Posted
4:53 PM
by Gene
Given how GoogleNews and Yahoo!'s "In the News" work, I wonder -- do we impute too much power to news hacks as individuals? Don't they tend to work like one giant amoeba anyway, an amoeba that thinks itself more intelligent than its readers though it is collectively without a brain, that is the unvarnished soul of right, that cannot make mistakes and when it does is better than to apologize for it? I often think of the news as being generated by one superbeing, or some giant Minitrue, and one cannot shake the aura of centralization and conformity when reading even the mildest of stories. This is why news hackery poses such a danger to us: it is a force of its own, with no accounting even to itself, that is as human as galaxies and stars, and just as imperturbable.