When receiving disappointing news, my advice is often to revel in the sights and sounds around you to find comfort. Yesterday morning before 9am, a man visited through the gas station around the corner and sped away, honking obnoxiously and yelling, "WOOHOO TRUMP!" loud enough to hear it from my basement office. I rolled my eyes and walked out the front door to go to my standing Wednesday morning hair cut appointment, just as a yellow Cybertruck drove past.

Even in my famously ultraprogressive Honda Fit-loving neighborhood, I can't maintain a bubble. The city was foggy, feeling like October without the blissful ignorance of uncertainty. My kitty-corner neighbor, a woman probably thirty years my senior, paced the sidewalk and indulged in a morning cigarette. Her face narrowed, annoyed at whatever mental journey she was on. The only women who are more pissed off and resigned than I am are older.

I arrived at the salon and, upon seeing my hairdresser, who may or may not be older than 30, I dissolved into an ugly cry. I felt like Florence Pugh in Midsommar (but actively let forth fewer wails because I, y'know, want to maintain the appearance of being a civil adult). Eventually I calmed down and we talked about tv. She had never heard of The O.C., so I told her about 2004, when the bands were great but the clothes were terrible. We departed with a hug.

The 2004 vibes are easy to access. I remember being crushed when Bush was elected the second time. Oh, naïve 21-year-old me, thinking that was as disappointing as politics could get. 

But I've come a long way personally and professionally, and right now I'm womanning up, gritting my teeth, and modeling through it. So today you get pure, unfiltered opinion, with more measurement talk to be continued next week.

Where do we go from here?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my theory that, on the internet, we are in Deadwood — in an emerging civilization where the laws are still being mapped out. Since then, I've finished the third season of Deadwood and watched the movie. Spoiler alert: The richest man wins, strong-arms his way into all the property he feels he deserves, buys out the election, and molds the town in his own interest. Calamity Jane, Joanie Stubbs, and Alma Garrett persevere in the best ways they know how. But the man who wins the game is Hearst, whose name remains massively prominent in American influence 2024, long after his and his son's lives ended.

So. If you are looking for a solution, I don't have that, but I have informed observations. Here are my takeaways from the past 48 hours:

If you are feeling like the world is ending in front of your eyes, for your mental health, I recommend getting involved with whatever local activism you can. Working with your neighbors to make incremental change is a surefire way to maintain your faith in humanity.

Build connections with people. If the internet is getting you down, spend less time in digital spaces.

Mediated communications vs. IRL

Mediated communications, whether on tv or in published books or on the small screen of a phone, provide a skewed vision of humanity that seems just as emotionally and intellectually satisfying as interacting with real people on a day-to-day basis. But what we see from the most "authentic" voices online and in the most meticulously edited documentaries and newspapers, all of it is built specifically to elicit specific responses. Whether that response is "feeling disgusted and angry," "ready to protest," "satisfied through engaging a fantasy," or even just "smugly well-informed," consuming mediated human interaction is a manipulative, controlled, deliberate action designed to get a result. It is not the same as a direct experience of other people.

As content professionals, we know what result we are trying to achieve before we sit down to write. Even the most authentic appearances are edited and filtered in some way. Storytelling tropes and researched messaging strategies are manipulations of an audience.

In the United States we don't have state-run media for good reasons and bad. Our mediated communications are built on a system that monetarily rewards "attention" and "attention-seeking behavior." It's easily to view all people through that deeply cynical lens, but people in real life manipulate their actions far less than we writers do. 

And I don't think it's particularly fair or healthy to expect people in real-life interactions to meet the same requirements of taste or point of view. It's not fair to tune people out in the same way one can turn off the tv or opt out of social media.

I haven't always felt this way, but that's where I'm at now. Maybe I'll change my mind again later. That's the thing about being an unmediated human: you're not always required to tell the same story to or about yourself. Often you're not telling a story at all.

And as professional people, we have to do uncomfortable things, and one of them is interacting with terrible men.

Terrible men and free speech

Today I feel that terrible men are inevitable — terrible women, too, but mostly terrible men. Terrible men do not care about others, who think that everyone should act as they do, who refuse to see the diversity in human behavior. Terrible men say things like, "No one thinks that way" and "no one does that" and "shut up." Terrible men believe they are not beholden to anyone else's opinions, and they think that they are the default. There are terrible men in every job, every political party, and every community. 

Terrible men have found a platform in free speech. When asked not to say terrible things, they say "free speech." When asked to take a modicum of responsibility for caring for other people, they say, "free speech." When held accountable for the things they do, they say, "free speech."

The thing is, I am also very much in favor of free speech. I went to journalism school and took media law from a prominent First Amendment professor. I've worked at several media companies. I agree with these terrible men about free speech most of the time, although I hold that free speech just means you can't be arrested for what you say, not that you don't suffer consequences. I expect I will lose some subscribers for talking about terrible men, but I can write about them regardless.

