The Hidden Dangers of Reading the News
Troubling information, propaganda, and biological cognitive impairment.
I've been a news editor for WantToKnow.info for many years. During this time, I've summarized about 6K news reports about high level corruption and cover-ups, primarily from mainstream outlets. I watched mainstream reporting shift dramatically in 2016, then again in 2020. Both shifts involved collusion between political and corporate forces to push control regime narratives and sideline dissenting voices.
At the same time, more and more news outlets have installed paywalls and anti-adblocker features on their websites. Everybody complains about this but almost no one is talking about the deeper implications of the trend. These deeper implications involve opening the door to a degree of totalitarian control we definitely don't want.
News reporting is our culture's mechanism for keeping society informed about what's happening. Someone has to pay for this reporting. The advertising revenue model for news media worked when the world was paper-based. Back then, you could buy a paper for a trivial sum of money and pass that paper along to anyone else for no additional cost. The ads you'd encounter while reading this paper consisted of print and still images.
Those days are long gone. On a basic level, most online ads today are pure malware. They burn cognitive resources, capture personally identifying information, and waste your device's computing power. When a website demands that you turn off your ad blocker, what it's really demanding is that you allow your device to be infected with malware, typically from unknown third parties.
Society's primary mechanism for staying informed obviously shouldn't depend on our willingness to infect ourselves with garbage. But ads aren't the only revenue source used by mainstream media. Paywalls and registration walls are also widespread. To pass beyond these walls, you must create an account whose activity is closely monitored.
That means news outlets now know exactly who is reading exactly what. And once this information exists, it can be exploited by corporate interests or government agencies. The American surveillance state is already a public private partnership. Reverse search warrants are now being used by law enforcement to identify criminal suspects based on Google queries. It's not a stretch to imagine our news consumption habits being used against us.
There are two great dangers in account-based delivery of news. First is the danger of customization. I'm personally a fan of customized news feeds, but there does exist the potential for these feeds to be manipulated, in extreme cases presenting one version of reality to one group and another version of reality to another group, leading to conflict between groups.
The greater danger of account-based delivery of news is that political forces would secretly obtain user data and use this to systematically identify and suppress dissidents. We've seen how comparably systematic repression was done across social media platforms to censor and manipulate COVID information. So our control regime has recently demonstrated the willingness to use technological dirty tricks to fool us into believing the official story. Forcing users to have accounts to read news gives the powers that be yet another set of dirty tricks to use against us.
If the revenue model for online news shouldn't be advertising or standard account-based subscriptions, what's left? Nonprofit news and affordable anonymized subscription models. I'd love to see nonprofit news grow. And I can envision a future media network running on Hive or EOS micropayments, perhaps using the banner auction model first showcased by the now-defunct social media platform Voice.com.
In this model, every piece of content that was created came with ad space in the form of a banner. This ad space was essentially sold to the highest bidder in an auction that began when the content was published. The better the content, the more desirable the ad space, the higher the price for the space. All of the published content was public, eliminating the need to keep track of who read what when.
Reading the News Without Letting it Get to You
While most people can tune out bad news, I'm continually exposed to it by my work. The news reports I summarize every week are often troubling and sometimes horrific. Although I'm inured to the negativity to some extent, there are times when the material I'm dealing with hits me like an emotional earthquake. In extreme cases, tears cloud my vision and I feel hopelessly overwhelmed. When this happens, I breathe deeply, allowing the emotional spell to overtake my senses before it eventually dissipates.
Some of the impacts of the bad news I read are more subtle. Over the years, I've become casual and even strident about the gravest of matters. On a somatic level, the stress of continual exposure to bad news is stored in points of bodily tension. I'm better than I used to be at processing and dissolving these tensions quickly, but they still show up sometimes.
One of the best ways to process disturbing information is to talk about it with another person. Sharing the burden of knowledge naturally alleviates some of the pressure of knowing. Another thing I've found helpful is putting the information into a more appropriate context. Everything that happens is part of a larger story, and that story is broadly positive if you zoom out far enough.
Of course, most people avoid this kind of stuff by avoiding terrible news altogether. They're deliberately unaware of society's great and ongoing failings. That's understandable. Good for them. But the rest of us would rather know what's going on.
