#### intro why do Democrats cry "distraction" every time Trump does some new, fucked-up thing? why is it that Trump can say he'll have something ready in 2 weeks and by that time, nobody pushes him on it? why does everything feel so chaotic? the obvious reply is "the information environment is fucked up and our media sucks", of course, but *why?* we could look at jeff bezos' [fucking with Wapo](https://www.thenation.com/article/society/washington-post-jeff-bezos/#), or Paramount bribing Trump to get the [Skydance merger approved](https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/us-clears-way-8-billion-paramount-skydance-merger-2025-07-25/), or Elon buying Twitter and turning it into a Nazi haven. but i think those are symptoms of a deeper problem. >[!important]+ %% %% ![[about#^intro]] >>[!info]- %% %% >>hey, you clicked the button. nice, you get a cookie. this is where i show you how i'm easily able to pull the above section from another page by typing the following: >>``` >>>[!quote]+ %% %% >>>![[ ]] >>``` >this action generates a connection between the pages and automatically updates if i edit the linked words. neat, right? i hope you've enjoyed your brief interaction with this collapsible callout. i think the problem is ultimately *us*, as consumers of information. we have trapped ourselves in a cycle of 24hr news headlines and handed our hours over to dopamine-generating app scrolling. %% (note: expand later with quote from Siren's Call, perhaps) %% in the wake of the 2024 election i saw a lot of calls for Democrats to build "party media" partly by funding local journalism. frankly, i think we're fucked if our solution is waiting for benevolent elites to drop cash on that. the better use of our time and money would be spent investing in tools that organize and present the information that's already out there! >[!question]+ hypothetical what if instead of getting bogged down by "distraction" messaging on TV, Democrats could simply point to a "List of Bad Things Trump Is Doing" and declare the new minor issue of the day the #7 or #8 most important thing? wouldn't that make it easy- "this thing is #7, it's not nothing but Democrats are focusing on #1 #2 and #3?" my solution starts with us, and you can help do it for free, right now: Pivot to Wiki. #### "Pivot To Wiki" ##### what it is "Pivot to Wiki" is my proposal for a **cultural shift** in how we organize, curate, and engage with information. we need to rely less on info formats that work by grabbing our limited attention. we've only got 24 hours in a day, and all the articles & social media posts & flashy videos have to compete for each second of that. when clicks and retention rule, conveying truth becomes an afterthought. ^p2w-def consider the financial incentives for article-based news/journalism & social media: - article-by-article journalism, as a business, must necessarily be written by a finite number of employees and derive its revenue from keeping readers informed on the news via clicks or subscriptions. **if it stops producing news (new information), it won't produce any revenue**. - social media, as a business, has to attract a mass audience who constantly post to keep each other's attention. **if nobody posts, there's no business**. i'm not suggesting we reject news and social media entirely, but you need to realize at a very basic level that these organizations, without a change in what we demand, cannot escape the attention competition. we as consumers have to demand that as much information as possible be converted to and represented in Wiki formats. a [Wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki), compared to a news publication, sorts information not by time but by topic. a Wiki prioritizes interlinkedness and organization, and derives its value from those properties. > [!important] the scope and aim of a wiki page should be the complete set of information regarding a topic, whether written internally or linked externally. ##### what it isn't > [!warning]+ Pivot to Wiki *isn't* about trying to solve the information environment with "Wikipedia 2 but it's Based Lib Propaganda". > 1. a cultural shift means more than simply acquiring a singular all-encompassing Liberal Wikipedia where everyone somehow agrees on all the facts (lol, lmao). that's not feasible nor do i think it would be helpful even if somehow we had total cooperative unity. 2. p2w can't rely solely on the original Wikipedia. no shade to them, but they have rules, such as their ["No Original Research"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research) policy which makes them unsuitable for a larger pivot. the NOR rule means that, in practice, if you wanted to use a wiki page to record all the times that a person posted racist things on social media, you would first have to get that published in a reliable outside source. 