. (And instill honor...)
Not only yes, but hell yes. If y'all release plans and designs I would be happy to (at the very least) analyze and comment as best I can, and I'm sure I'm not alone. I'd love for this to succeed, and I'd love to help if feasible.
...
That said, this is gonna be a rather narrower target to hit than tech products usually aim for, in that I think there's a bunch of constraints Do you have a plan for governance such that you can both stay responsive enough to tune the reputation/attention system you're building, and nonetheless avoid political or ideological capture?
Yes. If you look at my stickied post, I have a whole comedic manifesto on how we basically need a digital republic layer added to the internet. My goal is to implement the system and then give power to the people.
"You’ll be able to form Trust Networks with people who believe and think like you."
Love everything you wrote here until you got to this paragraph. What you're describing here sounds way to much like the worst of Twitter, where it resembles an mmorpg with clans and raids against other teams etc. I know you're building in differences, but I worry they won't be sufficient to change a very bad dynamic into a good one.
1) within your own group, there is a sortition mechanism so that small groups can’t seize total control. Leaders are emergent because many people can blindly choose their views as representative.
2) when you group brushes up against another group and loses, you lose overall visibility across the system. So your own extremism forces you to adapt or bleed money and resources to others. You basically wind up infinitely cheap to challenge and override with a large loss record trailing behind to discredit you.
The long answer is: the way this works today is that the people who are most motivated to sign-up for these kinds of things form cabals. Then the cabals become more extremist. You can see this already in the primary system at a much larger level. The Republican and Democratic candidates have to create broad appeal among their voter base, then pivot to create broad appeal among all voters because more people are now able to make decisions than before. The way this would work at the rules layer is that we would prevent people from being able to choose which matters they’re voting on. It’s random selection, so you have to appeal to a broader base. I don’t want to dissolve parties but I do want to modulate their behavior toward appropriate fact-based action.
I'm kind on the left, but Obama's campaign slogan, "hope" and "change," totally irritated me. Zero content—all blind belief. Of course, Trump can say a million words and they are all content free.
It’s our own fault for not demanding specifics. That’s the part I keep coming back to. If we withheld our loyalty more strategically or demanded better plans, we would have better outcomes. I love that the ACA did away with denial of care for preexisting conditions, but you needed half a dozen other things tacked onto that to make the system sane. You can’t just wave your hands and say “then the businesses will figure it out… somehow.”
Ohman, your birthday is April Fool's? My condolences? 🫣😘
Thanks for the perspective(s) you've been sharing. I stumbled across your substack (via avoidable contact) and have been captivated for the last couple of days. Reading with what spare time I have between meetings and family life. I too have a similar "slice of heaven"; thank you for reminding me of that.
OK Guy - I'm such a geezer that I can't figure out how to forward you a link - other than as a comment.
Anyway - just read this on Facebook & it seemed related to what you're up to, so:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1A1XjAh8gB/
I will look! But I don’t have Facebook so right now this redirects me all over the place.
REASON FOUR: The credible voices for resisting authoritarianism have retreated (there is not really another word for it) into the more left-wing press, and you have to go there to find them.
Here is a short list of the sites you should be visiting on a daily basis because they are doing substantive journalism and avowedly resistance-based opinion pieces:
The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/
The New Republic https://newrepublic.com/
The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/us
The Bulwark https://www.thebulwark.com/
Jacobin https://jacobin.com/
Mother Jones https://www.motherjones.com/
There are more, but these are a good starting point -- and you are probably going to have to fork over for subscriptions to most of them.
Here's what.I mean by different reporting.
Here's a snippet from the Mother Jones' story "You Can Stop Asking Where the Mass Opposition Is. It’s Everywhere," by Tim Murphy
////You could meet a dozen people and hear at least a dozen different existential threats. Hands off Social Security. Hands off public health grants. Hands off student visas. Hands off women. Hands off trans people. Hands off our tax dollars. Hands off Greenland. Hands off books. Hands off 401ks. Hands off immigrants. Hands off Mahmoud Khalil. Hands off grocery prices. Hands off unions. I even talked to a woman clutching a sign that said “Hands off Libby”—the popular e-reader for public library systems which is now in jeopardy thanks to massive cuts to the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services.
////This barrage of grievances offered a snapshot of the new Trump administration’s multi-front war on modernity. But it also got at something essential about the current anti-Trump movement. People weren’t taking action just to protest what the president and his movement represented, but because of visceral fear—real fear—of what he had already done, and that once impossible things were now very much possible. People had lived through a Trump administration before. They were taking to the streets now, in part, because they had not lived through this....
