Fake News is a Thought Experiment

Breaking: There is no fake news - the stories are all part of a thought experiement...

firstly, an experiment on the public, to soften people up to the idea - to see how discourse, thought, in public, changes when doubt is cast on the veracity, the inalienable truth, of every day news - how can anyone campaign to undermine the authority of another, when every so-called fact is called into question.

secondly, an experiment that implies to people that news ever was true. that news channels controlled,, owned, censored, modified, changeable, rarely checked, lacking in provenance, authored, only-too-human, were some actual source of authority (in the sense of expertise or reflecting the disciple and learning of the source and utterance) rather than merely authorship, a form of creative writing...

after all, journalists decode what is happening, then encode it. what is lost in translation, modified in interpretation, distorted through cognitive and perceptive bias, to be refracted through the eyes of the reader."


there is no fake news-  there never was. or there always was and will be. "so high you cant get over it, so low, you can't get under it...

zeroth edition

welcome to the zeroth edition, the world's first bespoke counterfeit book publisher. we specialise in fake books. we work very hard to identify authors who resemble in some fashion or other the original author of an original work. We then commission them to write a book. Unlike George Burger's high end operation with his Front, Peter Lyre, we are not out to achieve better than perfect, but more to democratize the process of authorship, hence our product is often quite significantly different than the 1st edition you may have read at school, or seen dramatized on the BBC. No, we believe in a babel-brook approach, where many many versions flow down to the river of readership, and eventually into the sea of dissatisfied librarians, who now have to decide whether to shelve all the different versions by title, so that A Tail of Twosities is kept close to the authentic A trail of Truieities, and not far from the poor quality work of a similar name, or else to sort the works by author, making it impossible for a lifetime of scholarship to uncover all the versions of so many lives.

If you would like to sign up to be an author, you already have. If you would like to be a reader, you already are. If you are a copyright lawyer seeking fun&profit, you already did.

We realize that there are many other counterfeit book publishers already out there, and why would you come to us rather than them? Indeed, who had this idea first? Well, all we can say is that we are never knowingly underwritten.

peer-to-peer-straight-to-hell and no coming back

so what is it with peer-to-peer technology?

it seems like utopic, syndicalist anarchist, socialist techno-philia dream solution to the privacy invasive, attention grabbing, centralised, silicon valley launched interwebcloud of monopolies that we've had to put up with since the last 20 years.

but every p2p thing goes pear shaped in horrible ways  -
the internet becomes the non-neutral verizon-space-control freakery, we live in filter-bubbles and great firewalls of china and halal-land, and napster/freenet becomes itunes, community mesh wireless nets become facebook free basics,
and don't get me started on uber and airbnb, but what of bitcoin?

there's something fundamentally broken about these endeavours, and I can't figure it out....

forces of oppression? ownership of the means of production?

hmmm....

j