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Table of Contents
The 24-hour meme cycle
Australian Central Bank
US Inflation
Note on Methodology
Crypto Macro
Price Action
The SEC Continues
Conclusion
Internal References
1. The 24-hour Meme cycle
A few weeks ago a train crashed in Ohio. Fairly big chemical spill, you’ve probably already heard about it, so I’ll spare you the details.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock since then you’ve probably been badgered to death by people trying to turn every train crash, helicopter accident, and semi-truck rollover into a part of your daily news cycle.
Why?
I can vaguely remember when the 24-hour news cycle started getting popular on cable TV. CNN’s 24-hour news channel was created before I was born. But my family didn’t have cable TV until I was 11 or 12 years old. Before that, if we wanted to know what happened we had to be in front of the TV for the morning news, evening news, or the 10 o clock nightly news. Those were the only times that the news was on TV.
Because the period in which the news was being reported was limited, and because it was a local network, they had to restrict national and international news coverage down to whatever they thought was the most relevant for the amount of time they had available. Maybe 3 or 4 minutes for international news, and 3 or 4 minutes for national news. With the rest being sports, weather, and local news.
We only got the most important stuff, and these channels more often than not had to decide what to exclude rather than trying to find news to share with us. Of course, when we jumped up to cable we suddenly had more options for TV. There was a whole channel for cartoons now, whereas before I only had Saturday morning for cartoons.
Similarly, there was a whole channel for news as well. This meant that my mom and dad could watch the news 24 hours a day whenever they were curious about what was going on. But that wasn’t really what they wanted, nor was it really what anyone wanted. I think what people really want from the news is to check in for a couple of minutes and walk away feeling like they know a little bit more about what’s going on and why. What they got instead was an addiction box that could only sustain itself by monopolizing your attention for as long as possible.
The channel runs itself by pointing eyes at advertisements, this means that every segment they run has to command your attention for as long as possible. Attention is rarely commanded through simply being informative. Attention is commanded through passion. The two poles of passion are love and hate. Many people think hate is the opposite of love, it’s not. Disinterest is the opposite of love.
This is the business model of a 24-hour news network. Vegetables are bland and boring to the palate compared to artificial sweeteners and MSG. While real nutrition has trouble using its subtleties to compete against flashy powders and test tube flavors. Similarly, a 24-hour news network has to resort to manipulating your passions in a way that is often detrimental to your well-being in order to fill the airspace.
The Challenger Explosion while a tragic event was probably the first time that CNN got to discover just how much they could milk the public passion to fill the airwaves. The behind-the-scenes footage above tells you a few things right away. Nobody on the job was allowed to just sit back and say “Holy fuck, those people just blew up.” They all knew their roles in organizing personnel and equipment to harvest more usable footage even while the corpses were still in freefall. Hell, someone was even filming this behind-the-scenes moment in the middle of the space shuttle explosion because they knew they could someday use the b-roll for screen content. I understand why NASA holds an annual memorial for the Challenger explosion… but why do you think CNN posts an annual story for the explosion every year?
It’s one of those moments where they learned how much passion the public has for information about the space program. That may not be true anymore, but CNN does not care, and if you turn on CNN at 3 AM a day or two before a shuttle launch, they’ll have someone standing outside of Cape Canaveral in the pitch dark reviewing weather forecasts for the launch for the 19th time because of how impactful the Challenger explosion was on their coverage of the news.
That brings me to today. The current generation gets their news in a far different manner. Just about any online media commentator will tell you that CNN is dying and that a youtube news personality gets more views than them. Phillip DeFranco, the Young Turks, Alex Jones, Tim Pool, etc. can all claim to have more viewers than CNN, especially among the key demographic (18-50 years old). And while the method for delivering news has changed, the means by which news is monetized has not.
It is still ultimately a machine for manipulating your passions in order to harvest your eyeballs. Twitter recently announced it would start paying users for ads that appear in their tweet threads. And Instagram has an invite-only program that pays users for views on their reels. After being invited I tried it out to see how it performed and got a little over $50 for one reel.
I was subsequently banned from monetizing my reels after posting Kanye West’s face and further banned again after posting interviews of members of Afghanistan’s Taliban government after the war. They say I can monetize my account again in May, but realistically I expect that ban to be pushed further back. Obviously, such forms of income were never meant for people like me in the first place.
And that’s fine.
But consider the incentives for everyone else. The Ohio train crash was bad, it looks like a moderate ecological disaster and probably a significant health disaster for anyone in the surrounding areas. But tell me why we are suddenly being flooded with imagery and discussions about trucks turning over, or less significant derailments in Texas, the Carolinas, and other places?
Same villains, different costumes.
It’s a news cycle in which your attention is still commodified. There are many people making significant incomes doing not much other than making or even just copying content for the sole purpose of inflaming your passions. You could even claim that this very substack you are reading is harvesting an income by doing exactly that. I try to avoid sensationalizing and stick to useful/actionable information, but it’s difficult. I myself may be captured in passions I have been swimming in for so long that they’ve become invisible to me. If you asked a fish swimming in a latrine to help you identify feces, he’d probably ask you “What are feces?”
You must first swim in clean water before you can learn to identify shit.
The Twitter account I posted at the top of this section is satire. But it’s so deep in the satire, and so many other real accounts look identical to it that you’d have a hard time telling it apart from genuine accounts. This is the biggest problem with the American right-wing from where I sit. It’s so deeply inured in rage-bait and reactive content that it’s no better than the left it attempts to distance itself from. The right has become just as easy to satirize as the left. Maybe even easier if I am being honest.
Trains crash all the time. Other than the Ohio crash, none of these other crashes are actually news. What might we be talking about if they hadn’t been on the news? UFOs, or weather balloons being shot down by US fighter jets? What might we be talking about if that wasn’t on the news? The US blowing up the nordstream pipelines? Maybe even Putin’s upcoming address to Russia next week?
Ask yourself this. If you had only 4 minutes to inform someone who just woke up from a coma about what was happening at the international and national level, what would you tell them about? Would you even be mentioning a truck rolling over in Tucson? Or has social media turned into its own version of Nightcrawler?
What do you think is the most pressing national and international issue right now?
(there are no right answers, but plenty of wrong ones)
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