Grief. Despair. Fear. Paranoia. These feelings and more are bound to come up when looking into any of the myriad interconnected societal crises now underway. While these feelings may be uncomfortable, they're totally healthy. The trick is to acknowledge and attend to the feelings without giving them any power. There are two analogies I use for relating with strong emotions.
First, feelings are like the weather. They're little more than the state that an internal landscape is in at a given time. This weather develops and dissipates by somewhat mysterious processes. We can respond to it however we want. And it inevitably changes.
Second, feelings are like children. They can be a source of the deepest love and joy and purpose. They will also cause trouble everywhere just because they don't know any better. Children are to be cherished, but they should in no circumstances be put in charge of a household or its finances. In most matters, they're beholden to us and not the other way around.
Another piece of the puzzle here is psychological resilience. In part because of the work I do, my psychological resilience is high. I can bounce back from reading about ecological ruin or crimes against humanity relatively quickly. Many people need more time to make sense of troubling information. Fortunately, there's nothing wrong with taking it slow.
Biological Warfare
Michael Nehls MD PhD recently appeared on the Mel K Show. Dr. Nehls talked about how the COVID vaccine impaired hippocampal neurogenesis which interfered with autobiographical memory. This memory-damaging impact of the vaccine appears intentional to Dr. Nehls. He sees it as the biological component of a larger plan, carried out largely by popular media, to make our population more confused and forgetful.
I'm not sure I completely buy his version of events. But I do know that the toxic foods many of us consume also contribute to confusion and forgetfulness. And I'm pretty sure that the powers that be don't want us clear and competent. So Dr. Nehls' theory may not be as crazy as it first sounds.
Dr. Nehls' new book on the subject is titled 'The Indoctrinated Brain: How to Successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on Your Mental Freedom.' It'll be available for purchase in a few days. I plan on ordering a copy. Although I haven't yet done the research to corroborate Dr. Nehls' claims, he seemed very clear and rational on camera. And his basic argument is straightforward enough:
COVID vaccines cause harmful inflammation in the body including in the brain.
This inflammation in the hippocampus impairs regular brain function, specifically the function of something called index neurons.
This impairing of brain function was intentionally part of the vaccine program.
Personally I don't question the harm, but I wonder how intentional it really is. Lots of unnatural stuff causes inflammation, so of course a mass produced experimental vaccine would do that too. Then again, the control regime has been using every means at its disposal to dumb us down for decades. It would be unsurprising to discover that the vaccines were a part of this much broader effort.
On the show, Dr. Nehls message alluded to mass media being weaponized against us. He says that identity itself is being attacked. The rampant censorship and the tenor of the propaganda throughout our media landscape kind of make his case for him. The control regime's endgame is less clear. The regime obviously wants us stupid and obedient, but maybe there's more to it than that.
Many people see a mass mind control program with a biological component and they immediately think global domination conspiracy. But the control regime could have other reasons for carrying out the program. Maybe it wants to replace our natural identities with lower quality synthetic identities that are easier to manipulate. Or maybe the regime merely wants most people sidelined, unable to meaningfully participate in public life due to cognitive impairment or chronic illness.
This last prospect strikes me as extremely plausible. And this sidelining might be easier to accomplish if many of us are so confused about our identities that we must continually argue about them. If we're arguing with impaired cognition due to a manipulated biological environment, even better. As long as we're focusing exclusively on dimensions of identity like race and gender, we're not talking about how the control regime has stolen our power and ruined the world.
Most of us are aware of this, if only intuitively. Mainstream media prescribes public discourse and keeps the conversation away from real questions about power and the people who wield it. To people like Dr. Nehls, the whole COVID program looks like a delivery system for a biological weapon which makes us more vulnerable to such manipulation. I'll admit that the virus itself and the experimental vaccines do appear perfectly designed to mess up our brains and memories. Even so, I'm not quite ready to see COVID as primarily a biowarfare operation against the people of Earth. We'll see how I feel after reading Dr. Nehls' new book.
For more of my writing, check out my scifi novels and my Hive blog.