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Mob Rules (Blog of the Grotesque)
One of my favorite reading assignments in high school was a short book of extremely short chapters written by Sherwood Anderson, named “Winesburg, Ohio”. The first chapter, as I recall, was about an old man who scribbled down notes about the people in his hometown and then he crumpled up the scraps of paper he had written them on and stuck them in his pocket. I think this chapter was called “The Book of the Grotesque”, I guess referring to the archive of little balls of paper he had stashed away in his pockets.
Today, I too want to write down some such notes about the world I live in, mainly my own views about the situation I share with the people who coinhabit this planet with me. Of course I am well aware that I know very little about the vast majority of people on Earth — my hunch is that less than one billion (out of the over eight billion) people living are native speakers of English, far less are native speakers of German, and far, far, far (that’s very far) less are anywhere near as focused on languages and literacy as I am … and so quite probably the less than 1% of people who are simply as “academically” oriented as I am number more like at most ten million people world-wide. Distilling that number down again by a factor of the commonly quoted one percent who are actually active participants in online communications and my “peeps” dwindle down to maybe a mere 100,000 (worldwide). I could go on like this until I reach the conclusion that there are probably only a handful of people who seem to understand me at least half as much as I believe to understand myself.
Oops — did I just go off on a tangent? Sorry about that. 🙂
Where was I? Oh, not much of anywhere yet. Let me get back there.
In the USA, where currently many mobs are running rampant and talking on tiktok all day and all of the night, things are getting sorta cray-cray real fast. The USA is undoubtedly the global #1 in both military technology and also in propaganda technology (despite the popularity of the recent Chinese upstart). This is not some overnight sensation — just listen to Ike’s “warning” speech given almost 70 years ago:
Source: https://emotional.politics.blog/2021/01/07/a-better-way-to-leave-office I feel that in the intervening time, the USA has been too much focused on the expansion of liberty (or “freedom”) and too little focused on the responsibility required to impart and train to the appropriate levels of literacy (and similar capabilities — such as “publicacy” [1]) with respect to the use of such powerful technologies as have been developed by the undisputed world leaders in both military technology and also propaganda technology.
Today in the United States of America people of all ages have virtually free access to these technologies without even so much as one iota of literacy in how to use them appropriately. Indeed, I fear that the situation globally might even be far worse than that (though perhaps in some countries the access to these technologies may be somewhat less liberal than in the USA).
Worldwide, in the past seven decades we have witnessed a vast expansion of liberty and freedom to use powerful technologies with only an insignificantly small amount of responsibility towards the expansion of literacy needed to know how to use such technologies appropriately.
The risks and dangers that someone may accidentally press a wrong button or trigger or whatever seem to be increasing rapidly.
[1] See “What is Publicacy + Why does it Matter?“
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The End of Objectivity
I only apologize a little bit for using this ambiguous title. I think there are indeed (at least) two different interpretations that both seem valid, but oddly both interpretations also seem relevant. One interpretation is that there is a point where objectivity will stop — and that is the interpretation that actually motivated me to use this title. But after I had chosen the title, it occurred to me that another interpretation which refers to the goal of objectivity (i.e., the “end” for which the “means” of utilizing objectivity) is also possible. I didn’t actually intend this meaning, but perhaps this is also worth investigating at some point … (but not today).
Today, I will try to make a case that something I discovered just recently (and wrote about yesterday) makes me believe that objectivity may indeed stop (and might even stop soon). Let me cut to the chase here.
Yesterday, I wrote “Irrational Media Promotion Makes “Dr. Noc” Newsworthy“, in which I give a brief overview of something Morgan McSweeney said on Alan Alda’s “Clear + Vivid” podcast recently. Now let me reiterate the gist in my own words here. Basically, he said that what his audience considers to be compelling information is information which is contextualized according to their point of view — essentially, by describing how he himself is a normal person (just like the members of his audience) and that is why the shared information is relevant and valid for them, too (I guess if he were very different — e.g. if he spoke a different language than they do — they might not even pay attention to him). He also mentioned that using a “just the facts” approach of simply presenting raw, dry data was simply not as compelling (and therefore relatively ineffective).
