I had to cancel one of the best journalists today. The old budget just couldn't take the strain anymore. I left a note of apology when I canceled my subscription.
The only way to keep up with the chaos is to subscribe to five or six Substack feeds, where the reporters driven from what we laughingly call the "news media" have sought sanctuary.
But there is no sanctuary from Capitalism. It's sell something or die. It's a buyer's market now, and likely to remain so. "Chronic insufficiency of demand" they call it.
This is not so new, actually. I saw a painting once, it was by Edith Vonnegut, who is a virtuoso with paint. It was an angel. The angel was in a big city, sitting on the sidewalk, on a blanket. Also on the blanket was a pair of wings for sale.
So, the only people who have a clue now are those who do the actual investigative work, and report on it; and those who can afford to pay them for their labor. The rest of us will just have to lump it.
That seems like a very big improvement, because up until recently we've had to pay somebody else to water down their stuff, and then pay them, if their employers saw a potential return on the investment.
This can't end well. But it's a microcosm, as they say, of Capitalism.
Somebody forgot to lock the capitalists up for the night, back around 1950, I'm guessing, and they got loose. After that it was only a matter of time before everything that wasn't bolted down would be sold off to the highest bidder. It's got so bad now even your attention, your autonomy, even your agency is already rented out.
But to return to my point. To be an informed person, a member of an informed electorate, you have to pay, so it means your ability to understand what's going on is now a trade commodity.
If you can't afford the work that journalists are supposed to do, you just have to make do with whatever comes to you free. It's sort of like trying to find a good movie, even the top streaming services are a vast wasteland of numbing soporifics. Free stuff is that overstuffed sofa left beside the road to rot in the rain.
A tiered society, ranked and regimented, stratified and hierarched, is what we live in now. It's what we've been living in for quite some time. So if you're worried about Our Democracy, you obviously haven't been paying.
I was going to say "paying attention," but now you have to pay to pay attention. Anyway, that's why there's no point worrying about Our Democracy. What there is of it is, at best, for rent.
Even writers are now rentiers, if they want to survive.