Because even when terrible men are exposed to a diversity of opinions and thoughts, even when they are shown that clearly other people think differently, even when they are exposed to the fact that there are technically more women in the world than there are men, terrible men still think of themselves as the "winners" and everyone else as the "other."

When I was still dating, I met men who said things like, "I don't like the sound of women's voices as much as men's." Or, if I suggested a movie with majority women characters, they'd say, "That's not for me." I know these men still exist in the world, even though I am happily married to a non-terrible man, and even though most of the men I know are not terrible men.

Because if they are going to hold sacred free speech, if the First Amendment is the most important amendment above even the one to own guns, then hell, they have to listen to me, too. They need to hear my voice, even when it bothers them. Even when I'm tired of fighting. Even when I fear I'm perceived as shrill or talking so much I'm annoying myself. Even when that terrible man is walking away, I'm going to shout after him.

And I'm not going to say, "You can't say that" or "no one else thinks that" or "that's just an opinion" or "tell your therapist" to anyone. What I will say is, "I will listen to what you have to say. And I have opinions and a voice too, and you get to listen to me, whether I'm right or whether my head is up my own ass... and perhaps I have some data, and would you like to talk about that?"

Because we can't opt out of terrible men, and I believe that we need to talk with them instead of talking around them (as long as they aren't openly violent, but I am mostly talking about professional settings where violence is at a minimum). It is ok to be socially engaged with terrible men as long as you are forcing them to hear your voice. I do not think you can or should avoid terrible men any longer, I say to the mirror.

You may not change anything and they may not listen, but at least your voice will be registered, even as an annoyance.

Wild West: Season three

Trump was reelected with the help of tech giants. Any digital regulation previously on the horizon is now moot. Don't expect bigger investments in trust and safety on algorithmic platforms, and certainly don't expect the wave of AI to behave like an ebbing tide any time soon. It will continue, and the rich men will pat themselves on the back for shooting more rockets into space.

I completely understand my many friends who are reevaluating their relationships with social media and digital participation, and I empathize. But please, supplement it with a subscription to your local newspaper or news website. Find a way to stay informed, not just entertained.

For those of us who work in technology and media, we need to understand that the internet is where a large amount of people actively seek and find information that confirms their beliefs, whether or not that information is as high-quality as something you may find in print. They look for connection and consensus online, proof to back up their existing beliefs. And many of us don't realize that the internet does not contain the whole breadth of human information that ever existed. What's crawlable online—the information that most generative AI used for its training data—is a small sliver of what humans have published, only a few bits of what they think and believe.

I don't think the answer is more "media literacy," which is an insulting term when people have a reason to believe they know what they see. I think the answer is making more reliable information available online so at least there are representative counterpoints that aren't hidden behind the iron gates of intellectual property laws, which are less likely to do much of anything in a further deregulated environment.

Far more people use the internet than make the internet. I still think, after all this, we need to make better internet.

Opting out of online communications is not a large-scale solution to rampant misinformation. Reporter and influencer Taylor Lorenz summarized the prominence of right-wing outlets that are backed by billionaire investors, noting that there are far fewer large-scale "Democrat" or even lefty independent websites than there are counterparts on the right. People who profit from hate and conspiracy theories tend to play the algorithm game well.

There are other ways to show up online besides rapid-fire invective. But they do require playing by the tech giants' rules to some extent.

Content structure and consistent communications go a long way in showing up in information-focused algorithms. There are people still trying to build "unbiased" algorithms. Sure, I think "unbiased" is impossible—all people are biased, but terrible men, who grew up thinking they were the default, believe they are not—but there are ways to structure good, fact-checked information so it is more findable and believable. 

With Google search and the impending AI information transformation, I encourage independent media and publishers who espouse different points of view to remain not only active but also engaged with popular algorithmic information.

And yes, there need to be better business models for online media. Digital media businesses need not only subscriptions but also advertising options that don't look like garbage. We need to find business models that enable creators to do more than eke out a long-term sustainable living. I'm not ready to give up on building independent media systems that support and encourage diverse points of view.

Content measurement modeling returns next week. Take care of yourselves. And in the meantime, ask your favorite chatbot to write a dystopian scenario that's somewhere between Susan Faludi's Backlash and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum.

Content tech links of the week

The Content Technologist is a newsletter and consultancy based in Minneapolis, working with clients and collaborators around the world. The entire newsletter is written and edited by Deborah Carver, independent content strategy consultant, speaker, and educator.

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Cultural recommendations / personal social: Spotify | Instagram | Letterboxd | PI.FYI

Did you read? is the assorted content at the very bottom of the email. Cultural recommendations, off-kilter thoughts, and quotes from foundational works of media theory we first read in college—all fair game for this section.

In 2004, I went to a lot of Le Tigre shows, dancing and sweating and screaming at the top of my lungs, and it was an immensely gratifying way to spend the Bush administration. Planning to go to the next Gully Boys show I can to recreate the feeling.