////“They have fucked everything up in how many days, in how many months?” said Jewels Nation, a musician escaping the rain under a stretch of sidewalk scaffolding. “January, February, March—in three months, they have fucked us completely.” She was “terrified” about applying for Social Security, but her fears went deeper than just retirement savings; like other attendees, she believed that the United States had already become a “fascist state.” ...
////This was just one protest in one place—albeit one very large protest in one very big place. Perhaps the vibes were different in Marshfield, Mass. or Salt Lake City or Bolivia, N.C. (Hopefully the weather was.) Ultimately the big story is not what the signs said, but the deep groundswell of anger and unrest that brought so many people in so many places out into the streets and other public spaces of their communities. The message is: crowd large. A lot of politicians and administrators and business leaders, in bowing to Trump, have drawn confidence and comfort from the perceived vibe shift. Events like this puncture that delusion. They are an unavoidable illustration of outrage. Trump may have gotten a lot undone in the last three months, but the opposition never went away, and it may finally be emboldened.
////On Saturday, it showed that it is everywhere./////
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/hands-off-donald-trump-fear-new-york-city/
We are going to have to change many things before we redeem our nation from fascist authoritarianism and rule by racists, homophobes, nativists, and billionaires.
In the end, changing the way we receive and process our news is going to be among the tiniest of them. Start today.
FOUR REASONS WHY THE MEDIA IS NOT COVERING THE PROTESTS AS ANYTHING EXCEPT A CURIOSITY
Once we are done celebrating that fact that "we did it!" and turned out what I'd guess is going to be 2-3 million people in a single day, we have to come to grips with two big facts:
(1) This is either the beginning of a long road, or the beginning of our end. This protest, if we look at it honestly, is aimed at mobilizing more of the people not paying attention than it is to change the minds of the Trump administration and the MAGA Republicans in Congress. They've got years to do more damage before the next substantive elections. I'll say more about this below.
(2) The media at large is NOT our ally in campaigning to save democracy, nor are the universities, nor the huge law firms, nor even (so far) the Democratic Party leadership. Remember what Jonathan V. Last has written:
////VL’s Law is: Any institution not explicitly anti-Trump will eventually become useful to Trump. I originally thought this would apply only to media orgs. Turns out that it applies to everyone and everything. From Ross Douthat to John Fetterman, from Paul Weiss to Facebook. All of our institutions are the Republican party now.
////This is an extraordinary moment and it requires extraordinary vision and actions. We must stop viewing political life through the lens of American politics as we have known it, and adopt the viewpoint of dissident movements in autocratic states.////
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/how-to-think-and-act-like-a-dissident-in-trumps-america
Let's dig deeper into that media question, and get to my four reasons.
REASON ONE: Local coverage was local coverage. I do not mean this as a condemnation of the countless TV and radio stations across the nation whose pictures and videos gave us a window not just what was happening in Washington DC, Boston, or Chicago, but the protests in Ravenna OH, Bozeman MT, Ames IA, and at the Abort Terrace Senior Citizens Home in Hackensack NJ.
But if you expected more than cursory coverage of WHY the protesters were out there, or the uniqueness of this event in American history, you'd have been disappointed, because this is simply not the job of your local TV station.
REASON TWO: Mass media -- legacy media if you will -- is now more thoroughly than ever "sound bite" media. The big networks are, by and large, owned and controlled by major corporate interests, and they don't actually do investigative reporting any more. If you want a poster child for this, consider the Washington Post, famous as the outlet that brought Richard Nixon down through the intrepid reporting of Woodward and Bernstein.
Since Jeff Bezos bought WaPo, in a single year we've gone from his editorial page having its endorsement of VP Harris yanked by the billionaire publisher, to an overt declaration that the paper would be turning conservative, to a recent op-ed favoring the idea of providing an avenue to give President Trump a shot at a third term. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/02/trump-third-term-abolish-electoral-college/
So major media coverage of the protests was largely visual and with the same methodology of local news scaled up. If you expected large-scale considerations of WHY we are here just shy of three months into President Trump's second administration you'd have done better to replay parts of Senator Cory Booker's marathon speech from last week. He said substantive things; network and cable media did not.
REASON THREE: The "opinion" pages at places like Newsweek, The Hill, and others have been hopelessly compromised by a "both sides" mentality that is corrosive to the idea of reasoned public debate. Literally -- and I have been keeping track of these at several of the major sites -- for every anti-MAGA op-ed that runs, at least one pro-MAGA piece is published. More to the point, these sites consciously contribute to confusing the reading public by NOT substantively identifying the institutional affiliations or extreme political leanings of the authors.
