The New Media Manifesto
The corporate-media complex is finished, and it knows. As the 24-hour news cycle-watching Boomers begin to die off, corporate-media is desperately scraping up every last dirty dollar with clickbait headlines and sensationalized snippets before its credibility and influence shrivels to nothing.
It is also clinging to an ideological narrative long exposed — one people are flocking away from in droves. It’s become hard to believe that even the people creating corporate-media news don’t realize this. Kanye West is just the latest to have them performing mental gymnastics and scrambling to keep up the facade, but what was once a leak is now a torrent. The levees are well and truly busted. There is no going back.
The openness of the internet has created a whole generation whose values are based on truth-seeking, free thought and honest discussion. Corporate-media — try as it might — can no longer shape the minds of the people to its will uncontested. It is exploiting phony social justice movements as a last resort to distract people from its agenda behind the curtain, but only a few straggling sheep are still listening.
Consider that, say, 80% of people can’t think for themselves (they have no inner monologue), and so 20% get to shape the entire culture and political discussion. That 20% is being radically redefined, and this is sending shock-waves through society faster and in more complex ways than anyone can keep up with or understand.
People are no longer afraid of not being ‘nice’ or engaging in unpalatable discourse, and are intent on pursuing truth and sense. They are stepping out from the shadows and putting an end to the cultural madness aggravated by a cynical outrage machine. They don’t want to be told by Orwellian thought police that they have ‘unconscious biases’; they don’t want to be demanded to think and behave in a certain, nonsensical way. They don’t want to be relentlessly told there is a ‘gender pay gap’, and not be allowed to question why it exists.
They don’t want to be polarized, patronized or pandered to. They don’t want faceless brands to act as if they’re social justice revolutionaries while they plunder and toxify the Earth. The people’s free will is being reborn. Human consciousness is transcending the lies, hatred and misery. The schemes of the weak and deceptive have been exposed, and the strong and noble are rising again.
The likes of Facebook and Twitter attempted to become the new corporate-media complex and outline a new sanitized narrative, but the nature of their own platforms meant they were easily overrun. People have long expected the internet to be clamped down, censored, corporatized — restricted to a dozen or so thought-policed sites. But it has not happened and will not happen.
The web has given us a permanently evolving, fluid window on the world, one that no dominance-seeking entity can frame. Taking the place of the corporate-media complex is an alternative media — an intellectual dark web — with no pervasive agenda. It has no legacy to protect. This alternative media will one day become the dominant platform. What will it look like? How will it be funded? How will it carry out expensive investigative journalism and serve the political process? These are exciting times for groups of free thinkers — challenging but brimming with opportunity.
Is it a fool’s dream to expect an agenda-less mainstream media? As the alternative media takes over, the advertising dollars will follow and inevitably lead to new kinds of corruption. But new media will keep sprouting in its place, and the evolution will be ongoing and unstoppable. Thinking people will always know where to go and where to avoid — who to listen to and who to ignore.
The corporate-media complex as we know it today will still exist in some sad form. But it will be an ideological wasteland — the odd investigative report still allowed, the grunt-work of press release rehashing, stock market tracking and obituaries still seen to. Once the clickbait revenue dries up, legacy media will largely go back to being reporters of plain facts.
The new media will flourish. It will do a better job of keeping governments, politicians and corporations in check. It will take on a great responsibility, one the legacy media has failed to uphold, and it will strive to resist the temptation of corporate corruption at every turn. It will assume formlessness, and herald a return to the sacred ideals of journalism. Propaganda is unavoidable, but the model will ensure vigorous freedom of thought and expression. So long as that is preserved, the new media will make the world a better place for everyone.
Read my free novella Under-Toronto.
Twitter: @adamwinfield
Blog: Palimpsest
