While it may be useful to attack the credibility of individual journalists, it’s more economical to attack the credibility of journalism as a whole.

The main reason for being for the existence of journalism is political: it’s supposed to inform the public sufficiently so that they are capable of making important political decisions. The importance of journalism is only relative to the importance of how politically informed the enfranchised population is.

Considering that democracy has failed, the stated mission of journalism has also failed. The pretense of maintaining an informed public was always a relatively thin one, but it becomes even more challenging when public-interest newspapers are increasingly struggling to maintain their market positions. The notion that people want to be informed about the goings-on of local, national, and international political affairs becomes less and less sustainable each day.

The crisis in general interest journalism is part of the larger crisis of democracy.

The truth is that it’s not that information is no longer valuable. The continued success of the Bloomberg Terminal demonstrates that people who need timely, accurate information will spend at least $2,000 per month to get it. Skilled workers everywhere are willing to shell out for useful manuals that tell them how to do their jobs. People who need knowledge or training that must be customized are always willing to pay for it. The existence of the internet does not change that — if anything, it has expanded the market for useful, timely information.

It’s just that part of the value of that information must come from it being kept scarce, that is, non-public.

What journalism relied on was the democratic pretense of ‘informing the public’ so that they could make intelligent voting decisions. These intelligent voting decisions have never happened. The ‘informed public’ was always an imaginary concept, that nonetheless might have been more believable in a time when the franchise was relatively restricted, and the population in Western countries was arguably of a higher overall innate quality.

The ideal democratic man or woman is impossibly well-rounded, is well-informed in countless topics, and is able to wisely delegate authority on everything from mining regulation to regulations on derivatives to war to peace.

This insane, counter-intuitive notion is not applied in any other area of life, except for in democratic politics. Journalists, although they are supposed to have specialties, are often profoundly misinformed about their supposed areas of expertise. Because they spend most of their time merely talking to people who are supposed to be informed (academics, consultants, and other self-interested ‘experts’), and not actually laboring in their supposed area of expertise, they usually don’t know what they’re writing about, and don’t even know what they don’t know anything about.

People who want to achieve excellence are instead advised to avoid reading journalists, because their work tends to be so profoundly misleading and harmful to the characters of their readers. People need good information to make better decisions, but they don’t need that to come from newspapers writing for a general audience on uselessly broad topics from a radical leftist perspective.

The Sony hack is probably a lead indicator that many more similar hacks will occur in the near future, not all of them involving the theft of items like credit card numbers.

IT and security in general tend to be low priorities at most companies. Normal users just assume that their communications are reasonably secure, even when they’re being transmitted in the clear, and can be intercepted by anyone with the desire to do so.

Computers are, in general, more powerful than the people who use them quite understand. We’ve put supercomputers into the hands of people who have no idea how they work (and I increasingly have to put myself in this category), and unsurprisingly, those same people wind up shocked when more savvy people gain access to their machines without their permission.

The financial system is especially vulnerable to hackers, and has been repeatedly targeted, in part because all that’s necessary to authorize a financial transaction is a series of numbers along with some associated text information, a lot of which can be grabbed from publicly accessible sources.

This, and some other recent events, lead me to conclude that the internet has expanded beyond the ability of the network users to secure it.

Whenever this happens, criminals force a correction, and then the focus of productive actors must be to re-secure the network. This notably occurred during the bursting of the first internet bubble, as security concerns demolished the credibility of banner advertisements. Only the developers at Google were able to credibly tackle the click fraud problem, and make the internet industry more credible to investors again.

This time, it’s more likely to be the alternative financial system, represented by Bitcoin, which takes the pro-security position. My argument used to be similar to Moldbug’s (it’s actually, I think, what introduced me to Moldbug properly), in that I thought the US government would just kill everyone that it has to kill, and jail the rest, to prevent the growth in cryptocurrency.