An example of how this works. Suppose you see a piece by a doctor -- ostensibly a pediatrician -- holding for on abortion rights or gender-affirming care. His professional affiliation is listed either as belonging to
The American College of Pediatricians
The American Academy of Pediatrics
One began in 1930, has a long proud history of advocating for better medical care, has strict standards for membership, and represents 22,000 pediatricians and medical professionals in closely related fields.
The other is a fringe conservative group started in 2002 by a small number of right-wing pediatricians and others (who don't even have to be medical professionals working in the field) to advocate against LGBTQ+ rights, abortion rights, gender-affirming care, and vaccines. It represents less than 700 people.
Which is which? When you read that op-ed by a doctor who claims to be an officer in the American College of Pediatricians do you know that he's a right-wing nutcase? Well, now you do.
For details on both
https://tinyurl.com/d4d2p6vx
https://tinyurl.com/mry62dwk
But our current crop of supposedly independent media outlets simply list these affiliations without providing readers a single clue that the MAGA right has spent years building an alternative, deceptively labeled set of institutions.
For example, did you know that the website "Evolution News and Science Today" is not a scientific site, but a subsidiary of the Discovery Institute, which is a theocratically supported organization devoted to "debunking" the entire concept of evolution in favor of "intelligent design"? Newsweek has published multiple editorials by that organization's president without ever alerting readers to his particular bias. https://evolutionnews.org/
Understand this: the right has no such problems. If an author appears at Fox News, the New York Post, the National Review, City Journal, NewsMax, the Daily Signal, the Daily Wire, the Washington Examiner, One America News, and etc., you do not have to wonder about that person's political pedigree.
we now live in a world wherein the "both sides of the argument" school of thought has progressed to the point that major publishers no longer think it necessary to tell you which side of the argument someone is coming from.
(I never thought I'd miss the 1990s so much, when the public refused to countenance that "both sides of the argument" for Holocaust deniers. Those days are long gone.)
Well Guy, I wish you Goddess Speed for your undertaking. I don't have any spare $ or web expertise, alas, but I think this is a grand endeavor.
I'm older (boomer land) & grew up curious & reading & came of age in the 60s & feel pretty clear in my choices for current information, & my sense of history is constantly on the update. But I worry about the younger people. I keep reading that education standards & funding have diminished, & that they spend their lives sucked into their phones. Perhaps this is just clickbait - kids I meet seem sharp & conscious & kind enough.
May your system aid the youth & the old. (And instill honor...)
And happy birthday!
You’re already a hero!
I would love an invite to the Discord!
Hey Dawn! This is awesome I wil reach out.
Not only yes, but hell yes. If y'all release plans and designs I would be happy to (at the very least) analyze and comment as best I can, and I'm sure I'm not alone. I'd love for this to succeed, and I'd love to help if feasible.
...
That said, this is gonna be a rather narrower target to hit than tech products usually aim for, in that I think there's a bunch of constraints Do you have a plan for governance such that you can both stay responsive enough to tune the reputation/attention system you're building, and nonetheless avoid political or ideological capture?
Yes. If you look at my stickied post, I have a whole comedic manifesto on how we basically need a digital republic layer added to the internet. My goal is to implement the system and then give power to the people.
A photo of myself and my son’s dutifully Ghibilified
TYPO: should be SONS-— lose the apostrophe
Corrected.
Happy birthday and continue dreaming big!
Thanks Jeanne!
"You’ll be able to form Trust Networks with people who believe and think like you."
Love everything you wrote here until you got to this paragraph. What you're describing here sounds way to much like the worst of Twitter, where it resembles an mmorpg with clans and raids against other teams etc. I know you're building in differences, but I worry they won't be sufficient to change a very bad dynamic into a good one.
Two pieces:
1) within your own group, there is a sortition mechanism so that small groups can’t seize total control. Leaders are emergent because many people can blindly choose their views as representative.
2) when you group brushes up against another group and loses, you lose overall visibility across the system. So your own extremism forces you to adapt or bleed money and resources to others. You basically wind up infinitely cheap to challenge and override with a large loss record trailing behind to discredit you.
Won't this end up being controlled by the most motivated? The people who are willing and able to spend the most time involved in this activity?
Clearly, it will be the product of only those people who are online.
The short answer is no.
The long answer is: the way this works today is that the people who are most motivated to sign-up for these kinds of things form cabals. Then the cabals become more extremist. You can see this already in the primary system at a much larger level. The Republican and Democratic candidates have to create broad appeal among their voter base, then pivot to create broad appeal among all voters because more people are now able to make decisions than before. The way this would work at the rules layer is that we would prevent people from being able to choose which matters they’re voting on. It’s random selection, so you have to appeal to a broader base. I don’t want to dissolve parties but I do want to modulate their behavior toward appropriate fact-based action.