Politics Becoming Way Too 'Toxic'
A few hours ago we confessed that "our Daily Links became increasingly political. Either the total volume or the proportion (maybe both) increased for political topics instead of technology - an area where press coverage is fast becoming scarce (and/or of decreased quality/originality)."
In the coming years a lot of political news will be "Trump says" or "Trump claims", no real analysis or even punditry. That's because investment in journalism has decreased a lot since 2016. Many outlets just shut down or barely keep the lights on.
"I just went through some feeds this evening and while there were a lot of article titles," an associate said later, "almost none were related to tech or tech policy. There has been a quantum step or three in the degradation this last week."
"I guess the political stuff should be reduced completely or at least reduced in proportion to how the tech news has reduced," the associate added. "On the other side, the concept of software freedom is intertwined with software but software now permeates all aspects of society and culture. Indeed with Gen Z and Gen A it has replaced culture, creating the first ever absolute cultural discontinuity between generations in the history of the species."
The associate concluded that "it's time to reduce the political stuff, it's just that the software is now so tangled with other topics that it's not separate in any way like before and is actually part of the process."
In IRC we try to partition things by having different channels for different topics or "themes". #techrights is typically about (or supposed to be about) tech and political stuff typically goes under #techpol. In Daily Links, until September of 2023, we had separated the tech news from non-tech stuff. After that we decided to post most tech news in the sister site, which meant Daily Links here became increasingly political. The editorial change had good intentions.
Perhaps one way forward might be, split off tech-related picks (including censorship in the digital realm) from everything else. But the blurry boundaries remain a challenge.
The associate noted that "with recent events, there might be little to no value pursuing the purely non-technical stuff, though the civil rights stuff is very closely related to digital rights."
"It's a tough call since, for example, Musk/Xitter/SpaceX/Tesla are rather tech related. The cars are proprietary surveillance engines," the associate concluded.
We'll need to think how to better prepare for an era of chaff as "news". In the meantime I've fixed some syndication tools, which help us find and curate news. We developed a lot of software to help us do Daily Links - a tradition that goes back to 2008.
'Toxic' political discourse ought to be covered, but reducing the toxicity of coverage itself (e.g. inaccurately covering things to incite "the left" and "the right") is still challenging. They profit from conflict. █