Thread by @Andercot

This plot presents a sad truth:

Media has failed it's duty to inform the public

Instead, a business model of selling fear, stoking conflict, pandering, and pushing advertisers propaganda.

McKinsey-ification and it's consequences has been a disaster for the human species 🧵

It wasn't always like this.

In the past newspapers made money by selling newspapers, and they competed on quality of research, clarity of insight, and reliability of sources.

Then newspapers started raking in massive sums in advertising revenue and things went sideways

The issue is that the advertising revenue model fundamentally drives a race to the bottom in hacking dopamine, while favoring content that can be digestible to the largest number of people.

Clickbait for the lowest common denominator

Marketers are very overt about this

There was actually good journalism in the past and still bits here and there today.

People who research diligently, piece together complicated stories, provide nuanced views, speak truth to power

E.g. "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair

That is the media we need today

How'd we get here?

We unleashed an army of "Managerial Executives" on the economy who brought an industry-agnostic mindset of driving shareholder value by any means necessary.

Boeing used to be run by engineers. Newspapers by journalists. Hospitals by doctors.

Now's its MBAs

People who have mastered a profession know intuitively how to do things the right way. Most people want to take pride in their work.

Boeing engineers saw the writing on the wall 22 years ago when outsourcing began under the reign of Ivy League MBAS

The McKinsey-ification of Industry and it's consequences have been a disaster for the human species.

Aerospace, automobiles, pharma, energy, manufacturing, publishing

Have been optimized into stagnancy, horizontally dissociated, regulatory capture and ineptitude

These plans looked good on paper but they are disastrous when their 2nd and 3rd order impacts mature

We've built up the manufacturing capacity of our rivals, poisoned the well of public discourse, and mined the regulatory landscape and process

Today, 10 years to build a bridge

This is all part of the The Blight that makes it $6.2 billion per mail of railway track in San Francisco

Or $10 billion spent and no miles built for high speed in California

While costs have inflated beyond control and governments ground to standstill on substantive progress, the information landscape has become so degraded most of us live in private realities that only occasionally intersect

A complete Balkanization of civil society

Unfortunately the trend is only getting worse. People are pursuing MBAs and consulting, lining up at the American Express lounge of the Corporate Class.

The best and brightest used to build, write, govern.

Now the dream is to be a VP or a capital allocator

The net effect beyond destroying our institutions, democratic process, ability to innovate and govern effectively is this:

It drives a casino economy where returns concentrate to capital over labor

It disincentivizes hard work

It sullies the American Dream

And the media capitalizes on this collapse of civic society by selling more fear, more hysteria, inventing more wedge issues and clickbait outrage every day

Gaslighting a generation into not having kids, opposing economic growths, and hating their own country

Probably there is no greater needed remedy in all this than new narratives that are investigative, genuine, impartial, and don't avoid complexity but seek it out and make it communicable

Expose The Blight wherever it festers and burn it out with the light of day