Here I also want to go deeper on a tangent Alan Alda uses in each episode when interviewing his guests. He uses “seven quick questions”, one of which is “How do you tell someone they have their facts wrong?” I think my own answer to this question would be “In order to answer that question, I would need you to explain to me what you mean by ‘facts’”. I have noticed over the years many of his guests find this aspect of the question difficult to manage, and I sense an increasing amount of pushback, and some have indeed even stated that the word ‘facts’ is problematical.
I could probably write an entire book about this one issue alone. But my point is not a matter of philosophical attitude. Instead, I am actually simply observing “just the facts” of what Morgan McSweeney and also other guests of Alan Alda are saying increasingly. I believe this increasing objection to the notion of ‘facts’ tells us something about human cognition. It tells us that we are skeptical of the “just the facts” philosophy. We doubt that humans are unbiased (indeed, maybe we might even say that anything capable of cognition is biased in some way). Maybe we might ultimately be led to the conclusion that the notion of “objectivity” is a hoax.
I have a very strong hunch that such disillusionment might be a very good thing.
Source: https://giphy.com/gifs/startrek-scotty-cannot-QBq8kOtfBd7DG -
From Unprofessors versus Unprofessionals to Science versus Religion
I think in my life I’ve experienced more than my fair share of quacks. I even consider at least one such person (i.e., a “quack”) within the circle of my own close family members. Throughout the many years and decades, quacks are littered more or less all the way along my own path. Some I have been quite easily able to shake off before they were able to do me much harm, others have unfortunately left deep scars behind which haunt me and rob me from well-deserved and sorely needed sleep on long, dark, cold and stormy winter nights.
I guess for the most part a large degree of the damage done occurred during periods on insufficient skepticism. Know-nothings will happily and merrily breed on the naiveté of pupils, scholars, students and assorted teenies, juveniles, adolescents and aspiring adults alike. Thirst for knowledge, experience, wisdom and whatnot more far outweighs the dearth of an ample supply of such resources.
The widespread social systems devised to impart reliability are still no match for the swarms of charlatans thriving in the free markets heating up all over the globe. Just the other day on one of the podcasts I follow, Ms. Phetasy was ranting about the newfangled systems that are being developed in order to provide “solutions” to old-fashioned problems (which are well-known and have also been solved almost a century ago by John Maynard Keynes) related to the way suckers are easily misled in the whirlwind of information being traded in markets worldwide. [1]
“What?!?” I find it more and more difficult to become outraged by widespread stupidity, illiteracy, bad decisions and whatnot. I think my own youth was perhaps filled with too much of “Great Expectations” for humanity. In the meantime, I think I have become much more accustomed to the lack of interest most humans show for pretty much anything and everything.
[1] see “That’s So Gross and Disturbing!” [ https://podcasts.video.blog/2026/01/16/thats-so-gross-and-disturbing ]
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One is Better than None
This week I met a woman from Ukraine (Tanya) who totally blew me away with how she reacted when I tried to explain to her why I prefer rational media to irrational media. I didn’t actually refer to them with these terms, because that might have been more confusing (since most “mainstream” portrayals are almost the opposite, insofar as they usually portray irrational media as reliable rather than what they actually are — which is: overflowing with propaganda). At any rate, I myself consider the distinction to be rather simple and straightforward, and I think I presented it quite clearly in “Rational Media” [ https://phlat.design.blog/2024/01/14/rational-media ] (nonetheless: if you beg to differ, please feel free to voice your opinion 🙂 ).
