(a picture from that time we visited the Roswell museum in 2007? It seems appropriate)
Damn. Do you remember when Scientific American was a prestigious scientific magazine that your NASA optical physicist Dad subscribed to? Remember when National Geographic wasn’t owned by 21st Century Fox / Disney and didn’t publish clickbait?
No?
Maybe I’m romanticizing these things from back when they were dense, thickly-spined, expensive magazines that my parents had in piles around the house. I guess you could say that a bright-yellow spine and the Topless Native Women were clickbait before you could bait a click. Maybe Scientific American was always kinda dodgy – I don’t know.
I’m just sad reading articles like “A Possible Link between ‘Oumuamua and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ which insists that since “…If UAP [unidentified aerial phenomena – a new term that doesn’t imply a UFO be an ‘object’] originated from China or Russia and were a national security risk, their existence would have never been revealed to the public. Hence, it is reasonable to conclude that the U.S. government believes that some of these objects are not human in origin”… I mean, that’s kind of a HUGE leap to label as “reasonable” no matter HOW much I’d like it to be true. That’s the kind of reporting for someone’s personal blog or… yeah… clickbait… not for the once-vaunted pages of Scientific American. Don’t worry, the author even gets a plug in for his recent book.
Meanwhile the National Geographic channel, stylishly rebranded as Nat Geo TV is touting shows like “The ’90s: The Last Great Decade?” and “9/11 : Control The Skies” “Barkfest” and “_____ Most Dangerous Animals”, churning out slick soundtracks and barely-informative programming that at LEAST is a couple of steps above the outright bullshit that the so-inaccurately-named-it-should-count-as-false-advertising History Channel, what with it’s ancient aliens and my highly-enjoyable Project Bluebook show…
Damn, so grumpy!
I was reading a Gizmodo article (no, I have no illusions that this is the highest echelon of reporting either, but I don’t feel like it really has the lineage or claims to have the journalistic integrity of any of the outlets above) titled ‘It’s Time to Treat Social Media Like the Climate Crisis, Researchers Argue‘ which I agree with rather heartily, both in the positive (it’s potentially an existential crisis for the human race) and the negative (in a system of capitalism, truly vast crises can NOT be dealt with unless it’s lucrative enough to do so in the immediate short-term since our system is geared too heavily towards immediate and tangible reward).
“At this point, it seems ludicrous not to muster all available resources to check a system that has fomented genocidal violence, platformed an insurrection, increased vaccine resistance during a pandemic, and imperiled asylum seekers, to name a few.”
A’yup. But who’s going to listen? 19 minutes before I write these words a federal judge dismissed antitrust lawsuits brought against Facebook by the FTC and number of state AGs. We simply don’t have laws in place that are made to fight these kind of threats – and those that might seem to address them would take so much effort to prove, all the while fighting the very system of disinformation that has everything to lose – I honestly don’t think it’s possible to do anything than write scholarly papers and point excitedly in a vacuum as the world turns towards kitten memes and conspiracy videos.