A headline has never served to inform. A headline has always been an attempt to persuade someone, with a few targeted words, to buy a newspaper. A few simple words, and if they were cleverly chosen, you sold pages and pages of additional words along with them. Objective observers still want to believe to this day that it is about “being informed.” Hm… How could anyone nowadays still be informed about anything at all? When all statements seem to cancel each other out...
In times past, newspapers were institutions. Of course, like almost everything touched by bipeds, inflated with loads of vanity and illusory importance, but at least they were directional. You could buy a right-wing, a left-wing, or a liberal newspaper, and you would be supplied with what you wanted to believe. Opinions, values, right and wrong were clearly structured. Reading a newspaper, a journal, was a profession of faith, and you did not associate with people who read the wrong newspaper; at the very least, you maintained a healthy distrust toward people who did not read the same paper as you did. At the same time, you could wonderfully stroke each other’s egos if you read the same newspaper. Then it was reasonably guaranteed that you believed the same nonsense, and shamelessly ranted against everything that did not fit into your own reality tunnel.
Those times are long gone. Does anyone even read newspapers anymore? And if so, are these people such rare specimens of Homo sapiens that you can only find them in museums now? Stuffed? As a pre-Martian once said: “The internet is the new news medium.” That means the news comes directly from the people on the street. Quickly filmed, and immediately afterward posted to the asocial NotWork. If you consume enough of these cellphone snapshots in a day, something like a vague sense can emerge of what is happening at a tiny point in the world. You do, however, have to watch very, very many such clips. Otherwise it is about as random and arbitrary as a lottery win, and says nothing. Which is why the new frenzied reporters (without training, editor, or emotional maturity) do everything they can to pull as many viewers to their side. Which is no longer so easy, in an Internot where everyone thinks they are a superstar, and does everything to remain a superstar.
The Internot is a competitive arena of vanities. Even romantic souls should by now have understood that the Internot is about money and success. Nothing else. It is NOT about truth, NOT about justice, NOT about communication, NOT about knowledge. It is about egos and masturbation. Masturbation on a scale previously unknown. Public masturbation, whose sole purpose is to attract as many spectators as possible. With headlines that lure, provoke curiosity, or simply invent hair-raising claims. In the attempt to prove one’s own importance, the wildest headlines are pulled out of magic hats. Look at the headlines with which clips on your Lootube are advertised. They make the headlines of former tabloids look lame. They play with the incurable curiosity of the biped, and anyone who has not seen through the game will sit through clips for 45, 90, or 130 minutes, waiting for the one piece of information promised in the headline. Until you realize you were screwed. That information does not exist. It was just a headline to lure you, seduce you, steal your time, but above all: to feed the ego of the inventor of the headline.
Which, at least for me, has astonishing consequences.
I have less and less interest in going into the Internot at all, because these headlines are like slurry and tar for my sensitive network of synapses.
If I do fall for one or more temptations, I notice relatively quickly when someone simply likes hearing themselves talk, and that there is no added value for my life coming out of it.
It has long since fallen by the wayside to cite sources for specific information. Which makes the truthfulness of information in the Internot even more questionable than in the times of “real” journalism. And even back then, truth was often in short supply, because the incorruptibility of the reporter, editor, or newspaper was never truly guaranteed.
There is too much of everything in the Internot. The sheer mass of data triggers in me the same reaction I had before the Internot, when people tried to force-feed me certain ideas.
At all times there have been events that were turned into phenomena of the age. Somehow everyone talked about them, and because everyone talked about them, even more attention was drawn to them, which made even more people talk about them. This happened during the turn of the millennium, which had no, zero real significance in any practical, real way. Resourceful people found ways to press the paranoia button in bipeds, and soon everyone was talking about the “millennium crash.” Which, of course, did not happen. Until even the last childish minds understood that, clever strategists had made large profits.
By now the Internot is a mass phenomenon of individualists. Whoever believes they have a clever thought (I, here and now, for example), or are on the trail of a trend, will turn it into a business model. Headlines have become the new and seemingly only marketing tool for this. Because the scroll illusion of the Internot makes it necessary to hook an anchor into the junkie within a fraction of a second. Nuance, truth, real background have become secondary matters, even though they are not secondary at all from the standpoint of humanity.
On what do bipeds base their decisions? By weighing pros and cons. In doing so, a reasonably sensible biped tries to accumulate as many real facts as possible, in order to extract an essence from these facts on which decisions can be built. Strangely, bipeds orient themselves less and less toward reality as found in their own real surroundings when seeking facts, and more and more toward digital data. Without ever being able to be sure who the author of certain stories is, or which sources that author relies on. Quite apart from this, AI has opened the door wide to entirely new forms of manipulation. Which image, which sound, which word is still real, what comes from a calculator? More important than real integrity is the role, the image someone conveys of themselves. The measure of credibility today is how many likes, followers, subscribers someone has. That means the amount of fans of a “reporter” decides credibility. Which is roughly just as hair-raising as measuring the truthfulness of a message by how much you like the message.
Actually, everything should and must be questioned right now. Especially the messages that most flatter one’s own beliefs cry out to be questioned. Which apparently no one does anymore. It has become too easy to scatter messages into the world. Which is why everyone with Internot access feels called to do so - and thus to contribute their share to the hopeless chaos in the world. Which raises a decisive question: what value does anything in the Internot still have?
Only recently I saw a popular opinion-maker in the Internot who, in a long 1 ½ hour nonstop monologue, reinforced his statements what felt like 300 times by claiming to speak only “the truth.” “That is a fact! The truth!” And why? Because he said it was the truth. And the sky is blue because it is blue. Every child understands that.