In contrast, Tanya seemed completely baffled and explained that she couldn’t understand what I was saying at all. I think to her it seemed incomprehensible how anyone might consider (just) one source of information reliable — merely on the basis of being based on natural language. I think she mentioned that relying on just one source seemed … well, I already said it: incomprehensible (she was actually expressing herself in the very basic German she has been able to learn in the 2 years she has been in Germany since seeking refuge here from her own war-torn country).
I agree — in school, I was also taught to seek information from a wide variety of sources. Yet no one seeks information from an absurdly wide variety of sources. Let me give you an example. If you want to learn about what weather is predicted for the next day or two, then you would not consult a cookbook (even though cookbooks may very well contain certain atmospheric information, such as a note that the boiling point of water depends on the amount of atmospheric pressure in the environment). Searching for a weather report in a cookbook seems absurd — and yet so called “search engines” are supposed to cast such wide nets across the entire internet (yet note also the “world turned upside down” story I covered last week — see “I Want to Say Goo-Goo-Ga-Joob” 😉 ).
As I mentioned last week, only extremely naive people still do not realize that a search engine (like Google) presents information from a very particular perspective — namely the perspective that is most profitable for the search engine company … now (Google [and other search engine companies] executives seem to have learned something from John Maynard Keynes’ famous quote that “In the long run, we’re all dead”).
Source: see “The Social Construction of Publishing“ The mainstream narrative is that Google (like the Pope, cf. “If Google is the Pope of the Internet, Then Who Are You & I?“) simply tells the truth … and suckers (like “the mass of men, who lead lives of quiet desperation”) simply soak it all up. Suckers are so naive that that they simply believe this mainstream narrative — and therefore, they are ready, willing and more or less able to search for something … and erroneously believe that the results are not Google’s perspective … they seem to be so mesmerized that they actually believe such results to be “facts” (remember, remember: my post from last weekend 😉 )
The illiterate masses are indeed completely lost. Since even most literate people won’t remember, I will remind my readers that most of Europe was also completely lost and in turmoil for centuries after the Reformation brought about by the printing press.
Economists like to refer to such “world-changing” events as shifts. Let me (try to) remind those of my readers who are old enough to remember what situation the world was in when Google took the world by storm at the turn of the millennium. The world (and in particular: the Internet and even more specifically the WWW) was quite different than it is today. Back then, the vast majority of “content” was academic — written by professors with impeccable precision. Today, the vast majority of content is quite different — filled with bells and whistles produced by quacks and charlatans and influencers and journalists and advertisers and even machines and apps and bots that get “turned on” by the cheek of some teenager’s butt. Those two worlds have very little in common. Yet due to a large staff of expert lawyers and marketers (and many other specialists, too) a very large tech company (which might actually be deemed as “too big to fail“) can mesmerize large populations of people with rather limited literacy skills to believe that some hack which may have worked back then still works today. IT doesn’t — it (the hack referred to as “Page rank” — which was actually essentially copied from an algorithm developed by Eugene Garfield) was abandoned many years ago. It has been replaced by quite sophisticated engines (see the image above) which produce nearly nothing … other than huge profits for shareholders who are obviously quite far beyond “drunk on the koolaid”.
Any person, company, robot or whatever that purports to have no subjectivity — no “point of view”, perspective, opinion, etc. of its own — should be considered laughable. Instead, shady characters are much more busy laughing all the way to the bank. Duping a global population of suckers is big business (see also “There’s a sucker born every minute“). The only thing that these tech wizards seem to have left out of the equation is a quip Frank Zappa once pronounced (and which is now preserved forever … — or at least until the cows come home):
There’s more of us ugly mother-fuckers than you
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Frank_Zappa#Tinseltown_Rebellion_(1981)Then again: I have been warning that this giant sucking sound is just around the corner for years (if not decades) — so I guess I should add: “your milage may vary”.
