PanoptiCon Artists: Your Questions Answered

Thank you, subscribers, for your thoughtful questions! I answered most and tried to address the main points of the rest. I’ve also done two recent interviews on the Mark Thompson Show that answer even more questions. (Click on the underlined links.)

Finally: Please sign up to get this newsletter in your inbox! Email is the most reliable distribution method in the oligarch algorithm era, so if you’d like to hear from me, sign up — it’s free! If you’d like to offer financial support — and get the perk of submitting a question for the next Q & A — please do so here:

Mary: What are you doing about research now that the internet is so broken? Tracy: Do you have suggestions for how we the people can archive information before it disappears?

SK: The loss of working search engines and easy access to information is a tremendous crisis for researchers, especially when coupled with AI. Here are some suggestions. First, all AI content needs to be labeled as such. Second, we need far more curation, including preservation of digital-only works. Third, anyone who can make their website free should do so. I am a lone writer in Missouri, and I keep my work free, yet millionaire media groups claim they can’t. As a result, we end up with a slew of paywalled “Here’s the only way to save democracy” articles with the “answer” blocked. People pay to bypass the wall and land in a gated community of Stepford Pundits. These pseudo-resisters prey on fear for profit: they are the regriftance.

The war on information is a war on the future by way of destroying the past: especially the recent past. I worry that the history of the first quarter of the 21^st century will be annihilated. When I look back on my books, I know I could never uncover all that corruption today — partly because search engines are broken; partly because media is censored or outlets have gone under. My end notes have become dead ends.

I encourage folks to print out articles, make copies as Word docs, save them on Internet Archive — anything. Hopefully there will be a more organized preservation movement in the future. Given the enormous amount of vital digital information out there, every effort helps, even if it’s not public yet. Someday a writer may post ...