Because the US has failed to kill, torture, and imprison with as much aggression as it would need to in order to prevent the growth of cryptocurrency, my conclusion also has to change: it must be the new growth area, because the US lacks the cold-bloodedness  and tenacity that it would otherwise need in order to keep its system together.

If I were them, I would kill (physically shoot) every bitcoin user that I could find. Because they’re either stupid or corrupt, they’re not doing this, and because they’re not doing this, they’ve signed a death warrant for their employers. Fine with me.

Update

This post should have included a hat-tip to Nick Szabo’s recent post on the topic of trustless computing.

An MIT economist named Jon Gruber has been in the news recently over a series of comments that he made at conferences stating that Obamacare had to be misrepresented to the public in order for the law to be able to pass.

This culminated in a congressional hearing in which Gruber thoroughly debased himself in front of the public.

The voters may be stupid, but the bigger problem is that we have intelligent economists who nonetheless advocate for socialist health care programs, despite the obvious failures of socialism, despite the strong logical and empirical arguments against socialism.

The smartness or stupidity of the American public are less relevant than the moral and intellectual failings of elite professor/consultants like Jon Gruber. The problem with Obamacare is less within the details of implementation and more with the high level design of the thing. It was never going to have a good result from the first step. The details are just not relevant.

Democracies can sometimes achieve impressive things. They can produce occasionally impressive people. The main problem with it is that it tends to promote clever villains like Gruber who are highly capable at manipulating the masses for malign ends, and are similarly capable of convincing themselves that what they’re doing is good.

The incentive structure inherent to democracy rewards men like Gruber who are able to create policies that appeal to to vices common to the American public as it relates to medical care:

• Sloth: I should not have to work to pay the doctor what he is owed.
• Lust: Other citizens should pay for the negative consequences of my lack of sexual discipline. If I get a rash from banging a stranger, someone else should have to pay for it.
• Envy: The wealthier family down the road should have to pay the doctor for me, because they have more than I do.
• Greed: I am entitled to free work from the doctor because I want it so much.
• Pride: Because I’m an American, and because I deserve it, because I’m a good and beautiful person, my medical care should be free. Oprah said I’m wonderful, so I am wonderful.
• Gluttony: Even though most of my medical problems are due to my gobbling and guzzling, other people should pay for my heart bypasses, diabetes medicine, and motor scooters to move around my bulk so that I can fill my basket with more Coke and Oreos.
• Wrath: Anyone who says that I am not entitled to free work from doctors is an evil person who doesn’t understand my fundamental rights as an American.

Gruber is so hated in part because he, unself-consciously, exposed how he exploited a population given to reveling in its own sinfulness, especially as it relates entitlement to medical care that would have been impossible less than a century ago.

This is also another way in which selecting a leadership class based on how well that they perform on quizzes is not a great idea. Whatever Gruber’s capabilities as a manipulator, under scrutiny, he repeatedly humiliated himself and betrayed his political allies. If he were going to be a villain, then it would at least be respectable if he were to be a better class of villain.

Among conservatives who were unable to muster a strong intellectual and moral case against socialized medicine from the word ‘go,’ instead tending to oppose it because it would threaten existing socialized medical care programs, it’s foolhardy for them to act as if they were really on the right side all along. Republicans and Democrats are fundamentally on the same side of the great debate over socialism, as they must be, because the people also favor socialism, whether they know it in those terms or not.

The second that you begin quibbling over the details of some socialist program is the moment that you have already ceded the central point in question: whether or not to have the state plan and regulate medical activity, rather than distributing planning and regulation in a more decentralized way.

Republicans feign shock at Gruber’s frank talk, but they themselves tend to hire similar consultants to help them to manipulate different segments of the population at different stages of their political careers using similar minor legal-vocabulary type tricks.

Stupidity is not so much a vice as it is the natural human condition among most people, everywhere, in all places. What is vicious is the flattering of the stupid that they are worthy to rule, and even worse to tell the capable that this is what’s virtuous, and that they have no other duty except to slake the greed of the mob.