No Bird is Free in the Aviary

As journalists are banned, mention of competition is throttled, and employees are threatened and fired, it feels incumbent upon anyone with even a sliver of a platform to comment upon the social media upheaval of the year; Elon Musk’s tyrannical takeover of Twitter.

The South African greed monger has been stalking the social media giant since April, at first being refuted and throwing a hissy fit. But eventually, as is usual in the upper echelons of Corporation, money has the final say, and for a wooping 44 billion USD, Twitter finally caved this October.

“The bird is freed”, he world’s richest man proudly announced. Which exact bird he referred to is unclear. It certainly wasn’t the employees left at the company, who were either fired or subjected to the mother of all ordered overtime. And it certainly weren’t the general users, with mentions of competitors being muted and journalists being banned. The only bird apparently freed in Musk’s aviary seems to have been the vulture Trump, unshackled again and just as unhinged as before his time-out, sparing not a moment to broadcast the release of Trump-centric trading card NFTs as Christmas gifts.

As with most powerful men promoting freedoms to gain public support, their cherished freedoms seems an exclusive privilege, offered only at the benevolence of the overlord.

But people forget that Twitter, and its ilk, was never about freedoms. Social media isn’t a public service or a public right. Twitter, for all its past benefits and ills, has always been a private company, bent on making money from human-to-human interaction. No matter how often the PR departments of Facebook or Twitter or TikTok speak of “connecting human beings”, the only connection these companies have ever cared about is their connection to your wallet. Or better yet, a connection to the bigger wallets of those that want to understand how and why you do your connecting.

Social media has become as a revolutionary step in communication technology as the telephone or printing press. But despite its public influence and presence, social media isn’t a public service. It is a public leech. From the start, its intentions have been to bleed people dry. Through subscriptions, advertisements, or a source of data to sell to whomever wants to manipulate the public the most. If people want a public good, a place designed not to bleed people but to connect them, they should search out platforms that aren’t run by Machiavellian shit-stirrers or robotic facsimiles, but are open-sourced and free from capitalist agendas.

Twitter hasn’t fundamentally changed under Musk’s regime. It is what it always was; a platform where its users are the product. To expect Twitter to be otherwise, pre- or post-Musk, is naïve to say the least.

The only difference between now and then is that Musk is worse at hiding Twitter’s true nature.

/Sebastian Lindberg 19/12-2022

Public Servitude

Internet darling Sanna Marin, Prime Minister of Finland, the world’s youngest prime minister, took some flak last week. Bringing condemnation and spurious allegations from her political opposition. Prompting press conferences and drug tests and world-wide conversation about women in power and public figure responsibilities.

I’m sure you’ve seen the disgrace by now. The debauchery. The sheer indulgence! The very gall, that a world leader, a prime minister, a woman, has the brazen audacity to have fun with her friends after work!

Or maybe it’s just the fact that she looks good doing it that sparked the envy and ire of her political foes, among whom is Riikka Purra of the Finnish right-wing racist party.

There are things to be said about equality here. There are things to be said about women in power, how easily they’re made into targets by petrified conservatives. There are things to say about moral honesty. But I’d like to say something about what we expect from our public figures. Our representatives. And by large, those that serve society’s needs.

Here’s my hot take: Public figures are people. Not always very good people, but none the less people. They eat, shit, sleep, fuck, dry their runny noses on the backs of their hands, and masturbate. They’re no different in any fundamental way from you yourself, except that they’re probably wealthier and they’re better at public relations than you are.

So stop expecting them to be mindless automatons in the service of the state. They represent you at work. That doesn’t mean you own them in their spare time. You’ve chosen them to perform a professional service. Nevermind that they’re usually ass-hats at it, incompetent and corrupt, ignorant and cowardly. You do not own them when they’re off the clock.

This is a more common misconception than you may realise. It’s not just politicians that suffer from it. Celebrities become public idols, slowly bereft of their private lives for the benefit of the salivating judgement of the mindless masses that has nothing better to do with their pathetic lives than obsess over some Hollywood puppet. But you don’t need to go to the glamour of tinsel town to find comparisons. Just take a look at your doctor. Your nurse. Your child’s teacher. All of whom you somehow believe you own just because you need them.

Your curiosity does not give you any power. Your needs do not give you any rights. Your vote does not indenture anyone to you. Being a doctor, being a nurse, being a teacher, being an actor, being a minister, is just a job. Public service is not public servitude. Even when those people care about what they do. Even when they’re needed for society to function. Even when you can’t make your miserable life go around without them. It is still just a job. And off the clock, when the curtains are down, out of the lime light, no matter how important they are to you, they owe you nothing.