Just… how much truth is contained in truths that appeal to sources which themselves have a questionable relationship to truth? I am not talking here about the phenomenon that every view of phenomena can only ever be a fragment of the whole picture. I am talking about the fact that every little Hitler in the Internot has their own agenda. Hidden motives that are never loudly proclaimed. Of course the opinion-makers in the Internot have only the noblest intentions. They want to make the world “better,” or even “save” it. Why they want this is explained, at best, only as deeply as someone has learned to look into the mirror. Which does not exclude blind spots, or the possibility that some perspective may be built on trauma or injury.
The little dictators in the Internot are not very choosy when it comes to selecting their means. Any means is a means to an end. And this holy end seems less about enlightening others, and more about convincing as many people as possible that one oneself is enlightened and worthy of worship. Naturally, this is never spoken about. The role once played by gurus and coaches is today taken over by… almost every little Internot dictator. Whoever has Internot access and a digital page somewhere plays the wise enlightened one, and whoever says what others want to hear will soon become the leader of a large congregation of loyal disciples.
What happens relatively rarely is that someone considers themselves too good to participate in the attention competition of the Internot. Logically. Anyone who does not compete is ignored by algorithms that are programmed to measure, evaluate, reward, and punish according to Olympic performance-and-success competition standards. Since bipeds have been fed performance and competition norms from early childhood, they do not question whether the game itself makes sense. They do not question what expectations are directed at them, or how much they enslave themselves in order to be allowed to play along. It is generously ignored that whatever brought success from then on determines the life of the successful one. What was just vain fun a moment ago turns, in a fraction of a second, into pressure of expectation. That which brought success must now be fed to the fans. Again and again and again. Until the fans shift their focus to another idol. It is the “Heroes” syndrome: no David Bowie concert without him having to give in to the pressure of the fans and sing his anthem “Heroes” for the 300-millionth time.
It is high time to highlight a fundamental aspect of the Internot: the Internot is entertainment. Entertainment is distraction. Perhaps with less greedy CEOs the Internot could really have become a tool for communication or knowledge. A futile thought, because truth as such is far too simple and complex for anything bipeds create to ever capture more than a tiny partial aspect of truth. This truth, however, is captured less by scientists or reporters, and certainly not by influencers, but by poets and artists. True poets and real artists, not the self-appointed Internot simulators, know very well that there is not much they can actively do. Truth happens. It is captured by chance and decides whether a work has substance or remains merely pleasant decoration or pastime. Which is why I never tire of pointing out that art has nothing to do with virtuosity or skill. On the contrary: the more unintentional and childlike the play, the more likely it becomes that the muses will let a few molecules of truth flow into the work. Humility and devotion help the artist more than delivering a perfect thing that makes the average consumer marvel.
So if individuals everywhere obediently play by the rules of foreign systems, yet are not capable of humility and devotion, that alone is reason enough to change the channel. Life has gifted me with some very paratoxical insights. For example, that noble intentions do not necessarily produce noble results. Rather, any intention at all, regardless of motive, seems excellently suited to generating confusing outcomes. Whereas lack of intention almost always seems to lead into the essence of truth. As if one can only recognize “what is” when one jumps into the phenomenon naked like a baby. This is the phenomenon that in the realm of love is called “unconditional.” It has become common knowledge that love with expectations and demands is not love. It produces no love. It drives love away. In other areas this has not yet been understood. One’s own ideas and expectations distort the picture. This applies to the little Hitlers in the Internot just as much as to the many loyal consumers.
Little room is given to surprise. Probably because you cannot slap a copyright on a surprise. An important aspect of the normal biped is obsession with control. Given how obsessed bipeds are with control, it should by now have become common knowledge that they are control freaks. Which is practically a synonym for lack of trust. Which is not surprising. To this day there is no Nobel Prize for trust, nor an Olympics of trust. Trust is not measured by material status symbols, fame, or power. Therefore trust has no real value in the society of bipeds. “Trust is good, control is better”? That is, in any case, a belief of the performance society. It sounds wise, but expresses nothing more than mistrust of trust.
Instead of documenting surprises and phenomena, the little Hitlers in the Internot try to derive amusing conclusions. Conclusions that no one would give a damn about if they knew who the little Hitlers really are, which skeletons they have in their basements, and which unhealed wounds they carry in their hearts. Or put differently: what can I still orient myself by today?
The Internot is not the great communication and knowledge medium it was once sold as. Therefore it is utterly unsuitable as a basis for decisions. The old media have long since been convicted of corruption, and are therefore unsuitable as well. Books? Even for the greatest authors, the same applies: if I do not know him or her personally, I know nothing about that person. I must therefore assume that at best only a fragment of truth was captured there as well. Hm… Friends? At least there I have a rough sense of which traumas and heart injuries I am dealing with. Which makes some self-deception of a friend or a lover truer than the lies in the Internot. Where on earth can I find a spark of truth and not have to think any further?
I mostly find remnants of truth in the last oases of untouched nature. More precisely: when nature becomes uncomfortable and challenging, I am almost instantly beamed into the realm of truth. As little as I love pain, pain is a pretty good parameter for having landed in the space of truth. Ecstasy can also be truth, provided it is not built on vanity or other forms of compensation. But otherwise? It has become easier to feel when I am being lied to or manipulated than to recognize anything as fundamental truth. So how can I tell that a headline is not trying to screw me over and seduce me into a subscription? Quite simply by the fact that there is no headline. Truth, even in the 21st century, is quiet and modest. It needs no headline and no little Hitler shouting it into the masses. Truth comes. Always. Earlier, but mostly later. I can lean back and observe the unimaginable monkey theater. If I want to. Mostly I do not. Because nature holds inspiring stories ready. That makes everything much simpler. Not necessarily more comfortable. But it spares me the slurry of bipedal existence.