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I Want to Say Goo-Goo-Ga-Joob
My persistent followers (stalkers?) may have noticed by now (hopefully?) that I publish many blogs (I don’t actually count them, and sometimes I even forget that I maintain so many of them). Luckily, WordPress has a neato feature — I guess it’s an RSS feed tied to everything a WP user publishes — the feed for my main account is here:
https://wordpress.com/reader/users/internetonlineweblog
The reason why I publish so many blogs is because I have many different ideas. I also understand that many of my colleagues (i.e. fellow bloggers) publish everything in one location (also known as URL 😉 ), and I view that much in the same way that the “New Testament” was (simply) ordered according to the names of the authors. I have no problem with that, but it (simply) doesn’t jive with the way I choose to manage my information in a way that I feel is simple and straightforward (and quick and easy, etc.) for my followers to consume in little itty bitty bits and pieces that represent delicious snacks which are not only healthy but also designed for supreme digestability. [1]
In general, I am most interested in what my so-called “blogging community” says they WANT (hence: https://Wants.Blog 😉 ).
Yesterday, I happened to find a fellow publisher who recently wrote:
Source: https://www.arnoldit.com/ I wanted to word it “broke the law which suits Google” but I am not sure that is clear.
https://www.arnoldit.com/wordpress/2025/12/30/is-this-correct-google-sues-to-protect-copyrightFor those of you less focused on titles (than I am), let me spell out the complete version of the title corresponding to that URL:
“Is This Correct? Google Sues to Protect Copyright”
The author of that post clearly states that he is completely stupified by this news — understandably. The so-called TECH GIANT has finally come out of the closet in order to say that its entire business model has been built on what amounts to copyright infringement (to be clear, I am referring to Google — also known as Alphabet, GOOG, … — whatever 😉 ) … and it now aims to not only accuse but also to sue a poor little startup (which may very well be operating out of someone’s parents’ garage) … of (and for) doing the SAME THING!
Do I care whether any of my own posts will ever show up on a Google SERP? LMFAO — hell, no! In my humble opinion, the only people who still pay attention to Google are unreasonably illiterate (see also “Google can’t answer question about using Google (or NOT)#” [ https://search.tech.blog/2025/06/10/google-cant-answer-question-about-using-google-or-not ] 😉 )
[1] See also “Rational Media” [ https://phlat.design.blog/2024/01/14/rational-media/ ]
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Community Information versus Milieu Information
Since I have been writing about information, language, communities and milieus for quite some time, and since other people have also recently been increasingly commenting more on a wide variety of related issues, I’ve decided I should focus my attention on an insight that just happened to me in an “AHA!” sort of way.
I think I will use this essay to allow myself to simply explore my own thoughts first, and then I may very well follow up on working out the theoretical foundations on other blogs (of course leaving a sort of “paper trail” of links back to this post).
To cut to the chase: I think of “community information” as distinct from “milieu information” particularly in one aspect — and that aspect is the presence of at least one institution in the “community” scenario, whereas no such institutional involvement occurs in the “milieu” setting. [1] One way of interpreting this would be to appeal to the notion of a “card-carrying” members in community settings. Alternatively, one could focus on the quasi-“complete” anonymity of participants in milieu settings.
In community settings, community participants agree to involve some kind of institution to facilitate order in some way (e.g. to “make sense”, provide context, organize information, etc.). In milieu settings, no such institution or organizing principle is involved. In this sense, milieu settings are relatively unpredictable, easy come, easy go, much like so-called “free” markets.
Source: https://www.united-mutations.com/m/ed_mann_perfectworld.htm I have a hunch that one of the most problematic aspects to delineate in the explication of what sets milieu settings apart from community settings will be a clear and concise description the wide-ranging gamut of institutions which exist in the very complex world, more or less interwoven throughout human existence. Let me just provide a few examples to sketch out some of the ways institutions impact our lives on a daily basis.