/Sebastian Lindberg 22/8-2022

Iä! Iä! Old media fhtagn!

That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange government bailouts, even dying business practises may… gasp for another few sordid breaths before they too will inevitably die.

And so, strained references aside, let’s get on with our regularly scheduled broadcast. Swedish public service media is having its mandate revised. Or so claims the fresh off the rocky start Swedish government. And as a key component of that revised mission statement, along with some meagre attempts at modernization, public service is to ”defend the commercial news media houses”.

So what? Don’t worry! It takes a moment. It will sink in before you’re done reading.

So, first thing’s first. I know there’re a few international readers out there on the internet. Never tell me I’m so dimwitted that I believe that my societal practises and cultural touchstones are the hub of all creation (I’m looking at you, US of A). I bet you may be confused as to what this strange thing called ”public service” really is. Does it bear the stench of socialism, you may wonder?

A little bit, I guess. Public service is, in short, publicly funded entertainment productions, education projects, and news coverage. Which sounds nothing short of State media the likes of Chinese CCTV (which is still the greatest media joke of all time). But state funded media can on occasion have an upside. The Swedish example, for example, is meant as a non-commercial alternative to the Swedish media climate. It is supposed to strive to educate and uplift the public, rather than to sell us advertisements. It is supposed to stay neutral and not align with any political parties or ideologies. And it is supposed to have media coverage even in the far flung corners of the country where commercial interests don’t see a profit in reaching.

And all of it is funded by taxes. By the citizenry, whether they like it or not.

It doesn’t accomplish all those goals, not by a long shot, but it’s supposed to try to! Studies show again and again that public service news coverage isn’t even nearly politically neutral, skewing heavily to the left. They don’t nearly reach all the corners of the Swedish map. Their strive to be non-commercial can go into such silly extremes that they’re not even allowed to mention brand names on their shows. And journalistic horror stories keep cropping up, detailing how reporters are bullied and pushed into ”correct” ideologically sanctioned opinions and angles. And no matter how many jumps and hoops our politicians put between themselves and the public service budget, to lend it non-partisan credibility, it is still those same politicians that appoint the head honcho of the public service organizations.

It is a mixed bag, suffice to say. Some like it. Some dislike it. Some hate it. Some love it.

But now, another mission that public service news coverage is supposed to do is ”to defend commercial news publishers”.

Why? Because it is by now readily apparent that trying to run an old-school news platform on the basis of subscribers is an act of beating a very, very, very, very, very dead horse. But even though traditional news media has been dying for decades, journalism is still an absolutely vital part of not only a democratic society, but of a Socratic society as well.

But why ever should it be the tax-funded part of journalism’s job to give CPR to the commercial part? Why should taxpayers have to give artificial support to commercialism? Doesn’t that go against the very core of the so-called ”self regulating” free market? If a business is too fragile, too old, too stupid, to function under its own set rules, why should it be kept alive?

But how though? How can tax-funded news coverage ”defend” commercial competition? By waving exclusivity and journalistic competence so that the life-supported old media giants can get there first? The press release doesn’t make it clear on just how public service is to accomplish this. Naturally, the Swedish government weren’t clear on the how. They rarely are.

It is almost vague and wrong-headed enough to suggest that media house lobbyism has had a hand in these new guidelines. Which wouldn’t be a first. The whole point of the widely hated and ridiculed EU Copyright Directive, and its articles 15 and 18, was to give the old news publishers another shot of adrenaline as they have been wasting away in their sick beds. Traditional news media lobbied hard to get that piece of loathed legislation through. It is no wonder that similar soft bailouts would be introduced nationally as well as internationally.

But journalism is good! And it gets even better with a multitude of journalistic actors on any given scene. But you can’t keep staving off the death of archaic business practises. You can’t keep rewarding turgid and inflexible business moguls that can’t or won’t change with the times. That is not how you promote media plurality. That is not how you incentivise change. That is how you let businessmen get away with bad behaviour. To let them just sit there, and whine, wait, and cannibalise themselves beyond recognition. Iä! Iä! Old media fhtagn!

Government bailouts rarely, if ever, work. It just doesn’t stave off disaster. It didn’t with Goldman-Sachs. It didn’t with Swedish Saab. It just costs resources. Time and money. Better spent on other activities. Like, for example, to support the evolution of smaller, slimmer, independent journalistic efforts instead.

But oh no. There’s a dead horse in the Swedish government’s yard. And they’re going to beat it ’till there’s nothing left but some residual bone and a bunch of blood-splattered daffodils.

/Sebastian Lindberg 11/6-2019