3. p2w is also not Vox's now-deprecated ["card stacks"](https://digiday.com/media/two-years-vox-com-reconsiders-card-stacks/). these were good, to be clear, but as long as new, shiny, attention-grabbing content is the primary focus of what you do and what consumers value, it won't be enough. a cultural shift means *changing our behavior* and *changing what we value*. we have to do our part! ##### who this is for i recognize that asking folks to break away from the attention vortex of headlines & social media is similar to asking them to put down their phone and clean their house, or go for a walk, or something like that. i don't expect this idea to get mass adoption. **wikis are boring and that's why they matter**. i am specifically talking to you, the high-information, high-engagement users. i'm not even asking you to Log Off! just, please, take a small portion of your time to implement these ideas into your Posting. > [!cite]+ 10% of Twitter users post 97% of tweets about national politics [(Pew, 2019)](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/10/23/national-politics-on-twitter-small-share-of-u-s-adults-produce-majority-of-tweets/) > just a few folks making a Pivot will have a big impact. #### implementing Pivot to Wiki... ##### ...for ourselves > [!question]+ ask yourself: > 1. what are 3 topics or arguments you care about? big or small, just come up with 3. > 2. if you were busy, but wanted to educate someone about these topics, how quickly could you do it? > 3. what resources would you send? article links? books? a scattered collection of screenshots and social media threads? (a wiki, perhaps?) > 4. how much time would it take for them to parse enough of that info to learn what you want them to learn? ^432138 my guess is that, if you do this exercise, you'll find that your knowledge of the topic or argument vastly exceeds your ability to exchange that knowledge with others. i think this should upset you! not everyone can or should build a full personal wiki, but let me encourage you to get in this mindset: - start keeping at least a few pages of notes about the things you care for. organize them so that they're ready to share with a stranger. - if you find yourself revisiting the same arguments, referencing the same social media posts or articles...collect those into notes too! even just a list of URLs will benefit you. i've completed this exercise for myself [[p2w exercise|here]]. > [!example]+ taking notes > [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md) , which powers jortswiki, is free to download and use. at its core, it's a note-taking app, but it has a lot of powerful features to build interconnectivity between your notes and turn them into a knowledge base. single-device, personal use is free, but if you want to sync between devices and/or publish your site to the Web, you'll need to subscribe. (i have not been sponsored to include this, it's just good software). ##### ...for others > [!question]+ ask yourself: > - when you see an article or social media thread, you should ask: why is this information in the format that it's in? is there value in it being presented in this way? > - could or should it be in a wiki instead? > - is the author or poster trying to get clicks? sell a book? are they a lazy stenographer of the news / political chatter? support wiki tools with your money (jortswiki is free, don't worry). start to critically analyze information formats. ask your favorite publications, news orgs, and social media accounts to consider adding these kinds of resources into their toolkits. lastly: >[!important] DO NOT BE CONTENT TO EXPERIENCE REALITY AT THE SPEED OF HEADLINES. i really believe we could do a lot of good for the world by pivoting to wiki. if i've not yet convinced you, please direct feedback and suggestions regarding this page to me on [bluesky](https://jortscity.bsky.social). [[definitions#glonzo]] %% ### other points (old text, WIP, rewriting) - in age of LLMs and endless unverified social media bullshit, we need to be able to trace the sources of information - social media and article-by-article journalism run up against a fixed constraint which is that people only have 24 hours in a day. "stream" forms of information must compete for an ever and ever smaller share of your total amount of attention. so they must become addictive and designed for you to glance at, get mad at, and move on to the next item - journalism is an "elite" and "stream" structure. social media is a "mass" stream structure. wiki is a "semi-elite" and "semi-stream" structure > [!quote] [@ankura](https://bsky.app/profile/ankura.bsky.social/post/3lsclo47vfs2i): "What a consumer of good journalism builds in their brain is a narrative structure of how the world works. In a world where most people can't or won't do that work, wiki works as it encodes explicit structure(s)." - [musk outright hates wikipedia.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Views_of_Elon_Musk#cite_note-Rascou%C3%ABt-Paz-2024-219) this should tell you something. - the information industry is pivoting to podcasts and short-form video and this is going to make things even worse than now unless we stop it - AI video is coming & the only way we're going to be able to refute this new rapid breed of bullshit is to be able to produce truth faster. - we may not be able to fact-check current events with these methods, but you can at least head off the possibility of "AI video makes politician say something" if that quote runs completely counter to their beliefs, as clearly established well-ahead of time via something more than social media %%