Great Reads for October
Make it so
I’ve been thinking a lot about journalism and media. Given how fast things are moving these days and how dangerously dead the media industry really is, we are now in the Post Truth Age, an era marked by a Rashomon of viewpoints, all wrong.
Despite what people think about journalists, they aren’t biased. They’re human, sure, but their jobs are to find the truth and print it. That truth can come in the form of a press release - Joe Smith did something amazing! - or in the form of reporting. It cannot, say, come in the form of a context-less video or a piece of analysis that describes what, specifically, a piece of truth means.
Notice that I bolded the word journalists above. At this stage in the Post Truth Age, journalism has been bastardized to mean anyone with an audience of more than a few thousand people. A guy like Ben Shapiro is considered a journalist even though he’s a media figure. A guy like Marques Brownlee is a YouTuber, not a journalist. The journalistic mission of afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted does not apply to these kinds of people any more than a travel influencer is a creating anything as meaningful as Bill Bryson or Charles Dickens.
This, obviously, is another case of “old man yells at cloud” and I’ve been doing that a lot primarily because the cloud is full of anvils that are about to drop on all our heads.
An app I wrote, Copydesk, can create journalism instantly. It takes in the truth and spits out the truth. It doesn’t hyperbolize, offer opinion, or lie. It can’t. It can hallucinate, sure, but it can’t lie.
But here’s the problem: I don’t want this app to exist. I can feed the app my notes - the who, what, where, when, and why - and it will write a news story instantly. This is amazingly dangerous. It puts journalists out of business and it opens the door to folks who will use these tools to practice propaganda.
The Washington Post just laid off 240 people. More layoffs are coming because AI is taking over as the arbiter of truth. If this doesn’t sit well with you then you’re definitely in the minority. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to pay for journalism. Hell, nobody wants to pay for books. They want the river of content, burbling out in a constant, hot stream like so much beef stew. They want you to hate, to consume, to adore, to desire. They want to show you fake beauty, generated art, and simulated sex. And the thing they don’t want to show you is the truth.
The bottom line? Pay for journalism. End of story. Pay for every kind of journalism you can, including newspapers, radio, and books. Visit bookstores and newsstands. Help the written word survive the Post Truth Age.
Because when truth is gone, there is little left for any of us to cling to.
Now, on to the books:
Photo by Elijah Hiett on Unsplash
Foundry
Eliot Peper
Eliot Peper is one of my favorite authors and he’s been doing some fascinating sci-fi writing. His latest book is a taut thriller about two hitmen (hitpeople?) in a hotel room, negotiating their survival. It’s free on Amazon Prime right now so grab it ASAP.
Exadelic
Jon Evans
What happens when an AI hates you - and only you. This new book by my friend Jon Evans explores the dark side of AI with a book about a computer that thinks a middle manager is its enemy. Honestly, it might not be wrong.
Making it So
Patrick Stewart
Memiors are hard. Either the person isn’t interesting or they’re so fascinating that a single book, written by the subject itself, doesn’t suffice. Luckily, Patrick Stewart aka Jean-Luc Picard, is interesting enough to carry this book to the finish line. If you’re only picking this up for Star Trek lore, you’ll be a bit disappointed. That said, if you want to read about a fascinating actor who came up through the Royal Shakespeare Company and ended up on a starship, it’s great.