from Balaji | by Balaji

Legacy media hates tech because tech disrupted them.

Media couldn’t build search engines or social networks. But they could write stories and shape narratives. Faced with decline, starting precisely in 2013 after Obama was re-elected, there was a visible editorial decision to push wokeness to drive clicks. That drove the 2010s.

Yglesias’ thread has many aspects of truth. One thing to add is that legacy media is actually simultaneously far to the left, far to the white, *and* far to the West of tech. As @OoTheNigerian wrote, tech journalism is less diverse than tech. t.co/dNy7tb9j5F t.co/KoOEjan6ao

Another aspect was ably written up by @mattyglesias himself, in a then-courageous piece on wokeness. But it wasn’t go woke, go broke. It was go broke, go woke. As media economics declined, they shouted slogans to drive clicks and radicalized millions. t.co/D8zC0l4Rs6 t.co/ohM19QGWwp

This bit isn’t quite right. Tech thinks the owners of media corporations are mostly meritless nepotists. After all, Zuckerberg built his fortune, Sulzberger inherited his. The son of a dentist outdid the son of a zillionaire. So it’s not about checkmarks. It’s about merit.

The journos’ checkmarks are really just a proxy for their unearned, inherited privilege in general. That inheritance more broadly is what is being taken away by technology. Because they certainly didn’t inherit the right to determine “truth” for the whole world. t.co/iQGmXlGLph

One last but key point. The real choice is between centralized corporate truth and decentralized cryptographic truth. Are we to believe a giant corporation that runs Orwellian billboards proclaiming itself to be the truth — or an open source algorithm that anyone can run? t.co/3B5xJ29wRr