Imagine any cash transaction taking place anywhere in the world — and let’s just zoom in and focus on whatever cash objects are involved. Let’s simplify it even further and focus on just those transactions involving just one “piece” of cash. I take it most people will have some concept of this cash being issued by some institution, and the institution sort of guarantees that the value of this piece of cash can be freely exchanged with other pieces of cash of equivalent value (and the value of each piece of such cash is obvious). Nevertheless, in the community setting (and in particular in this example in which a cash transaction occurs), the role of the institution(s) involved in the transaction are integral elements of the information related to transaction (e.g. including banking institutions, monetary regulators, etc.).
I could even imagine very extreme cases — such as the involvement of a variety of institutions whenever someone mentions a particular day or date on the calendar — but I think rather than delving into the details of such extreme cases, it would make more sense to provide another more mundane example most people are familiar with in their everyday experience.
As I mentioned last week (see “Technology (and Audience) Capture“), the currently booming “tech” world provides a plethora of institutions involved in managing vast communities of consumers of their products, services, including innumerable “free offers” and opportunities to be manipulated, controlled, propagandized to (and more!). You might even call it a world in which brave and naive consumers are suckered not even just day in and day out, but even every single second (maybe even many times over from millisecond to millisecond).
In contrast, milieus are unconstrained, uncontrolled, unmanipulated — they are simply (more like) free markets.
Ultimately, the distinction between milieus and communities boils down to whether participants are willing to agree to being constrained by (at least one) controlling institutions, which will ultimately constrain the behavior, communications, language, free speech, etc. Anyone unwilling to be constrained this way will orient themselves towards the freedom to move freely throughout milieus. Such freedom-lovers will tend to refrain from constraining themselves by signing on to agreements, binding contracts, etc.
[1] Here I am thinking of the characterization of institutions provided in e.g. Berger / Luckmann “The Social Construction of Reality”
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Technology (and Audience) Capture
Over the past few decades, the history of information technology has become littered with many examples of what I would like to refer to as “technology capture“. I think of this as essentially analogous to “audience capture”. Yet I feel as though in the technology industry there are a few caveats we should be particularly careful about … and I feel the time has come for us to focus on — and address the issues.
The main issue (in my humble opinion) is the hoax known as “artificial intelligence”. It’s “cheap” — “just press a button”. We don’t need no humans … who are prone to failure. [1] Literacy is now often what creators allow robots to do on the proprietary development (i.e. technology) platform.
Source: https://wants.blog/2025/12/20/maybe-this-christmas-i-shall-be-released Slop leads to sloppy sloppiness.
How about if we simply let “pride” refer to all humans and humanity (once again)? Let’s be proud (enough) to admit our failures (or shortcomings), to course-correct and adapt. Adaptation is indeed inherent to our own biology.
If I could choose between a sloppy guess and an educated guess, I think I would choose an educated guess every time.
For example: In the case of so-called “translation”, I trust a cohesive community of educated, trained and most of all engaged human translators far more than I would ever trust any “machine” (aka “AI”) translation anytime.
This reminds me of a quip one of my economics professors used in reference to “social economics”: people who believe too much in statistics seem somewhat predisposed to believing that if a hunter misses shooting a rabbit once on the left and also once on the right, that on average the rabbit has been “successfully” shot.
[1] See “Kintsugi (Finding Motivations & Inspirations for Moving On)” [ https://failure.news.blog/2025/12/18/kintsugi-finding-motivations-inspirations-for-moving-on ]
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I Read and I Write
Since I spend a lot of my time with a variety of tech gizmos, there are some people who seem curious to “figure out” what I do, and so they ask me to describe what I do. Since this has happened several times before, I have — over many years of their questions and my answers — come to the conclusion that the most appropriate description I can give them is:
I read and I write.
Source: CC0 licensed photo by Karin Christen from the WordPress Photo Directory: https://wordpress.org/photos/photo/6546482017 One thing I myself find curious is that many people seem to feel this answer is insufficient. Yet they are rarely able to explicate how they find my answer unsatisfactory. I think they usually find that my answer is unsatisfactory because it does not involve money.
Let me offer some examples of other things I do quite regularly which also do not involve money.
