Denewsification And Future Literacy

I spent the morning writing a whole rant about the state of news provision here (which has only gotten worse since I wrote this), and got several hundred words in before I realised it had turned into the sort of clickbait bullshit I was railing against.

I read Bryan Johnson’s ZEROISM last night, and found this therein:

We cannot know which historical or present phenomena will persist and what will defy our expectations. Be aware and cautious about what assumptions you make about the future. Try to isolate each assumption and examine it carefully. Simply being aware of the scaffolding you’re standing on will enable you to react faster and with improved clear-headedness when you see other patterns emerge in the world. If you can make this a staple in how you process information, you’ll be able to sift through arguments, trends, and norms and keep your mind in sync with technological advances. You won’t live in the past.

Here are three simple questions you can ask to enhance your predictions when you’re trying to make life decisions: What must remain true for this to continue to be true? What new thing would make this untrue? What wildly unexpected surprise would change the question?

Now, he’s talking about something entirely different. But what struck me was: isn’t this at least some of what news provision is for?

future literacy: a mindset and toolkit to navigate a rapidly changing and completely unknown future.

Isn’t that what news is for? Here’s where I think I am today, here’s what I think it looks like, and here’s what might happen next and why. See something new every day and write a story with it.

(ZEROISM is more an essay than a book, and there’s a lot wrong with it in my eyes, but I was curious and it was 70p on Kindle)

I want to know what’s happening, I want to know what may happen, and I want preparatory material for that space. I don’t want a newspaper that thinks a scroll of emotional-contagion clickbait is news provision, and that seems to be most of them now.

(I was about to complain that BBC News should not be using newsflash notifications for cricket scores, but it has right this second flashed me with the president of South Korea declaring martial law, so I’ll apologise to them)

I’ve been joking with people recently that I miss newspapers, not least because you could finish the newspaper, with the sense that you’d read everything that was important that day. The news wasn’t bottomless. That is a joke, because the news doesn’t stop happening after the print job, and now I get flows of information throughout my day, and that is a good thing. If it’s information.

I’d be tempted to subscribe to the Financial Times if it wasn’t so bloody expensive, as, like The Economist, they protected their journalistic resources by imposing online pay-gates very early on. I’d like to be reading a British newspaper, as I have throughout my life.

Now, I’m not going to put on a tinfoil toupee and start raging about the mainstream media. But I do feel behind. I feel like I’ve lost some future literacy. And that’s on me for not choosing my inputs with more care.

There is a temptation, which I’ve also talked about with others, to just say fuckit and check out of the world entirely. And, honestly? That temptation is strong. I’m absolutely culling my news stack. But I was struck by the idea of protecting my future literacy, and that made me aware that there’s a lot of stuff I’m not across these days.

A not-fully-baked thought, as we say: but tonight I begin the process of looking at what I might be missing, and controlled ways to bring it to my little back room that I’ve been writing from for thirty years to see what it makes me think about.

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Right now, the stack is:

• The Economist
• Foreign Policy
• BBC News
• City AM
• Politico
• NYT
• CNN
• France 24
• DW
• AP News
• Al Jazeera
• Bloomberg (I let my subscription lapse, but I keep it for my currency watchlists currently)

I suppose I could mention these two, too.

• The Times Literary Supplement
• The London Review Of Books

(Hi, newspaper whose subscription I cancelled – the way to get me back is to not immediately email me offering me the same subscription at almost twice the price I was previously paying)