Almost every day, at some point in the morning I stand up. I walk around and go through various motions and then later in the day I might lie down for a little while, but normally at some point in the later evening I will lie down and then sleep for several hours, usually until the next morning again — and then on the next day these steps will start over and sort of repeat themselves again.
Also, throughout regular days like this I will time and again eat stuff I often refer to quite simply as food. I usually chew and swallow it, and then normally I digest it. Anything I no longer want or need, I will excrete. I find that is a sufficiently detailed description of what I do, and no money is directly involved in motivating me to do such things.
Of course I also do many things daily which do involve money, but I think it would be quite far-fetched for anyone to maintain that everything I do requires money for it to happen.
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Dovetailing Boundaries with Moving Targets
I am travelling today, and I’ve just decided to combine two pretty much completely different discussions into one combinatorial confrontation.
These days I find I am incessantly concerned about the “shifting sands” of propaganda, manipulation and all that jazz. I think of this sort of like investigating quicksand while I am drowning in it.
In case you already feel queasy about mixed metaphors, perhaps this might be a good moment to take some medicine, because I have a hunch we are headed towards increasing turbulence.
One of by blogger friends (whom I have so far never met “IRL”) wrote a post today about confrontations (see “Is There Such Thing as a Good Confrontation?“). Here, NL writes:
You have to remember that a confrontation takes place because of a negative thing otherwise this wouldn’t be called a confrontation but a discussion, so do not think twice about having this conversation—this will help you so much in the long run.
https://new-lune.com/2025/12/07/is-there-such-thing-as-a-good-confrontation
image source: https://new-lune.com/2024/07/05/3-things-to-be-unapologetic-about I wonder whether it’s possible to maintain boundaries with moving targets. I imagine it might be rather difficult.
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Kleinanzeigen (a German term for “classified ads” [in English] ) as “Consumer Platform”
Irrational media are usually (simply) consumer platforms, as the content shared via irrational media cannot be rationally contextualized. [1] Since there is no agreed-upon (and shared) meaningful context available, content is normally simply consumed without being interpreted as appropriate (or inappropriate), simply because irrational media do not provide any context for such kinds of evaluations.
In contrast, rational media are contextualized by the corresponding community’s language.
A few days ago, someone recommended a rational media site which I would also refer to as a consumer platform. The site in question goes by the name of “Kleinanzeigen” (which can be roughly translated into English as “classified ads”), in the “DE” top-level domain.
The site seems to be configured in a manner such that “partner organizations” provide “secure” transactions (mainly partners for online payments and also for shipping / delivery). Beyond that, the site is also rather heavy-handed with respect to tracking its users, and presumably this user data collection is then also sold “down the river” — perhaps to the same partners, but perhaps also to other partner companies interested in trading in user data.
Although I set up an account, I have decided this business model is too onerous for me.
maybe I’m to blame for all I’ve heard (but I’m not sure)
Nirvana (Kurt Cobain), “Lithium” [ https://www.nirvana.com/video/nirvana-lithium-official-music-video# ]Yet I feel perhaps the German community using this site appreciates this “big brother” approach to law and order.
What I find curious is that such control is not (as far as I know) an inherent part of the meaning of “Kleinanzeigen” (in German language). I feel the users of this site consume this approach (although they are not forced to do so, it appears to be a “default” setting, and one the site seems to strongly discourage from changing).
When a rational media site’s administrative staff imposes rules on its users, I feel that such deviation from the meaning of the site’s name jeopardizes the site’s rational media status. I guess it depends on whether such impositions are seen more as a “feature” or more as a “bug”.
In this case, I feel it’s a bug — so I will refrain from using the site. Yet I can also understand that there may indeed be a thriving community of users who see it as a “feature” — and also one they are happily willing to consume.
[1] See “Rational Media” [ https://phlat.design.blog/2024/01/14/rational-media ]
Social Business (WordPress weblog)
Socio Business blog 